ABSTRACT
The projects of the Smithsonian Institution's River Basin Surveys (RBS) unearthed thousands of human remains, particularly in the Upper Missouri River Basin. The recovery of skeletal remains from RBS sites coincided with major theoretical and methodological changes occurring in physical anthropology. During this time, there was a general shift away from racial determinism, espoused by physical anthropologists Ale Hrdlika and Earnest Hooton, to a biocultural approach that paralleled the trends occurring in the field of archaeology. The development of modern American physical anthropology was grounded in the typological approaches to the study of human populations prevalent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Physical anthropological studies relied on human crania, which could be studied and measured with great precision, to define the races scientifically and make inferences on intelligence based on cranial capacity. In this era of skull science, Native American skeletal remains were in great demand.
