ABSTRACT
Craniology in the work of the 18th-and 19th-century anthropologistphysicians Blumenbach, Morton, and Warren serves largely as a descriptive tool, and analysis for these early typologists was confined to evaluating individual specimens. Variability was unimportant, and the approach is primarily one of classification. The typological study of Indian and Eskimo crania became the dominant enterprise as American physical anthropology emerged as a profession around 1900. The contributions of Hooton, HrdliCka, Rivet, Oetteking, and Neumann are reviewed. Among these, HrdliCka and Rivet built on the
19th-century French school that begins with the work of Paul Broca. Oetteking and Neumann built on the Boasian school, and through it as well as independently on the German school. American craniology is distinct from similar work in Europe in the degree to which these researchers interacted with archaeologists, in part because the Boasian race-language-culture model encouraged such interaction. The cultural and historical questions that motivated the typologists remain with us today.
