Harvard University Press has produced a beautiful book. The subject matter, too, will appeal to a wide readership. Samuel J. Redman tells of a craving for human remains in the United States. Museums heaped them in spaces known as bone rooms, amateurs and scientists assembled them from all over the world, and the latter engaged in the project of reading the natural classification of humankind from them. The book reveals how this hunger for human remains began around the Civil War and informed the fields of comparative anatomy and physical anthropology in theory, practice, education, and popularization. It is mainly in the first two chapters that we learn about these practices of collecting and the ways in which the organic remains were enmeshed with an obsession with race and racial classification. At the center of interest stands the Army Medical Museum, which was among the first museums that systematically collected human remains from the American West and globally, mainly through medical officers. This added to the conflict with Native Americans, who tried to protect the bones of their ancestors and of their massacred contemporaries from ending up in a museum. At the end of the nineteenth century, the collection of the Army Medical Museum was transferred to the Smithsonian Institution that became the new address for bone collectors rushed by the projects of physical and salvage anthropology.

While the issue of scientific racism is taken up again in chapter five, in chapters three and four, Redman engages in two case studies, the medical Mütter Museum in Philadelphia and the San Diego Museum of Man. The final chapter also revolves around human remains and the interest in prehistory. In 1915, the Panama-California Exposition took place in San Diego. It contained an exhibit called The Science of Man, out of which grew the San Diego Museum of Man. In building the exhibit, organizers collaborated with the Smithsonian Institution. An expedition to Alaska was planned to collect photographs, linguistic data, and skeletal material, but the Czech-born physical anthropologist at the Smithsonian, Aleš Hrdlička, aimed at an exhibit of global dimension. He and his staff traveled to Europe, the Philippines, Siberia, Mongolia, and Peru, where they plundered graves or picked up bones from graves already ransacked. Redman hints at resistance from local people, however, and his case study confirms the findings of other scholars that governments became more protective of their antiquities in the early twentieth century. In quarrels about ownership, the meaning of organic remains was often negotiated between foreign scientists eager to analyze bones and therefore downplaying their economic and cultural value and local officials who regarded them as national treasures. However, the argument of their exclusively scientific use could work with colonial governments who cared little for the beliefs and feelings of their subjects.

Like the team of his colleague at the American Museum of Natural History, Henry Fairfield Osborn, who published his first popular book on human evolutionary history in 1915 and who was working on an exhibition hall on the subject, Hrdlička traveled to Europe to examine the fossil collections and produced casts. With recent and prehistoric material in hand, modelers created busts of the “racial types” from different parts of the world as well as of the remote ancestors of man. At this point, historians of the human origins sciences, especially those who have written about these subjects, will miss information about the interactions with European scientists and institutions as well as on the production of the busts beyond that they were made in cooperation with the scientists and on the basis of measurements of bones. Which “hominid types” were actually reconstructed? One also wonders what narrative of human evolutionary history was being conveyed (was it in accordance with Hrdlička's particular view that Neanderthals were part of the human species and ancestral to modern humans?). Redman informs us that in the end the interplay of artistic reconstructions, casts, and human skeletons in the exhibitions produced rather a classificatory than a narrative impression. The comparative study of race was the focus of the largest two rooms. Nonetheless, visitor responses seem to suggest that such narratives and connections to current issues such as eugenics were being created.

On the basis of these case studies and the Hall of the Races of Mankind as well as the Hall of Prehistoric Man that were opened at the Chicago Field Museum in the 1930s, Redman makes out a shift in focus from race to prehistory. This shift that he locates in the 1920s and 1930s is a topic that runs through the book, which is highlighted in its subtitle: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums. The early decades of the twentieth century have witnessed a certain coming of age of paleoanthropology, but the two interests were not regarded as separate by the European pioneers of “human prehistory” in the nineteenth century. So there was not a general shift from racial studies to prehistory. As Redman shows himself, there were, to the contrary, attempts to reconstruct the prehistories of “the contemporary races,” while some of the American scientists under his concern entered the field of prehistory at a time when the focus on race was increasingly criticized.

The arguments and the narrative of the book would have been improved by a more thorough engagement with the scholarship on the history of paleoanthropology, and the inclusion of a bibliography would have been much appreciated. The book seems to be based on Redman's Ph.D. thesis and would have profited from further revision also regarding structure and repetition. This would certainly have been worth the effort also because its concerns are very topical. Redman situates his history of collecting, interpreting, and exhibiting human remains in the context of the more recent demands and acts of repatriation. It is this history that led to a situation in which U.S. museums are estimated to hold around half a million remains of Native Americans alone.