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An understanding of the division of labor in different societies, and especially how it evolved in the human species, is fundamental to most analyses of social, political, and economic systems. The ability to reconstruct how labor was organized, however, especially in ancient societies that left behind few material remains, is challenged by the paucity of direct evidence demonstrating who was involved in production. This is particularly true for identifying divisions of labor along lines of age, sex, and gender, for which archaeological interpretations mostly rely upon inferences derived from modern examples with uncertain applicability to ancient societies. Drawing upon biometric studies of human fingerprints showing statistically distinct ridge breadth measurements for juveniles, males, and females, this study reports a method for collecting fingerprint impressions left on ancient material culture and using them to distinguish the sex of the artifacts’ producers. The method is applied to a sample of 985 ceramic sherds from a 1,000-y-old Ancestral Puebloan community in the US Southwest, a period characterized by the rapid emergence of a highly influential religious and political center at Chaco Canyon. The fingerprint evidence demonstrates that both males and females were significantly involved in pottery production and further suggests that the contributions of each sex varied over time and even among different social groups in the same community. The results indicate that despite long-standing assumptions that pottery production in Ancient Puebloan societies was primarily a female activity, labor was not strictly divided and instead was likely quite dynamic.

Asen examines the history of one application of dermatoglyphic knowledge: the development of techniques to diagnose Down syndrome (known as \"mongolism\" earlier in the 20th century). He states that the assumption that there might be discoverable secrets in fingerprints provided the impetus for decades of scientific research and clinical application in dermatoglyphics during the 20th century. Although such an idea might appear less compelling today, the ambition of using science to explore pressing questions at the intersection of human identity, heredity and health can still be recognized.

Fingerprints are well-known and reliable means of identification in forensic sciences and security technology. Literature that covers the history of fingerprints often refers to ancient Chinese knowledge on this topic. The earliest use of fingerprints, indeed, can be traced back to the Zhou dynasty (, 1046-256 BCE), and the first documented use of crime scene fingermarks dates back to the Qin dynasty (, 221-206 BCE). During the Tang dynasty (, 619-907 CE) and Song dynasty (, 906-1279 CE), fingerprints were widely used on contracts, divorce papers, and other legal documents. However, many of the literature references are inaccurate or obsolete, so this paper reviews some of the original sources from the Tang and Song periods that are now publicly available, thus attempting to investigate the Chinese use of fingerprints.

This paper examines how Spanish techno-scientific discourses and practices shaped metropolitan Spanish and colonial Guinean bodies and identities. It focuses on the range of technologies of biopower - from fingerprinting and blood testing to racial and geographic discourses - that constituted Guinean bodies in ambivalent ways during two periods: the first decades of the 20th century, and the post-Civil War period of the Francoist regime. In the first decades of the 20th century, blood tests were imposed on the local population as a legal requirement for obtaining identity cards in colonial Guinea; the identity cards offered them a severely restricted citizen status, especially if they were female. Indeed, the new blood testing technologies played a key role in efforts to control, reform and identify 'natives', less as subjects than as labouring bodies. During Franco's dictatorship, following the end of the Spanish Civil War (1939), the colonies became a space for the reconstruction of a unified Spanish national identity through two key strategies: 'detribalization' and 'hispanicization', which were carried out through a web of techno-scientific practices - in medicine and psychology as well as geography and anthropology - that included fingerprinting, blood testing, measurements of intelligence and racial discourses. Under the Franco regime, these practices not only justified violent, racist forms of exploitation, but were also used to stake a claim on Guinean colonial territories and bodies by emptying them of their existing identities and then reconstituting them under a single Spanish national identity.

At a time of ever increasing state encroachment on privacy through the development of intrusive techniques and technologies for personal identification, it is important to place these developments in an historical context. This article looks at why proposals in the interwar period to fingerprint British welfare claimants were rejected by state officials. The proximate reason was that fingerprinting was associated with criminals. However, this was linked in turn to a much more fundamental distinction in England, going back centuries, between the identification of the juridical person – the citizen/welfare claimant – and the criminal. The juridical person was identified by what he or she possessed or could do (seals and signatures for example), and the welfare claimant via the community or documentation. It was only the deviant who was identified via the body, whether through branding, photography, or fingerprinting. The latter, a technology of the British Raj in India, also carried racial overtones. With the rejection of fingerprinting, traditional means of identification were retained, if in more bureaucratic form. Contemporary proposals to introduce general systems of identification based on biometrics efface, therefore, cultural distinctions spanning millennia and continents.

This paper uses a reconstruction of the life and career of Heinrich Poll as a window into developments and professional relationships in the biological sciences in Germany in the period from the beginning of the twentieth century to the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. Poll's intellectual work involved an early transition from morphometric physical anthropology to comparative evolutionary studies, and also found expression in twin research - a field in which he was an acknowledged early pioneer. His advocacy of eugenics led to participation in state-sponsored committees convened to advise on social policy, one of which debated sterilisation and made recommendations that led eventually to the establishment of the notorious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. However, his status as a prominent geneticist and, in particular, as a eugenicist had an ironic and ultimately tragic dimension. Heinrich Poll was of Jewish birth, and this resulted in his career being destroyed by an application of the population policies he had helped put in place.

British laws which sought to control and prevent street prostitution in the early twentieth century all relied on the idea that a ‘common prostitute’ was a legally definable person, and, while prostitution itself was not an offence, that the action of street solicitation represented a special kind of public nuisance. This article explores some of the implications of this legal system, especially after prostitutes were added to the fingerprinting schedule of the London Metropolitan Police in 1917. Centred around one rare case-file concerning the mistaken identity of a street prostitute in 1920, the article explores the way in which women working as prostitutes experienced and negotiated the criminal justice system. In contrast to the historical attention given to the Contagious Diseases Acts, the solicitation laws are seriously under-examined. Yet these laws were put in place prior to the CD Acts, lasted long after their repeal, affected a far greater number of women, and were significantly more important to the police and the state in their control of prostitution than were the short-lived and geographically limited CD Acts. In the context of the CD Acts, historians have looked at the ways in which a prostitute identity was developed and assigned by medical discourse and medical registration. However, the far more common and long-lasting experience of prostitute women in Britain was governed by the solicitation laws and a legal, not medical, process of classification. Through Nellie Johnson's story, we can begin to explore the intricacies of a legal system of prostitution control peculiar to Britain at a crucial point in its development. This article argues that over the course of the early twentieth century, the criminalization of identity became the grounds upon which the entire system of street- prostitution control in England and Wales rested. The fingerprinting of prostitutes, and Nellie Johnson's personal experiences, fit into a larger story of modernization in early twentieth-century Britain and the early twentieth-century world. This period witnessed the development of particular, and technical, forms of identification which were applied to particular groups of people, an abstraction which turned the body itself into a text that had very real consequences for women like Nellie Johnson.

In 1961, a prestigious group of medical researchers called on their colleagues to stop using the language of 'Mongolism' to describe people with what we now call 'Down's syndrome' (or Trisomy 21). This call responded to new knowledge about the biological basis of Down's syndrome: rather than the product of racial degeneration, as had been hypothesized in the 19th century, the condition was the result of an extra chromosome, dubbed '21'. Yet, despite this plea, the terms 'Mongol' and 'Mongolism' continued in scientific use through the 1960s. Drawing on published and archival materials, I argue that the new knowledge about chromosomes did not rupture older patterns of scientific practice or interpretation, and with them, older terminological habits. The persistence of the language of Mongolism reflects the continuity of a network of older approaches to interpreting the condition within the community of human and medical geneticists, including an enduring diagnostic and interpretive technology, dermatoglyphics. Old networks were not supplanted; they were re-aligned.

Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson demonstrates how technologies of identification attempt to counter how bodies evolve beyond previous constraints—in particular, the constraints of racial classification. Twain develops accounts of subjectivity and racial classification that cover an extraordinary breadth of genealogy, biology, and law, while still invoking elements of randomness and chance. The key to such combinations of fixity and emergence in human identity is the technology of fingerprinting. Twain's speculative engagement with fingerprinting creates a system and medium to classify and secure particular forms of identity, leading to the reassertion of racial values already inherent in science and technology, law, and commerce. Fingerprinting represents the direction that technologies of identity would seek to employ: a movement away from direct visual observation of bodies, whose emergence and change over time make them difficult to categorize, to reliance on archives of information that are increasingly removed from the contexts of meaning and emergence those bodies inhabit; this reflects \"one drop\" politics, as race becomes increasingly difficult to define visually. The archive itself, then, becomes infected with the spectacular vitality of, and the speculation and risk within, nineteenth-century biological and cultural determinism.