The Department of Anthropology and the Office of the State Archaeologist at the University of Iowa recently acquired legal possession of one of the largest collections of documented human skeletal remains in the United States. Officially transferred in 1998 from Stanford University's School of Medicine, this extraordinary collection of nearly 1,100 individuals was amassed in the first half of the 1900s from individuals born in the mid to late 1800s. They are thus the remains of people that lived prior to major improvements in modern health care practices including the advent of antibiotics and epidemiological science, the widespread use of fluoride and other modern dental practices, improvements in the treatment of degenerative diseases such as arthritis, and the availability of vitamin supplements and other nutrition based improvements. The U-Iowa Stanford Collection thus provides an important new resource for physical anthropologists given the rapidly shrinking availability of human skeletal material in the United States, and adds significantly to the range of ethnic and regional variability encompassed in the other major collections (e.g., the Terry Collection, Smithsonian Institution, and the Hamann-Todd Collection, Cleveland Museum of Natural History). These collections constitute the cornerstone research resource for many aspects of physical anthropology, and with the advent of new bone DNA extraction and analytical technology, the U-Iowa Stanford collection, in particular, promises to contribute widely to health-related research. It is unlikely that such large, systematically amassed human skeletal collections could be obtained today, or ever will be again in the future. The proper curation and research availability of those few that exist, therefore, is a high priority in physical anthropology and is the focus of the current project.
