BERTILLONAGE

Instruments used by António de Almeida in anthropobiological missions Angola (1948-57) and Timor-Leste (1953 campaign).
Anthropometry Case Used for somatic measurements.
UL-IICT-ANTROP 021

 The portable anthropometry case was part of the scientific instrumentation used during fieldwork outside the laboratories. This type of equipment is intended to recreate in loco, so approximately as possible, the technical conditions originally conceived by Alphonse

Bertillon for somatic measurements made at the office. Transported to the places where the populations were staying, as was the case with colonies, the teams of the anthropobiological missions, the scientists themselves or trained assistants, assembled and dismantled the various pieces of this technical apparatus.

Pachon's sphygmomanometer (1909)
Blood pressure meter.
UL-IICT-ANTROP 026

Plane, roll and paint for dermatoglyphics.
They are used for fingerprint registration.
UL-IICT-ANTROP 066A, 066B, 066C

Dermatoglyphics.
Fingerprints and palms were collected on a large scale for all studied individuals.

Dermatoglyphics are the models of grooves, and papillary wrinkles of the fingers and palms initially used to collect fingerprints and palm prints in criminology and legal medicine, to identify people detained by the police, for the individual record of convicted criminals and as well as the corpses collected at the Institutes of Forensic Medicine. The belief in its usefulness for detecting racial differences, assuming that the patterns would be variable from race to race, led to their systematic use from forensic context to colonial anthropobiology.