In this presentation, I uncover an overlooked genealogy of biometrics, tracing it back to early 20th-century race science and the rise of statistical thinking about human identity. Before biometrics became a technology of controlling human identity, it was a science aimed at understanding human diversity, specifically racial diversity. I examine the emergence of craniometry in the 19th century and how its methodologies paved the way for a novel approach to racial anthropology driven by mathematical statistics in the early 20th century. Finally, I explore the postwar development of computerized anthropology.

Iris Clever is a historian of science, technology, and the body, and currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science at the University of Chicago. Her book project, The Afterlives of Skulls: How Race Science Became a Data Science, traces the surprising origins of modern data technologies in colonial race science, revealing how the racialization of human bodies lies at the foundation of modern science. Her work has been published in Isis, Perspectives on Science, and is forthcoming in American Anthropologist.

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