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Samuel J. Redman - Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums

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Book:
Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums
Author:
Samuel J Redman
Publisher:
Harvard University Press
Genre:
Books / History
Year:
2016
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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 Ale Hrdlika at the Smithsonian...against ally-turned-rival Franz Boas at the American Museum of Natural History.
David Hurst Thomas, Nature

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BONE ROOMS

FROM SCIENTIFIC RACISM
to HUMAN PREHISTORY
in MUSEUMS

SAMUEL J. REDMAN

Cambridge, Massachusetts | London, England

2016

Jacket design: Lisa Roberts

Jacket image: George Widman, 2009, for the Mtter Museum of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia

978-0-674-66041-0 (alk. paper)

978-0-674-96973-5 (EPUB)

978-0-674-96972-8 (MOBI)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Redman, Samuel J., author.

Bone rooms : from scientific racism to human prehistory in museums / Samuel J. Redman.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Human remains (Archaeology)United States. 2. Archaeological museums and collectionsUnited StatesHistory19th century. 3. Archaeological museums and collectionsUnited StatesHistory20th century. 4. ArchaeologyUnited StatesHistory. 5. Racism in anthropologyUnited StatesHistory. I. Title.

CC79.5.H85R43 2016

930.1074'73dc23

2015033855

CONTENTS

1 Collecting Bodies for Science
2 Salvaging Race and Remains
3 The Medical Body on Display
4 The Story of Man through the Ages
5 Scientific Racism and Museum Remains
6 Skeletons and Human Prehistory

Gunshots ripped through the late-spring air near a dusty U.S. Army outpost in rural Minnesota in May 1864. Militiamen who were engaged in a campaign against local Indians shot a Dakota man twice: one bullet struck him in the head, shattering his skull; the other tore through his mouth or neck. Either wound alone could have been fatal. The man likely died instantly or bled to death in seconds. Healthy and strong in life, he now lay on the ground completely disfigured. Described in contemporary newspaper accounts as a hostile Siouxand later by scientists as a man of distant Asiatic descenthe was probably between twenty-five and thirty-five years old. A single incident such as this, even a deadly one, on the distant Minnesota frontier might have soon vanished from memory in a nation focused on violent clashes with Native Americans across the region and the raging Civil War miles away. What happened to the body of this particular young Dakota man, however, was striking. The mans earthly remains were about to play a small part in an unfolding drama involving major museums, obsessive and sometimes eccentric scientists, and an array of amateur collectors. It is a story marked by evolving efforts to understand the human body in the language of race and human history. These efforts sometimes clashed, competed, and even overlapped in complex ways.

Leaving dark trails of blood, the soldiers dragged the corpse across the grass to a nearby fort. Word of the killing spread quickly. White civilians began gathering to celebrate. Settlers beat the lifeless body. Bones cracked. The scalp was cut off and carried away as a souvenir.

In the days that followed, one German American newspaper reported on the skirmish from the settlers perspective. The paper proclaimed, It is time to hunt down these red beasts with iron pursuit.

Muller no doubt possessed his own vivid memories of violence between settlers and the American Indian tribes residing nearby. Just a few years earlier, he had received high praise for his treatment of wounded settlers following one particularly grisly attack.

The remains, which were eventually moved to the Smithsonian Institution, were swept into an expanding project to understand humanity through a changing kaleidoscope of ideas about the human body, race, and, increasingly, human origins and prehistory. Scientists, eager for evidence to support their ideas, organized spaces colloquially known as bone rooms. In these spaces, they studied the bones in an effort to classify the races and develop an understanding of the deeper human past. They relied heavily on collectors of all kinds to gather specimens. Professionals and amateurs alikeinfluenced by a broad spectrum of ideasbegan gathering and organizing human skeletons from around the world. Museums concerned with natural history, medicine, and anthropologyin their quest to solve riddles connected to race and human historyturned to human remains for answers.

Starting around the time of the Civil War and stretching deep into the twentieth century, gathering human skeletal remains was a common intellectual, cultural, and social pursuit. Though not limited to professional collectors, the practice centered primarily on an important, changing, and diverse network of scholars and scientists affiliated with a number of museums in the United States.

After arriving in Washington, DC, the Dakota mans bones were placed on display in the Army Medical Museum (AMM), though details about any possible exhibit are murky. The skeleton was most likely used in the late nineteenth century to teach visitors about an emerging field called comparative anatomy. The bones would have been identified as those of a Native American man, a Dakota stand-in for many tribes across the Americasa lone and broken man intended to represent a unique and vanishing race. In some instances, bones were presumed to be similar enough to be simply interchangeable within racial categories; if the jaw was too broken or shattered for display, the museum could replace the broken or missing bone with another, similarly sized portion of a different Native American skeleton. For a few decades following the Civil War, medical students likely pored over bones still bearing cracks and cutstestimony to harsh beatings. At some point, too, the bones were probably used to teach young medical students about the severe injuries they might encounter on modern battlefields. Packages accompanied by letters, many with stories like Alfred Mullers, arrived almost daily at the museum from around the American West and from expeditions around the globe. Gradually, the significance of these collections would be reflected in their growing ubiquity in certain museums.

The original goal of the AMM was to collect examples of battlefield injuries. Soon after the museum opened, however, remains like those sent by Muller further encouraged the curators to pursue a new project in comparative racial anatomy, a long-standing scientific endeavor to classify human races on the basis of physical features and appearance. Several influential individuals working in museums now believed this project to be possible on a much larger scale than once imagined. His conclusions, though drawn from skewed measurements and based on faulty assumptions about the size of the brain cavity and its link to human intelligence, were nevertheless offered with the certainty that ample evidence was thought to afford. While not all scientists were as bold and direct in their racist conclusions, collecting, studying, and displaying nonwhite human remains largely supported the scientific (and pseudoscientific) racism that dominated the era. In many respects, the practice reinforced existing and emerging colonial power dynamics veiled as scientific and social progress. While a few indigenous individuals, tempted by money or other compensation, were complicit in excavating graves for the benefit of museum collections, most resisted the practice. Organized protests against scientific determinism resulting in the return and reburial of nonwhite skeletons, however, came about only much later in the twentieth century.

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