Bone Rooms

Bone Rooms reconstructs the rise of physical anthropology in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. It aims to deepen understanding of the “cultural significance” of the skeletal collections created by scholars and museum curators (p. 14). Samuel James Redman maps a shift from an emphasis on racial classification of these remains to their use in efforts to understand evolution and early mankind. Two questions guide the discussion: What explains the “bone craze” of this period? and, How did this shift in emphasis occur? By the early twentieth century, U.S. museums had acquired an estimated 500,000 skeletal remains, largely Native American (Megan J. Highet, “Body Snatching and Grave Robbing,” History and Anthropology, Dec. 2005, pp. 415–40). Redman argues that the collections’ scope reflects anthropologists’ response to the myth of the “rapidly disappearing” Indian, rushing to fill their cabinets with bones acquired opportunistically from graves, building sites, world's fairs, medical schools, and battlegrounds (p. 72). He suggests the changing interpretation of these remains reflected institutional and biographical factors, including the decline in eugenics’ respectability with the rise of Nazism, the influence of the African American anthropologist William Montague Cobb's search for racial similarity rather than difference, and the rise of the Franz Boas school that emphasized cultural relativism rather than race

Archaeology · Biological anthropology · Eugenics · German · Interpretation (philosophy · Mythology · Nazism · Political science · Prehistory · Race (biology · Racism · Sociology · Anthropology · Classics · Gender Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law · Philosophy · Race, Genetics, and Society