Museum stores, where the great proportion of their vast collections are kept, are fascinating places. They reveal much about taxonomy, material culture and modern Western science. And among the most unnerving are those housing skeletons and other human tissue – the ‘bone rooms’ that are the subject of Samuel Redman's first book. Human remains have very particular resonance, and have been the subject of considerable attention and debate in recent years, stimulated especially by repatriation activity. Bone Rooms is a highly readable historical contribution to this field.

A number of disciplines store and study human remains, but it is physical anthropology, and to some extent pathology, that interest Redman. He uses collections as a hook to outline the development of physical anthropology in the United States in the intellectually turbulent decades from the late nineteenth century through the Second World War. Too often histories are concluded at 1900 or 1914, and Redman's more thoughtful periodization pays dividends. In the disciplines considered here, as in other museums, these decades were the zenith of their size and authority.

Throughout, Redman stays firmly on the message encapsulated in his subtitle, that the use of skeletal collections, contemporary and fossilized, shifted from attempts to establish racial hierarchies to understanding the prehistory and origins of humankind. The tensions and continuities are nicely encapsulated in two new Field Museum galleries opened in 1933, the Hall of Prehistoric Man and the Hall of Races of Mankind. As he admits when presenting these two simultaneously, the shift from synchronic to diachronic analyses was messy and uneven. It involved questions that are unsettling to us now, including eugenics and the evolutionary status of Native Americans.

Details abound. Although he has a national scope, Redman naturally gravitates to a handful of individuals and institutions. Looming largest is Aleš Hrdlička, the first physical anthropology curator at the Smithsonian Institution (his name revealing his Bohemian roots). He dominated the department, and arguably the discipline (founding the American Journal of Physical Anthropology and the American Association of Physical Anthropologists). His nemesis Franz Boas is in the wings of Bone Rooms throughout, but Redman is more concerned with the collection work of figures like Montague Cobb at Howard University in Washington, DC and Henry Field at the Chicago museum named after his great-uncle. As well as the Field Museum and the Smithsonian, Redman also considers the San Diego Museum of Man, based on the ‘Science of Man’ element of the Panama-California International Exhibition. Other international expositions also feature, quite appropriately given their role in collecting and museum founding. The higher-education sector appears as Redman considers the supposed brain drain from museums to universities – which was not so clear-cut (if clear-cut it was) for physical anthropology as for cultural anthropology.

Two pathology collections, the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia and the Army Medical Museum in Washington, DC, play surprisingly large roles in this account. I had expected more forays into natural history rather than medical institutions, but these two are fascinating, and Redman encourages us to reflect on how race was pathologized. He draws particular attention to the transfer of the anthropological material to the Smithsonian in 1897, an important hinge in disciplinary development. This is only one of the many details of museum practice to which Redman pays laudable attention: we also learn about storage, exhibition making and acquisition – including the mechanics of this most macabre of mail and the vagaries of collecting expeditions. He also includes those elusive historical actors museum visitors and researchers.

This is an important study, based on thorough archival research, and for the most part it has been shucked of its doctoral-dissertation origins. It will be interesting to see how this focus on US physical anthropology would compare with other national contexts (Sir Arthur Keith in London makes a cameo here), and with different medical or historical disciplines. One may find that racial classifications and questions endured for longer than at the institutions presented in Bone Rooms. Redman necessarily focuses on humans, but comparative anatomy was a much broader enterprise across natural-science collections and there have been some exciting analyses in recent years; likewise, the significant impact of the First World War on collections on both sides of the Atlantic would complement the short section here.

Overall, Bone Rooms is an engaging and lively book. I enjoyed Redman's easy style: in one of the few ventures into the question of soft tissue, a brain is ‘a soggy ball of flesh’ (p. 99); on the veteran anthropologist's limited success in finding living anthropometric subjects, ‘Hrdlička's gruff approach … may have contributed to a general reticence to sitting anywhere near the curmudgeon while he was wielding calipers’ (p. 105). He brings his characters alive, complete with egos and petty jealousies. But more, he encourages us to consider the changing values of human remains in museum collections and their role as the material basis for the disciplinary history of physical anthropology. Bone Rooms will hopefully appeal not only to historians of US science and museums but also to a wider audience interested in the provenance of public collections.