From anatomy to palaeo-raciology: Two Neanderthal reconstructions at the NHMW 1924/25
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1924 and 1925, anthropologist Egon von Eickstedt from the Natural History Museum of Vienna (NHMW), and Austrian/Hungarian artist Erna von Engel-Baiersdorf created two soft tissue reconstructions of the head of a Neanderthal, based on a cast of the skull from La Chapelleaux-Saints, discovered in 1908. Eickstedt was to become a leading racial scientist and representative of German interwar and Nazi anthropology. Engel-Baiersdorf established herself as a scientific sculptor, survived the Holocaust, and reinvented herself as an anthropologist in Canada. The two busts were the first hominin reconstructions at the NHMW and initiated the NHMW’s reconstruction workshop in the 1920s and 1930s. An original copy of the bust from 1924, which was recently rediscovered in the collection of the University Museum Utrecht, allows a detailed comparison with the 1925 bust in the NHMW collection in methodological terms: Eickstedt aimed at introducing a new method for facial reconstructions of fossil man, producing a ‘racial type’ or ‘racial portrait’, adopting and refining the reconstruction method developed by Kollmann & Büchly in 1898. A number of nineteenth and early twentieth century Western scientists discussed Neanderthals and modern Europeans in a triangular relationship with Indigenous peoples from German Pacific colonies. As we will show, the two early NHMW sculptures, as genuine products of German/Austrian interwar palaeo-raciology, combine theories and methods of ethnology, evolutionary and physical anthropology, and anatomy with artistic practices. Thus, they provide interesting new insights for current debates on the entanglements of German colonial history and the interwar/Nazi period.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".