She recalled when employees at the museum gathered around a cake to commemorate the anthropologist’s birthday more than 50 years after his death. Rachel Watkins, a biocultural anthropologist, worked at the Natural History Museum in the early 2000s after the Smithsonian had reckoned with what he had done in Larsen Bay. But within the Smithsonian at the time, some lamented the loss of the collection and continued to celebrate his legacy. By 1991, residents in Larsen Bay had forced the museum to return the bones of about 1,000 individuals he disinterred. Some of the body parts he amassed were for the Smithsonian’s “racial brain collection” and “racial collection of pelvises,” which he attempted to use to compare races.ĭecades after his death, public sentiment on his racist beliefs and his methods began to turn. He was featured in newspapers frequently, and his beliefs influenced U.S. He was widely viewed as an expert on race and human variation, and believed that collecting body parts would help with the discovery of the origins of people in the Americas. But his macabre legacy endures: The Smithsonian has in storage at least 30,700 body parts, including 255 brains, most of which were collected by Hrdlicka or at his direction. Since his death in 1943 at age 74, Hrdlicka’s name and the human remains that he methodically amassed over 40 years from Alaska and elsewhere have faded from public view. He was celebrated in his time, testifying before Congress and as an expert witness in court, and sought out by the FBI to help with cases. He considered people who were not White to be inferior and collected their brains and other body parts, convinced that he could decipher race primarily through physical characteristics, according to his writings and speeches. For years he dominated the still hotly contested debate over when these people first traversed the Pacific. He amassed an enormous collection of body parts and used his research in Alaska to propagate the theory that the first people to populate North America crossed a land bridge at the Bering Strait. Hrdlicka (hurd-lich-kuh) was one of the world’s leading anthropologists, and he ran the Smithsonian’s division of physical anthropology for about 40 years.
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