American journal of physical anthropology
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Am. J. Phys. Anthropol. · Feb 2017
Historical ArticleThe vanishing Black Indian: Revisiting craniometry and historic collections.
This article uses craniometric allocation as a platform for discussing the legacy of Samuel G. Morton's collection of crania, the process of racialization, and the value of contextualized biohistoric research perspectives in biological anthropology. ⋯ Recent articles discussing the merits and weaknesses of comparative craniometry focus on methodological issues. In our biohistoric approach, we use the patterning of craniometric allocations across databases as a platform for discussing social race and its development during the 19th century, a process known as racialization. Here we propose that differences in repeatability for the Seminoles and Euro-American soldiers reflect this process and transformation of racialized identities during 19th century U.S. nation-building. In particular, notions of whiteness were and remain tightly controlled, while other racial categorizations were affected by legal, social, and political contexts that resulted in hybridity in lieu of boundedness.
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Controversies over race conceptualizations have been ongoing for centuries and have been shaped, in part, by anthropologists.