De la cranioscopie à la craniologie et au-de-là, la quête d’une paléo-pathologie mentale

From the end of the 18th century to the middle of the 19th century, cranioscopy, or phrenology, claimed to diagnose deviant behaviour by examining cranial reliefs. This lead would not come to fruition but would allow the collection of a significant body of material that would be used to develop craniometry as a descriptive science of human diversity. Recent developments in brain imaging, however, show that while phrenology had anticipated the functional areas of the brain, it is now only of historical interest and contributes nothing to bioarchaeology. This leads us to think that future efforts to attempt to construct a mental, or even social, palaeopathology, which currently does not exist, will turn away from anatomy and, thanks to palaeogenomics, venture into psychogenetics, a field that remains very controversial.