Bone Rooms: From scientific racism to human prehistory in museums

Unbeknownst to the vast majority of these visitors walking from the National Mall into the Smithsonian is the fact that the museum possesses about 30,000 sets of human remains. For a time in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – collectors of all kinds, ranging from professional archaeologists to medical doctors and amateur explorers – shipped boxes containing the bones of the dead to create the largest physical anthropology collections in the world. In researching and writing my book Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums, I explored the history of collecting and exhibiting these bodies in museums both large and small across the United States. - See more at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/ar...

Picking this up in the hopes that there is some earthly explanation for the Ossuary in Kutna Hora (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Se...). Wild place and there didn't seem to be any scholarship around on the motivation for building it.