Franz Boas and Native American biological variability

Human Biology, Jun 1995 by Jantz, R L

The contributions to physical anthropology with which Franz Boas is credited are mainly in the areas of growth, influence of the environment on body form, and biometric genetics (Howells 1992). The part of Boas's career dealing with biological variation among native North Americans is less well known and understood and is frequently omitted from his list of contributions to physical anthropology. This aspect of Boas's career has remained obscure because the data resulting from his activity had been relatively unknown and unavailable until recently. From 1888 to 1903 Boas was responsible for assembling anthropometric data on 15,000 Native Americans and 2000 Siberians. Boas's data collection efforts were supported by several large projects that permitted uninterrupted data collection over this 15-year period. Boas's data collection was supported by the Committee for the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the Bureau of American Ethnology, the World's Columbian Exposition, the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, and the Huntington California Expedition. The magnitude of this undertaking is difficult to imagine from the vantage point of the present, much less the difficult conditions under which fieldwork had to be conducted in the late nineteenth century.

The obscurity of Boas's activities was ensured by his apparent reluctance to describe the projects in detail and by his inability to conduct meaningful analyses with the pencil-and-paper data-processing capabilities of the time. The only general paper, which appeared in German in a relatively obscure journal, dealt with height and cranial index variability (Boas 1895). The 1895 paper is a remarkable paper. It is as close as Boas ever came to using the vast quantity of data obtained for the World's Columbian Exposition. It presents summary statistics, means, standard deviations, and frequency distributions of height and cephalic index for about 60 tribes. The tally sheets on which Boas tabulated frequencies survive in the collection of his papers and illustrate the immense number of calculations required.

Other papers resulting from the World's Columbian Exposition data include Boas's (1899) description of Shoshonean tribes and Sullivan's (1920) analysis of Siouan tribes. Sullivan's paper also represents a staggering number of calculations.

Boas's work for the Committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science resulted in several reports that included the original data. These data were used by Hall and McNair (1972; see references cited therein) in an investigation of British Columbian populations. This is apparently the first use of Boas's data since Sullivan's (1920) research.

The Jesup North Pacific Expedition (JNPE) is arguably the most important project with which Boas was involved. It extended the anthropometric data well into Siberia and resulted in a database reaching halfway around the world, from Nova Scotia at 60degW longitude to Yakutsk at 130degE longitude. Boas's reluctance to produce the summary volumes desired by Jesup have been previously noted (Freed and Freed 1983), and the Jesup anthropometric data were never reported. Jochelson-Brodsky's (1906) paper dealing with anthropometric variation among female Siberians is apparently the only publication to result from the Siberian data until Ousley (1993, 1995) and Comuzzie et al. (1995) used them.

In the decade since Boas's data were rediscovered (Jantz et al. 1992), my colleagues and I have managed to identify several principles that were important to Boas as he designed this research. The various projects had different goals, which Boas describes in various places. The data collected for the World's Columbian Exposition were used to construct exhibits at the fair. These consisted of maps and charts showing the distribution of height and cranial index. These exhibits were sold to the University of Chicago at the fair's end (D. Cole, personal communication, 1987). In a partial manuscript, unpublished and undated as far as I can ascertain, Boas lays out several points to be addressed by the exhibits:

1. What are the principal characteristics of Native Americans?

2. Can a number of types be distinguished among them?

3. Does the distribution of types give a clue to the ancient migration in North America?

4. Does intermixture result in any negative effects?

5. How does the mixed population differ from the unmixed?

The Committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the JNPE were projects designed to investigate the little known tribes of the American Northwest, and the Jesup project had the further goal of investigating linguistic, cultural, and biological relationships between North America and Siberia (Boas 1897).

The size of the database assembled by Boas raises a question, the answer to which may provide considerable insight into Boas's general philosophy. Why, given the data-processing capabilities of the time (i.e., pencil and paper), did Boas invest his resources in collecting data he really had no hope of analyzing adequately? This question can be addressed in several ways. One has to do with Boas's rejection of the typological approaches of the time. Although he uses the term type, it is clear that for Boas variability was paramount. Boas (1895, p. 367) writes: