New photo collection unveils northern Albania in the late 1920s

TIRANA, July 23 – Albanologist Robert Elsie continues unveiling rare private photo collection of Albania. The latest collection belongs to Carleton Coon, a physical anthropologist from Wakefield, Massachusetts, who visited Albania in 1929-1930 to carry out an anthropometric survey of 1,067 Albanians from ten regions in the north of the country, basically measuring body sizes and shapes.
This survey was completed in 1946-1947 with assistance from the Albanian community in the Boston area and led to the publication of his volume “The Mountains of Giants: a Racial and Cultural Study of the North Albanian Mountain Tribes,” Cambridge, Mass. 1950. The scholarly effect of Coon’s work was limited, however, because the science of physical anthropology and similar investigations of racial characteristics soon fell out of favour.
The photos were taken from the above-mentioned volume and from “Through Mirdite in Winter,” Boulder 2002, by his assistant Stavre Frash쳩 (1900-1965).
Carleton Coon (1904-1981) was a physical anthropologist from Wakefield, Massachusetts. He studied Egyptology and anthropology at Harvard University, where he graduated in 1925. He was a lecturer and later professor there for several years, served as curator of ethnology at the University Museum of Philadelphia, and worked for fifteen years as professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania (1948-1963). Coon carried out anthropological research in Africa (Morocco 1925, Ethiopia 1933), the Middle East, South America and India, and was the author of numerous publications, including both academic papers and popular books for the general reader. During the Second World War, he combined his scholarly travels with intelligence activities on behalf of the United States Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Robert Elsie has also recently unveiled A late 19th century private photo collection featuring Albania and other Western Balkan countries possessed by Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II and 700 new pictures of Albania dating from 1873 to 1952, featuring unique glimpses into Albania’s past.
By the end of the nineteenth century and in the early decades of the twentieth, it was common for foreign scholars, writers and adventurers travelling in Albania to take cameras with them and to record what they saw.