LAID out in old wooden drawers in London鈥檚 Natural History Museum is a staggering array of human skulls and bits of bone, part of a collection of 20,000 human remains. Some are inscrutable fragments, others tell rich stories of what life was like hundreds or thousands of years ago. A few challenge our views of what it means to be human. The UK is considering changing its laws to allow many of these artefacts to be returned to the communities who claim ownership. But if the experience of the US and Australia is anything to go by, repatriation will be no simple matter.
In the US, controversy has raged since 1996 over a set of human remains found on the Columbia river in Washington state. Dubbed Kennewick Man, the 9000-year-old bones belong to the oldest Native American known to science. His fate now rests with the courts, as scientists and five tribes that live in the area contest access to the bones. Such complications could also bedevil any legislation passed in the UK, says Philip Walker, president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA).
Some indigenous people feel that collections of human remains represent a rape of their culture. On the other hand, many scientists believe that studying human remains is the best way to understand history and correct any politically motivated rewriting of our past. A few go so far as to say that dispersing the UK collections could do irreparable damage both to science and our common human heritage.
Advertisement
Thirteen years ago, the US enacted the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. It mandates that human remains and burial objects be returned to Native American tribes, if the claimants can establish a cultural affiliation to them. Although there are debates over how far back these rights should extend, the ethical basis of the law is uncontroversial. 鈥淓veryone agrees the remains of grandparents should be [held] where grandchildren can decide what to do with them,鈥� says Walker.
The UK government has asked an expert committee to consider this summer how to relax legislation to allow museums to return artefacts held in national trust. There is no complete list of skeletal remains held in the UK, says Robert Foley, an anthropologist at the University of Cambridge. But the university鈥檚 Duckworth Laboratory alone holds 18,000. In the main, it鈥檚 not the loss of a few individual bones that worries scientists like Foley, but that the value of the collections as a whole may be lost. 鈥淭hey are an important part of human heritage,鈥� he says.
From a scientific viewpoint, Foley has a case. Studying such remains provides valuable clues to many aspects of human history, including genetic relationships, diet, nutritional status, growth and development, and even patterns of violence. Skeletal remains are also important tools for teaching osteology and forensic science, giving the only comparative perspective on human variation, says the AAPA.
Australia has never introduced laws forcing repatriation, but it has been the policy of most large museums since the early 1980s. Aboriginal people treat their ancestors as if they are living, says Jane Hubert at St George鈥檚 Hospital in London, who campaigns for the return of human remains. Under a 1993 agreement Australian museums have repatriated the remains of a thousand people, with a lack of funds slowing the return of three thousand more.
Many returned artefacts are hugely significant to palaeoanthropology. For instance, 22 individuals recovered from Kow Swamp in northern Victoria in the early 1970s have been dated to between 6500 and 13,000 years old. But aspects of their morphology resemble the ancient hominid Homo erectus. Some scientists suggested that these individuals evolved in a direct line from H. erectus in Java, and that the finds support the 鈥渕ultiregional鈥� theory of the evolution of modern humans.
In 1990, the Museum of Victoria returned the remains to the local aboriginal community, sparking a huge controversy. Remains dug up in Coobool Creek, New South Wales, in 1950 showing similar features were repatriated and reburied in 1985.
Revealing ancient secrets
Once this happens immensely important scientific information is lost forever, says anthropologist Bert Roberts of the University of Wollongong, who has worked on the remains of Mungo Man, Australia鈥檚 oldest known human. 鈥淣ot long ago, you couldn鈥檛 tell anything about palaeodiets from teeth, or get DNA from bone. Now you can. It鈥檚 difficult to tell what we鈥檒l be able to do in 10 years. The loss of [such] information is a real handicap for science.鈥�
鈥淗aving a physical sample to analyse is crucial,鈥� agrees Wolfgang M眉ller of the Australian National University. M眉ller recently completed an isotope analysis of the famous iceman 脰tzi found preserved on an Alpine glacier near Bolzano in South Tyrol. His analysis of tissue and bone, published this month, suggests 脰tzi spent his childhood up to 50 kilometres south of where he was discovered (Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research B, vol 204, p 705). 鈥淟uckily 脰tzi is European. It was still difficult to get hold of samples but I would have been worried about access if he was Australian,鈥� says M眉ller.
The scientific case for hanging onto remains is often seen as 鈥渃old鈥� compared with ancestral rights, says Foley. But Walker believes studies of such remains yield important advances in our understanding, helping to debunk racism, elitism and ethnocentricity. 鈥淥ne of the things that was debunked was the idea that Native Americans weren鈥檛 capable of having complex societies. Archaeology squashed that view,鈥� he says.
Marilyn Fogela of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Washington DC and her team have shown an isotope analysis of amino acids in ancient bone collagen can distinguish diets rich in maize from those associated with a hunter-gatherer existence. Carolyn Polet of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels and her colleagues used a similar technique to study the dietary habits of medieval monks living on the Belgian coast. Nitrogen and carbon levels in collagen from the monks鈥� bones showed they ate mainly terrestrial crops, but occasionally dined out on marine animals (Journal of Archaeological Science, vol 30, p 525).
For those who believe ancestral remains are sacred, such work counts for little. 鈥淭he scientific community [has] had its way for a long time,鈥� says Steve Banegas, a spokesperson for the Kumeyaay Cultural Repatriation Committee, which represents 12 Californian tribes. Information about people鈥檚 diet, travelling habits and beliefs have been passed down through an oral tradition of storytelling, says Banegas. To find out what they want to know, scientists should simply ask instead of disturbing the dead.
However, many scientists and indigenous people in the US and Australia are trying to find a middle ground. M眉ller for instance, is devising a non-destructive method of dating bones, using lasers to reveal levels of strontium isotopes in bone fragments. He is also helping to build bridges in Australia by using isotope analyses to uncover the geographical origin of bones. That will help determine which communities they are returned to.
The idea that repatriation leads to a loss of material is misconceived, he says. Michael Pickering, head of the repatriation programme at the National Museum in Canberra, agrees. Some aboriginal communities that have recovered human artefacts have become increasingly receptive to their scientific study, he says.
One popular compromise is the idea of 鈥渒eeping places鈥� 鈥� storage places to which local communities and scientists have access. There is no formal register of such places in Australia. But many scientists believe they set a precedent for the rest of the world. Mungo Lady, Australia鈥檚 earliest female remains, has been held in an air-conditioned keeping place since 1992, says Jim Bowler of Melbourne University, who discovered them. But Foley has his doubts about this approach. Not all keeping places maintain specimens at temperatures or humidity levels needed for long-term preservation and security is less tight.
Bowler disagrees. Hundreds of bones held by UK museums belong to Aboriginal, Maori or Native American descendants, among others. Keeping these remains within the UK is even less defensible, he says.