Bone Rooms
From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums
Cambridge, Massachusetts ; London, England : Harvard University Press, 2016.
Format: Book
Description: 373 pages, 24 unnumbered pages of black and white plates : illustrations ; 25 cm
In 1864, a U.S. army doctor dug up the remains of a Dakota man who had been killed in Minnesota. Carefully recording his observations, he sent the skeleton to a museum in Washington, DC, that was collecting human remains for research. In the "bone rooms" of this museum and others like it, a scientific revolution was unfolding that would change our understanding of the human body, race, and prehistory. Influenced by early skull collectors such as Samuel George Morton, zealous scientists at museums across the United States established human skeletal collections. Universities soon followed, with bones collected for Penn, Berkeley, and Harvard. American Indian remains collected from the American West arrived at museums at an increasingly fervent pace, held up as evidence to support new theories of human evolution and racial classification. But the study of human remains yielded discoveries that increasingly discredited racial theory. As a consequence, interest in human origins and evolution -- ignited by ideas emerging in the budding field of anthropology -- displaced race as the main motive for building bone rooms. Today, debates about the ethics of these collections continue.
Contents:
Collecting bodies for science -- Salvaging race and remains -- The medical body on display -- The story of man through the ages -- Scientific racism and museum remains -- Skeletons and human prehistory.
Subjects:
Human remains (Archaeology) -- United States.
Human remains (Archaeology) -- Racial analysis -- History.
Archaeological museums and collections -- United States -- History -- 19th century.
Archaeological museums and collections -- United States -- History -- 20th century.
Archaeological museums and collections -- Moral and ethical aspects.
Archaeology -- United States -- History.
Racism in anthropology -- United States -- History.
Human remains (Archaeology) -- United States.
Human remains (Archaeology) -- Racial analysis -- History.
Archaeological museums and collections -- United States -- History -- 19th century.
Archaeological museums and collections -- United States -- History -- 20th century.
Archaeological museums and collections -- Moral and ethical aspects.
Archaeology -- United States -- History.
Racism in anthropology -- United States -- History.
ISBN:
9780674660410
Availability | |||
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Call Number | Location | Shelf Location | Status |
HISTORY Archaeology Red | Northeast Indoors | Nonfiction | In |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 293-353) and index.