The measurement of skulls was not, in that era, a neutral scientific activity.

It was often embedded in programs of racial classification that served the political and social needs of Euro-American society rather than the genuine study of human biological diversity.

The scientific study of skull shape and its relationship to population history has not been abandoned — it continues as a legitimate field, now practiced with far greater awareness of the methodological and interpretive pitfalls than earlier generations brought to it.

But the legacy of the misuse of craniometrics means that any study that involves describing early Americans as morphologically different from later ones, or that draws attention to skull shape variation, is operating in territory where the science and the politics of race intersect in uncomfortable ways.