Written by Michaela Hamman
What happens to your skeleton after death? The role of human remains in institutional collections across the United Kingdom has been under ethical, scientific, and cultural debate. To better understand why these debates are happening, an investigation into who primarily populates institutional collections will follow.
Universities and museums might gain skeletons through a variety of ways. While beliefs and practices surrounding the dead differ worldwide, human remains deserve respect. Modern standards ensure that skeletons acquired today are done so with consent or are legally excavated by archaeologists. Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, only criminals in the UK could be dissected, which was considered further punishment after death. The Anatomy Act of 1832 allowed donated bodies to be dissected, as the illegal body trade ran rampant to provide individuals for medical dissections. While no longer the interests of museums, racialized evolutionary ideas and pseudo-sciences like phrenology motivated the start of global human skeleton collections. It is in these early contexts that remains were obtained, categorized, and studied.
Social and cultural biases have impacted who ends up where. The curators of a collection, in antiquity as well as today, influence the collection as they decide which individuals to include. Socially disadvantaged people, like the poor or marginalized groups, have been historically more likely to become part of a collection. As these collections were often built between the late-eighteenth and early-twentieth century, they are deeply intertwined to the colonial process.
The collection of the University of Edinburgh can act as an example of what has been described above. Part of the university’s Anatomy Museum collection was accumulated prior to the mid-nineteenth century, aided by the British Empire’s colonial network. However, the University of Edinburgh adopted a pro-repatriation policy in 1990, addressing this dark history early in comparison to its peers.
The University of Edinburgh amassed a large collection of indigenous Australians, particularly from the Ngarrindjeri nation, during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. This was in large part due to the efforts of two Edinburgh Medical School graduates who worked in Australia, Richard Berry and William Ramsey Smith. Berry became the chair of Anatomy at the University of Melbourne in 1905. Inspired by what is now the Anatomy Museum collection, he collected the remains of people with low socioeconomic status and of indigenous Australians, also sending remains to Edinburgh. Both groups were those he considered inherently inferior. Smith sent the majority of indigenous Australian remains from his eventual positions as a physician, City Coroner, Inspector of Anatomy, and Chairman of the Central Board of Health in late nineteenth-century Adelaide. He removed hundreds of individuals from their burial ground and from the morgue, sending the University of Edinburgh almost four hundred individuals along with numerous post-cranial bones, which are bones other than the skull. When the university received the remains, they catalogued them, assigned them identification numbers, and placed skulls, or craniums, in the museum annexe and post-cranial remains in the workroom.
The University of Edinburgh built a global phrenology collection through donations by former students, as described above, as well as government officials, archaeologists, and others. Phrenology, a debunked pseudo-science movement, called for the collection of human skulls from around the world. This eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theory argued that personal character and mental ability could be determined through careful study of the shape and dimension of the 37 ‘faculties’ of a skull. While outwardly a scientific endeavour, phrenology was a method of racial categorization and used as a tool to justify imperialism and colonialism by Western empires. The University of Edinburgh’s Anatomical Museum continues to hold 1,800 skulls collected by the university and the Edinburgh Phrenology Society.
Repatriation can be defined as the permanent return of objects of archaeological, historic, scientific, or other interest to the nation or culture they were removed from. Throughout 1991, the university repatriated what was thought to be all of the remains stolen from indigenous peoples in Australia and Tasmania. This came after repeated calls by these communities, to the Australian government and the University of Edinburgh, for the return of their ancestors. Due to lack of knowledge of the collection and its catalogue, only the crania from the old museum annexe had been returned. In the mid-1990s, the university’s extensive archive was re-discovered, leading to the repatriation of many post-cranial remains. Sadly, a large amount of these remains belonged to the crania returned in 1991, causing further pain to the descendants. Starting in 1998, research was undertaken to locate all indigenous Australian remains and their documentation in the University of Edinburgh collection. These individuals were repatriated in the second phase of repatriation in 2000, with many of them being reunited with their crania.
These human remains could help in future scientific research, likely through destructive analysis of some kind. It begs the question however, if continued storage of these remains, which is costly and harms marginalized people by the continued benefit through discriminatory systems, is worth the chance that one day, something about the human past can be learned. There are many remains in human collections, including individuals who have been excavated ethically and with collaboration of source communities, who would not face the call for repatriation.
This example from the University of Edinburgh demonstrates how collections with early histories can be entrenched in colonial and racist systems. This not only results in very biased collections but continues to hurt the origin communities, who struggle to procure the funds and attention for the return of their ancestors. Institutional policies of repatriation often ensure a review and conversation with the claimant when a repatriation claim is submitted. This protects the rights of communities to control their ancestors’ futures. However, remains are not always accompanied by the critical archival information that helps identify the individuals in collections. In conclusion, the history of collection practices and the research undertaken for repatriation helps provide context to who is in human remains collections. However, detailed inventories must be done until it is known for certain. It is then worth questioning whether scientific value is of greater importance than the ethical and cultural practice of repatriation.
Bibliography
Berryman, Jim (2020) “Human remains as documents- implications for repatriation” Journal of Documentation, 76 (1), pp. 258-270.
Chamberlain, D. (2024) “Phrenology and Edinburgh”. https://global.ed.ac.uk/uncovered/essays/phrenology-and-edinburgh
Fforde, C. (2009) “From Edinburgh University to the Ngarrindjeri Nation, South Australia”, Museum International, 61(1-2), pp. 41-47.
Grumhaus, N. (2023) “Spoiled Spoils of War: When Are Official Spoils of War Legitimate Acquisitions at the British Museum?”, Michigan State International Law Review, 31(1), pp. 37-70.
Jones, D.G. and Harris, R.J. (1998) “Archaeological Human Remains: Scientific, Cultural, and Ethical Considerations”, Current Anthropology, 39(2), pp. 253-264.
Redfern, R. and Clegg, M. (2017) “Archaeologically derived human remains in England- legacy and future” World Archaeology, 49 (5), 574-587.
Sharman, J. and Albanese, J. (2018) “Bioarchaeology and Identified Skeletal Collections: Problems and Potential Solutions” in Henderson, C.Y. and Cardoso, F.A. (eds.) Identified Skeletal Collections: The Testing Ground of Anthropology?. Oxford: Archaeopress Publishing, pp, 83-107.
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