Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 January 2009
For more than century, race was a major interest in anthropology. Buildingon Johan Blumenbach's 1795 color classificaiton dividing humanity into white, black, brown, yellow and red, anthropologists further subdivided the people of the world into finer taxonomic categories. Hair form, shape of the nose, pigmentation of the eyes and the hair, stature, and the shaps of the head were among the many characteristics race classifiers added to skin color to enable them to fit populations into the typologies they designed. By the end of the 19th century, numerous races and subraces had been described, laying the groundwork for the direction the discipline would follow until the mid-20th century. It was expected that the development and refinement of a racial typology would lead to a framework for tracing lines of human evolution and routes of human migration.