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Traditional histories of forensic anthropology focus on key figures, events, and/or publications within a larger narrative of disciplinary formation and expansion. These histories typically highlight individuals such as Thomas Dwight or institutions such as the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. This project represents an interdisciplinary collaboration with the goal of shedding new light onto the origins of forensic anthropology in the United States. By pulling from a number of published scholarly sources, as well as some unpublished correspondence, this project expands upon the more established historical events concerning the history of forensic anthropology. Here we argue that the origins of contemporary forensic anthropology not only trace back to the work of Wilton Krogman but that Krogman's forensic anthropology must be understood through the life and work of his mentor, T. Wingate Todd, as well as the Hamann-Todd Collection, early efforts toward personal identification of human skeletal remains, and a complex amalgamation of US and UK influences that Krogman was exposed to through Todd's mentorship efforts.

The body came to be taken seriously as a topic of cultural history during the “corporeal” or “bodily” turn in the 1980s and 1990s. Soon, however, critique was raised against these studies’ conceptualization of the body as discursively shaped and socially disciplined: individual bodily agency and feeling were felt to be absent in the idea of the material body. This article critically analyzes new approaches in the field of body history, particularly the so-called “material turn”. It argues that the material turn, especially in the guise of praxiography, has a lot to offer historians of the body, such as more attention to material practices, to different kinds of actors and a more open eye to encounters. Potential problems of praxiographical analyses of the body in history include the complicated relationship between discourses and practices and the neglect of the political and feminist potential of deconstructive discourse analyses. However, a focus on the relationship between practices of knowledge production and the representation of the body may also provide new ways of opening up historical power relations.

Traditional histories of forensic anthropology focus on key figures, events, and/or publications within a larger narrative of disciplinary formation and expansion. These histories typically highlight individuals such as Thomas Dwight or institutions such as the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. This project represents an interdisciplinary collaboration with the goal of shedding new light onto the origins of forensic anthropology in the United States. By pulling from a number of published scholarly sources, as well as some unpublished correspondence, this project expands upon the more established historical events concerning the history of forensic anthropology. Here we argue that the origins of contemporary forensic anthropology not only trace back to the work of Wilton Krogman but that Krogman’s forensic anthropology must be understood through the life and work of his mentor, T. Wingate Todd, as well as the Hamann-Todd Collection, early efforts toward personal identification of human skeletal remains, and a complex amalgamation of US and UK influences that Krogman was exposed to through Todd’s mentorship efforts.

This dissertation is history of how researchers have trusted biometric technologies to operate objectively but have perpetuated racial bias in the technologies’ design and output. It explores the origins and development of the biometric study of race and skulls during the rise and hardening of colonialism. A turn to quantification marks this period: researchers increasingly relied on measurements and statistical methods to develop racial classifications of the world’s populations. With a central focus on racial data and the practices that produced the data, the dissertation is a transnational history that follows the data from measurement encounters in colonial spaces, to laboratories in the United States and Europe, to printed form in publications. It transcends disciplinary boundaries and integrates anthropology, anatomy, statistics, and genetics, thus offering a fresh perspective on the history of racial science.I reveal a methodological crisis around 1900, spurred by a heterogeneous approach to studying race. Measurements and instruments like the skull-measuring caliper were introduced in the 19th century to infuse anthropology with precision. Meanwhile, researchers continued to study skulls through observations with a “trained eye”. By 1900, racial data had piled up without clear taxonomic value, creating a distrust in quantification and confusion about the direction of racial research. In the first half of the 20th century, statisticians like Karl Pearson began transforming anthropology with new biometric methods to make racial research more “scientific”. The dissertation argues that biometricians quantified and automated racial research: they made new use of the caliper by combining it with disembodied statistical formulas. Automation entailed a critique of the anthropologist’s subjective “trained eye” expertise and a reduction of human intervention in favor of objectivity. The biometricians, however, never challenged racial research itself and continued to reproduce old racial biases in their new methods and theories. Even in challenging Nazi race theories, they never questioned the existence of race. The dissertation thus uncovers how biometric practices were considered objective and reproduced racial prejudices.