Christopher Heaney

Christopher Heaney is an Assistant Professor of History at Penn State and a writer, with bylines in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and the New York Times. He researches and teaches on the history and culture of the Andes, Indigenous knowledges, science, museums, and empire. His first book, Cradle of Gold: The Story of Hiram Bingham, a Real-Life Indiana Jones, and the Search for Machu Picchu (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), was a history of the media discovery of Machu Picchu, and the fight that ensued between Yale University and Peru over the ownership of Machu Picchu's tombs. It was used by Peruvian officials and Yale alumni to assist in that collection's return. His second book, Empires of the Dead: Inca Mummies and the Peruvian Ancestors of American Anthropology (2023), is a history of how colonial and racializing sciences turned Andean and Inca ancestors into mummies and skulls on display in museums throughout the world. It is also a history of how Andean people and scholars transformed museums into newly ancestral spaces dedicated to healing knowledges.