Carleton Coon's Gage Study: Portraits of the Giants of Northern Albania

Rare photographs of 1929-1930, taken in the highlands of northern Albania by the American anthropologist, published in 1950 in the book "The highlands of mammoths: racial and cultural study of the highland tribes of Northern Albania..."!

The Albanian race had such characteristics, which made the American anthropologist Carleton Coon spend almost a year on the roads of northern Albania.

In the deepest villages of the northern highlands, Coon found the characters he needed for his studies.

He met men, women, children and old people. He made some strange measurements, which most probably seemed out of mind to the inhabitants of these parts. He studied the features of the portrait, the hair, the body length, the limbs... He photographed almost all the Gege mountaineers he met.

With his camera, he fixed the frontal portrait and the profile. He also kept notes on each of them, after the detailed measurements he made.

On this trip, he was accompanied by a close Albanian friend, whom he had hired as an assistant. His name was Stavri Frashëri.

Thanks to this duo Coon-Frashëri, who described the characteristics of the Albanian race in the mountains of northern Albania during 1929-1930, today we have documented very important data on the anthropology of the Gegs, which together with his study and an album with selected photos that Carleton Coon published in his book "The Highlands of the Giants: A Racial and Cultural Study of the Highland Tribes of Northern Albania", published in Cambridge in 1950.

Coon was born in Massachusetts in 1904. He first studied Egyptology and anthropology at Harvard University, graduating in 1925. In this field he conducted research and worked as an assistant and professor at Harvard University. Further, in the field of anthropology, he also taught at the University of Pennsylvania (1948-1963). During this period, he also conceived and realized the University Museum of Philadelphia.

"During the years 1929-1930, Carleton Coon was in Albania, where he conducted an anthropometric study on 1.067 Albanians from ten areas of the North, measuring the sizes and shapes of their bodies. This study was completed in the years 1946-1947 with the help of the Albanian community of Boston", writes the researcher Robert Elsie, in the presentation of the photographs taken by Carleton Coon.

His work had been very tiring, voluminous, long research, a work that in the end seems not to have given the author the fruits he expected. The scientific echo of the research work was limited, since "after the Second World War, such studies of physical anthropology and racial traits became taboo or had lost interest", explains the researcher Robert Elsie, adding that of particular interest are the photographs that Coon realized during the trips through the ten areas of the Albanian north.

Apart from them, the photos collected and published by Stavri Frashër in his book "Through Mirdite in Winter", published in Korça in 1930 and in the English version "Through Mirdite in Winter", are also of great interest. With the photographic materials of these two authors, the researcher Elsie has built a special album, which he has promoted on his website these days, from where we have chosen these specimens to present to our readers. /Telegraph/