Bone Rooms
From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums
-
- $29.99
-
- $29.99
Publisher Description
A Smithsonian Book of the Year
A Nature Book of the Year
“Provides much-needed foundation of the relationship between museums and Native Americans.”
—Smithsonian
In 1864 a US Army doctor dug up the remains of a Dakota man who had been killed in Minnesota and sent the skeleton to a museum in Washington that was collecting human remains for research. In the “bone rooms” of the Smithsonian, a scientific revolution was unfolding that would change our understanding of the human body, race, and prehistory.
Seeking evidence to support new theories of racial classification, collectors embarked on a global competition to recover the best specimens of skeletons, mummies, and fossils. As the study of these discoveries discredited racial theory, new ideas emerging in the budding field of anthropology displaced race as the main motive for building bone rooms. Today, as a new generation seeks to learn about the indigenous past, momentum is building to return objects of spiritual significance to native peoples.
“A beautifully written, meticulously documented analysis of [this] little-known history.”
—Brian Fagan, Current World Archeology
“How did our museums become great storehouses of human remains? Bone Rooms chases answers…through shifting ideas about race, anatomy, anthropology, and archaeology and helps explain recent ethical standards for the collection and display of human dead.”
—Ann Fabian, author of The Skull Collectors
“Details the nascent views of racial science that evolved in U.S. natural history, anthropological, and medical museums…Redman effectively portrays the remarkable personalities behind [these debates]…pitting the prickly Aleš Hrdlička at the Smithsonian…against ally-turned-rival Franz Boas at the American Museum of Natural History.”
—David Hurst Thomas, Nature
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"There is nothing natural about systematically collecting and studying the dead," writes Redman, assistant professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in this remarkable examination of scientific racism, biological anthropology, and the mission of medical museums. Redman opens his account with a startlingly grim piece of history: the cracked and disfigured remains of a Native American man, who was shot twice by militiamen on the Minnesota frontier in 1864, spent over a century in museum "bone rooms" for study before his remains were finally returned to the Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota Nation for reburial. In the U.S. alone, some 500,000 Native American skeletal specimens are housed in such institutions. Scrutinizing these institutional collections exposes a little-examined corner of the history of medicine, as well as the troubling legacy of racial science left by Ale Hrdli ka, the Czech-born anthropologist whose collection of bones was instrumental in helping to understand human history. "For museums in the United States, even the distant human past represented an opportunity to illuminate the most central of American problems race," Redman writes. As for the "Dakota man" whose end marked the stark beginning to Redman's meticulous, scholarly history, he teaches another profound lesson: that the study of human prehistory demands both scientific integrity and respect. Illus.
