After decades of intense collecting and comparative study of bodies, most scientists gave up on the project of using bones to prove superiority. (Debate on how much, if anything, we can tell about someone’s ancestry from their bones still continues.) Modern biological anthropologists study human remains for far different purposes. Our bones record variations in diet, housing, medicine, and disease exposures across different climates and time periods. Even the tiniest fragment of human remains can yield DNA — both human DNA and the DNA of microorganisms entombed within bodies, meaning that we can understand the history of diseases like malaria, bubonic plague, and influenza. A growing number of Indigenous scientists advocate for such research, and biological anthropologists are thinking about how to move the field toward a more ethical future. Suggestions include collaborating with descendant communities to decide questions like what types of research are appropriate, how the resulting data should be shared, and whether, and how, remains should be curated or repatriated.
In 2020, following protests over the museum’s practice of allowing testing that destroyed portions of Native American bones, the AMNH began to require outside scholars to consult with descendant communities about testing and imposed a moratorium on destructive testing, like drilling for DNA samples. But while this policy might help communities in cases where a researcher happens to be interested in their ancestors, there are few ways for these communities to figure out whether the remains of their ancestors are held in the AMNH in the first place.
Trying to identify the remains in the museum, I read all the publications I could find by scientists who examined them. I learned the most from the article with the driest title, “The Distribution of Human Skeletal Material in the Continental United States” (1977), which lists the geographical origins of many AMNH remains: at least 30 from Mongolia, 25 from Palestine, 49 from China, 866 from Bolivia, 40 from Puerto Rico, 643 from Mexico, and on and on and on.
Sometimes, learning just the location and date of the acquisition of bones is enough to understand the grim circumstances of their collection. For example, according to a catalog of the von Luschan acquisition that I obtained from a source, he sold the AMNH 92 skulls from the cemetery of the Panagia Greek Orthodox Church in Antalya, Turkey. In the aftermath of World War I, Turkish nationalists began systematically killing and expelling Greeks from the region. In 1922, the authorities converted Panagia Church into a museum. With no one left to protect the dead, their bones would have been easy to steal. A similar story presumably accounts for the 12 skulls von Luschan labeled as Armenian from the similarly devastated population of the Turkish city of Aintab (now called Gaziantep).