Aleš Hrdlička, founder and editor of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology and instrumental in the founding of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA) in 1930, cast a long shadow over the discipline during the 20th century due to his deeply rooted racism and use of the term “physical anthropology,” a practice focused on measuring the physical form. More troubling was Hrdlička’s study of the still-decomposing Native American remains from a late 19th-century massacre. He would later become the driving force behind the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History’s (NMNH) collection of skeletons of more than 30,000 Indigenous and enslaved people. Hrdlička’s inspiration could be traced indirectly to Samuel George Morton, a known racist and notorious human skull collector in early 19th-century Philadelphia. This study explores the discipline’s historically racist framework, in which human remains were studied to emphasize the biological and intellectual differences between the races. Primary and secondary sources in the form of 19th-century letters; books; museum record logs, including notes written directly on skulls; early 20th-century books; and journal publications were used. Several weeks of research in libraries and museums were employed to assess the materials and write this manuscript. Sociocultural factors impact science, and, as this study observes, the summer of 2020 brought a collision between the long-term fight for justice against U.S. federal agencies’ curation of these remains and the racial unrest erupting after the murder of George Floyd, a Black man in police custody. At that time, physical anthropology was caught in the middle, forcing the discipline out of complacency to make substantive policy changes away from the prevalent scientific racism of the past and the influence of Hrdlička in particular.

ancestral remains, enslaved skeletons, Morton Cranial Collection, NAGPRA, physical anthropology, scientific racism