What do you think?
Rate this book
The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America's Unburied Dead
When Philadelphia naturalist Samuel George Morton died in 1851, no one cut off his head, boiled away its flesh, and added his grinning skull to a collection of crania. It would have been strange, but perhaps fitting, had Morton’s skull wound up in a collector’s cabinet, for Morton himself had collected hundreds of skulls over the course of a long career. Friends, diplomats, doctors, soldiers, and fellow naturalists sent him skulls they gathered from battlefields and burial grounds across America and around the world.
With The Skull Collectors, eminent historian Ann Fabian resurrects that popular and scientific movement, telling the strange—and at times gruesome—story of Morton, his contemporaries, and their search for a scientific foundation for racial difference. From cranial measurements and museum shelves to heads on stakes, bloody battlefields, and the “rascally pleasure” of grave robbing, Fabian paints a lively picture of scientific inquiry in service of an agenda of racial superiority, and of a society coming to grips with both the deadly implications of manifest destiny and the mass slaughter of the Civil War. Even as she vividly recreates the past, Fabian also deftly traces the continuing implications of this history, from lingering traces of scientific racism to debates over the return of the remains of Native Americans that are held by museums to this day.
Full of anecdotes, oddities, and insights, The Skull Collectors takes readers on a darkly fascinating trip down a little-visited but surprisingly important byway of American history.
288 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2010
8 people are currently reading
220 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
July 13, 2015
A lot of people didn't like this book because Fabian uses juxtaposition to make an argument. Fine, I take a star off for the overwhelmingly moral message that creates. As a historian of science, I thought it was a pretty rad book otherwise.
July 1, 2025
Samuel George Morton was essentially the father of “scientific racism.” His vast skull collection was established less for anthropological study than for trying to fabricate proof that Caucasians are the superior race because of their skull measurements. Morton was besties with a phrenologist who thought he could detect all kinds of nefarious traits in other races by their skull bumps. Slaveholders loved Morton; he justified their practices. Morton didn’t dirty his own hands, but he encouraged others to dig up graves for him and send him the skulls, without ever thinking about how he would feel if Native Americans waited while his family buried him, and then dug him up and carted off his head (which collectors did in full sight of the grieving families of tribes).
Morton espoused polygenism, meaning that God had created different species of humans with characteristics appropriate for each continent they were created for. Easier to disparage a different species than just a different skin color. He believed in a divine ordination of racial hierarchy, really playing to the pro-slavery crowd. The diseases that spread through native populations were a great convenience; lots of specimens to choose from and relatives either dead or too sick to interfere with the grave robbing. Sadly, at the same time Americans were consecrating burial grounds and making extensive efforts to get the civil war dead back to their families, American collectors were desecrating burial sites in the west. It wasn’t until the 1970’s that Washington finally listened to the native tribes who objected to the double standard that upheld laws against robbing white graves, but did not prosecute collectors from robbing native graves. “Collectors robbed graves, insulted survivors, turned humans into numbers and their remains into specimens, curiosities, trophies, and pen racks.”
One of Morton’s naturalist friends explained that “the American people seem to prefer a well-got-up hoax, an ingenious lie, to any truth you can tell them, however important. A lecturer in this country must be very careful not to propose to instruct his audience.” Some things never change.
Morton espoused polygenism, meaning that God had created different species of humans with characteristics appropriate for each continent they were created for. Easier to disparage a different species than just a different skin color. He believed in a divine ordination of racial hierarchy, really playing to the pro-slavery crowd. The diseases that spread through native populations were a great convenience; lots of specimens to choose from and relatives either dead or too sick to interfere with the grave robbing. Sadly, at the same time Americans were consecrating burial grounds and making extensive efforts to get the civil war dead back to their families, American collectors were desecrating burial sites in the west. It wasn’t until the 1970’s that Washington finally listened to the native tribes who objected to the double standard that upheld laws against robbing white graves, but did not prosecute collectors from robbing native graves. “Collectors robbed graves, insulted survivors, turned humans into numbers and their remains into specimens, curiosities, trophies, and pen racks.”
One of Morton’s naturalist friends explained that “the American people seem to prefer a well-got-up hoax, an ingenious lie, to any truth you can tell them, however important. A lecturer in this country must be very careful not to propose to instruct his audience.” Some things never change.
June 17, 2022
Fabian details the work of craniologists, particularly Samuel G. Morton, who aimed to categorize race based upon cranial skeletal remains. Morton, the leader in the field, published Crania Americana in 1839 using cranial measurements to create a taxonomy of five races based on cranial capacity. Morton measured the skull’s volume and concluded that Caucasians had a larger cranial capacity and thus larger brains than other races. Although Morton’s conclusions were flawed, his approach was scientific enough to gain acceptance giving rise to scientific racism. Morton’s comparative work provided the intellectual justification for racial superiority. In addition. his collection of a thousand skulls, predominately from minoritized peoples, showed the cultural inequality between races. It was difficult to obtain Caucasian specimens due to cultural norms but easy to obtain those considered racially inferior. The pursuit of skulls “erased markers of the past” destroying parts of the cultural identity of minoritized peoples already suffering from racial inequities. Fabian states that the dead cannot suffer but the communities of the survivors can. The outrage felt by these communities grew with their agency in the late twentieth century, leading to the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. At best, Morton and his colleagues lacked racial empathy and at worst, they were scientific racists themselves. Their collective work, while offering some knowledge to the scientific community, ushered in justification for white superiority on the racial grounds.
December 17, 2020
Another example of the horrible racist attitudes of some 19th C so-called scientists. Really hard to read at times, what happens to all the Indigenous people's bodies and heads is horrifying. Digging up graves all over the world, cooking the "meat" off (the faces, the scalps, the hair) to get yet another skull for a collection in the US that would help "prove" that there isn't just one "HUMAN RACE" but that there are at least five: ...white, of course; black; Oriental; and the people in separate Native American tribes all over the US and Canada; and the hispanic/indian/south american people. I read every word, but it is astounding the lengths people, so-called learned scientists who were white, would go to prove that they were superior. Do things never change? Sidenote: I was surprised not to read anything in the book about the huge collection of skulls (approx. 139 of them) at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia. Established in 1858...certainly in the time frame covered by Ann Fabian in her book on skull collectors. Anyway, if you need to fuel your dismay at what so many people have suffered at the hands of white supremacists, you'll warily read this book. https://www.bing.com/search?q=when%20...
~ Linda Campbell Franklin.
~ Linda Campbell Franklin.
February 12, 2013
This was a fun book... if a book about skull collecting and the origins of "scientific racism" can, indeed, be described as "fun." Fabian’s analysis of 19th century skull collectors emphasizes the history of science and medicine, history of ideas about race, and a history of human burial. Initially, the display of skulls was limited to serious scientists, naturalists, or medical professionals.
Fabian centers the book around the life of Samuel George Morton, a Philadelphia-based naturalist who collected nearly one thousand human skulls. His collection and worked formed the foundation of American craniology. Although he died a decade before the outbreak of the Civil War, the data Morton collected about average skull shapes and sizes contributed to a distinctly American strain of thought about race and the collection of dead bodies. Throughout the text, Fabian emphasizes that it was almost invariably the skulls of the marginalized that ended up in a collector’s cabinet. She expands this to a larger investigation of how 19th century scientists/naturalists understood the value or sanctity of different bodies.
About two-thirds of the text traces the development of Morton’s collection. Fabian suggests that the men who sent Morton skulls derived a kind of “rascally pleasure” from the task both because they were able to transgress other cultures’ rituals of burial and mourning and because they were demonstrating their distance from superstitions about the dead. In Crania Americana, Morton’s richly illustrated book combined dry analysis of skulls with lithographs that tied the book to a vast symbolic language of skulls. She also suggests that that book, published in 1839, is now considered a foundational text in American scientific racism but, at the time, was a commercial failure and ineffective vehicle for the dissemination of his theories. However, it was taken up by Southerners and used to justify slavery based on racial hierarchy.
The final third of the book analyzes how individuals became specimens and the display of these skulls and bodies in the Army Medical Museum (now the National Museum of Health and Medicine). In this section, Fabian traces the fate of one individual from Fiji, brought to the United States as part of the United States Exploring Expedition, to the bone collector’s cabinet.
Fabian spends a great deal of time discussing the founding of the Army Medical Museum and its initial collecting policies. In addition to “chance” and “violence,” the museum purchased skulls from scholars (even the well-known Franz Boas sold skulls in the 1890s). Although battlefield medicine was to be the museum’s primary focus, several field surgeons sent human skulls—“a body part that better expressed mortality than surgical artistry” (172). She emphasizes that the museum sorted their skulls around accepted racial/ethnographic categories but that in later years moved all the skulls collected on battlefields into their “white” section, erasing ethnic and political differences. The museum moved to Ford’s Theater in 1867 and attracted a large number of non-professional visitors interested in Lincoln. The museum thus took on a sentimental and sensational tone as visitors viewed John Wilkes Booth’s brain and famous skulls like the Fijian Vendovi. The museum contributed skulls to the 1892 Columbian Historical Exposition. In a clear representation of racial hierarchy, the museum’s displays named the skulls’ donors but did not list the name of the individual skull.
Fabian centers the book around the life of Samuel George Morton, a Philadelphia-based naturalist who collected nearly one thousand human skulls. His collection and worked formed the foundation of American craniology. Although he died a decade before the outbreak of the Civil War, the data Morton collected about average skull shapes and sizes contributed to a distinctly American strain of thought about race and the collection of dead bodies. Throughout the text, Fabian emphasizes that it was almost invariably the skulls of the marginalized that ended up in a collector’s cabinet. She expands this to a larger investigation of how 19th century scientists/naturalists understood the value or sanctity of different bodies.
About two-thirds of the text traces the development of Morton’s collection. Fabian suggests that the men who sent Morton skulls derived a kind of “rascally pleasure” from the task both because they were able to transgress other cultures’ rituals of burial and mourning and because they were demonstrating their distance from superstitions about the dead. In Crania Americana, Morton’s richly illustrated book combined dry analysis of skulls with lithographs that tied the book to a vast symbolic language of skulls. She also suggests that that book, published in 1839, is now considered a foundational text in American scientific racism but, at the time, was a commercial failure and ineffective vehicle for the dissemination of his theories. However, it was taken up by Southerners and used to justify slavery based on racial hierarchy.
The final third of the book analyzes how individuals became specimens and the display of these skulls and bodies in the Army Medical Museum (now the National Museum of Health and Medicine). In this section, Fabian traces the fate of one individual from Fiji, brought to the United States as part of the United States Exploring Expedition, to the bone collector’s cabinet.
Fabian spends a great deal of time discussing the founding of the Army Medical Museum and its initial collecting policies. In addition to “chance” and “violence,” the museum purchased skulls from scholars (even the well-known Franz Boas sold skulls in the 1890s). Although battlefield medicine was to be the museum’s primary focus, several field surgeons sent human skulls—“a body part that better expressed mortality than surgical artistry” (172). She emphasizes that the museum sorted their skulls around accepted racial/ethnographic categories but that in later years moved all the skulls collected on battlefields into their “white” section, erasing ethnic and political differences. The museum moved to Ford’s Theater in 1867 and attracted a large number of non-professional visitors interested in Lincoln. The museum thus took on a sentimental and sensational tone as visitors viewed John Wilkes Booth’s brain and famous skulls like the Fijian Vendovi. The museum contributed skulls to the 1892 Columbian Historical Exposition. In a clear representation of racial hierarchy, the museum’s displays named the skulls’ donors but did not list the name of the individual skull.
March 11, 2015
Chronicling a rather dark period in American history. A good read, but her argument gets lost at times.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews