“There is nothing natural about systematically collecting and studying the dead,” writes Samuel J. Redman in Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums, yet American museums, led by the Smithsonian, successfully fixed themselves in popular perception as a proper repository for human skulls and skeletons in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (277). In clear and engaging prose, Redman explores a range of institutional sites and characters that established the study of human remains as a science feeding into the disciplines of anatomy, anthropology, and archaeology. Redman finds that the field saw a gradual and by no means uniform shift from a nineteenth-century obsession with racial classification to the twentieth-century construction of a grand narrative of prehistoric human evolution. Perhaps most significantly, “[s]cholars interested in studying human remains began to change their language from one centered on race to discourses surrounding population, migration, and evolution” (229).