Bone Rooms

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

"How did our museums become great storehouses of human remains? What have we learned from the skulls and bones of unburied dead? Bone Rooms chases answers to these questions 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

"In exquisite detail Bone Rooms narrates the rise and fall of racial science in America. This complicated and engrossing story is filled with unexpected twists and significant implications for the history of anthropology and intellectual history of race in the United States, and American intellectual history more generally." - Matthew Dennis, author of Seneca Possessed

"A beautifully written, meticulously documented analysis of [this] little-known history." - Brian Fagan, Current World Archeology

In 1864 a U.S. 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 increasingly discredited racial theory, new 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 have taken on a new urgency as a new generation seeks to learn about the indigenous past and to return objects of spiritual significance to native peoples.