Activate URL anchor but don't scroll to it?
I've played with this for a while, because I initially didn't believe you (I use the jQuery history plugin to get similar behavior).
And I'm stumped. I don't think you can. What you could do, as a workaround, is use javascript to set the hash to something DIFFERENT from what is actually on the page. And then use javascript upon load to read the hash and populate the correct content. I do this on my site. So in that scenario, users without javascript would be scrolled, users with javascript would keep the history chain, and it only gets wacky when people without send links to people with (or vice-versa).