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Physical Anthropology

Physical Anthropology Collections Counts

Below is a general listing of the Physical Anthropology holdings. The collections span worldwide distribution, but some geographic regions and temporal contexts are better represented than others. Curatorial staff in the first half of the 20th Century shaped the core of the collection according to their interests, building the collection through government-sponsored expeditions and by trading collections with other institutions. Aleš Hrdlička's primary focus was on the peopling of the New World and questions concerning American populations, so areas of Africa, Europe and Asia were not as actively collected and thus are less well represented.

It was also common in excavations in the earlier part of the 20th Century that only the best examples from the skeletal series or interesting pathological conditions to be retained, Smaller bones (hands and feet), ribs, or even vertebrae are often not present in earlier skeletal series. Thus, approximately 48% of the collections are made up of cranium or skull only, with no are incomplete postcrania. In the second half of the 20th Centrury, advancements in archeological methodology expected more complete retention of all materials from a site, so collections from this time (approximately 20% of the whole collection) include most or all of the elements from the excavation..

This below list does not include the museum's paleo-anthropological collections, almost exclusively casts of the fossil specimens. Please contact the Physical Anthropology Collections Manager, David Hunt and he will coordinate with the paleo-anthropology staff for listings of holdings and appointments for access to these collections.

• Make an appointment to study the collection in person
• Request more information about specific collections

A Note About these Statistics:

The counts listed below were generated in early 2007. Some North American collections are to be, or expected to be deacccessioned for repatriation, and /or restricted from research pending requests from Native American tribes. Therefore, researchers should contact the collections manager for the most up to date information before assuming that specific collections will be available for study.

The list is first sorted by present-day country. The second level is province, state, or a geographical location such as island or nearby town. The numeric counts represent the number of occurrences for each entry. Each occurence may represent one skull, one cranium, a fragmentary skeleton, a full skeleton, or a group of elements or bone assortments. The counts represent the number of catalog records for this entry, they do not represent the number of individuals.

The counts for any given country and/or state may include individuals who were not from indigenous population groups, therefore the counts do not necessarily reflect the number of individuals from an indigenous group. For example, 1728 of the 2009 individuals in the count for Missouri (USA) are individuals from the Robert J. Terry Anatomical Collection, a collection of White and Black Americans from the 20th Century, not Native Americans.

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