| Exhibition Review | The Journal of American History, 96.3

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| Exhibition Review | The Journal of American History, 96.3 | The History Cooperative

Exhibition Review

"Written in Bone: Forensic Files of the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake." Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C. http://anthropology.si.edu/writteninbone/.
Temporary exhibition, Feb. 7, 2009–Feb. 6, 2011; Douglas Owsley and Karin Bruwelheide, curators; MFM Design/VossWords, designers.

The hit television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation has spawned a craze for forensic science. Since the show's debut, the number of academic programs in the field has doubled, the number of graduates from those programs has tripled, and legal commentators have complained about "the csi effect" in courtrooms, where juries now expect indisputable forensic evidence and acquit defendants when prosecutors cannot supply it (Glen Paul Jackson, "The Status of Forensic Science Degree Programs in the United States," Forensic Science Policy and Management, Spring 2009, pp. 2–6; Donald E. Shelton, "The 'CSI Effect': Does It Really Exist?," National Institute of Justice Journal, March 2008, http://ssrn.com/abstract=1163231).

A similar faith in conclusive forensic evidence informs the newest exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, "Written in Bone." The exhibit introduces visitors to the basic technology and evidence used to identify skeletal remains and causes of death, then applies this analysis to ten case studies, or "forensic files," of colonial bodies uncovered in Tidewater Virginia and Maryland. The exhibition is partly sponsored by the History Channel, which airs several programs that employ forensic scientists to "solve" historical mysteries. The orientation video promises museumgoers a "real life csi," in which "bones are read" to "fill in history with such great detail that it goes beyond any records we have available." Later, the description of a case study tells visitors that forensic analysis will help them "grasp more fully what happened to" the peoples brought together by colonization.

Visitors learn some basic tenets of forensic anthropology before they see it applied to historic case studies. Well-diagrammed interactive displays compare legs, pelvic bones, and skulls to illustrate differences in age, sex, life-style, and "ancestry." But while anthropologists largely agree about skeletal indicators of the first three categories, they remain deeply divided over the last. In forensic anthropology, "ancestry" is a politically correct code word for "race." As two scholars put it, "ancestry implies an understanding that an individual may have combinations of traits which reflect a diverse heritage," though it allows "the analysis of races as exclusive categories to continue, simply under a different name." (Less than one-quarter of biological and cranial data has been shown to correlate to racial identification. For the reports on this correlation and the quotation, see Diana Smay and George Armelagos, "Galileo Wept: A Critical Assessment of the Use of Race in Forensic Anthropology," Transforming Anthropology, Summer 2000, pp. 19–40. See also Alan Goodman, "Two Questions about Race," Social Science Research Council Web forum, June 2006, http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/Goodman/.)The exhibit proves this point when it presents three skulls in a row as characteristic of European, African, and Native American "ancestry," respectively. Nowhere do labels clarify any difference between "European" and "white," "African" and "black," or "Native" and "red." One case study even conflates the terms, describing an "African" body from a burial site "where whites and blacks are buried side by side." Although a rising tide of anthropological research denies significant correlation between biological or skeletal data and identification of "race" or "ancestry," "Written in Bone" refuses to distinguish between place and race. To be sure, the label text hedges absolute conclusions. Europeans "tend to" have certain qualities, Africans "generally" have others, and visitors learn that "there is a wide range of variability." Yet "despite this variability," the introduction concludes, "our bones have features that can be clues to ancestry," and the exhibit includes no examples to the contrary.

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