Andrew Sillen
The storage and study of human body parts has stimulated intense debate, pitting scientists and museum authorities, on the one hand, against ethnic, national, and religious groups on the other. But, the issues are not always
The issue first emerged in North America, where the violent history of expansion has created an enduring legacy of bitterness and distrust among Native Americans. Museums in the United States obtained thousands of excavated skeletons without the permission of Native Americans, as well as skeletons boiled down from bodies picked off the battlefield. The Smithsonian alone has more than 2 300 Native American skeletons obtained from battlefield casualties. In 1989, the US Congress passed the Native Americans Graves and Repatriation Act (Nagpra), which mandates that museums must return any skeletal remains and funerary objects. It has been described as ‘the most important and historic event affecting American Indians in the 20th century’. But many physical anthropologists argue that, even though obtained dubiously, the skeletons contain unique information about the peopling of the New World and should not be sacrificed. They liken the reburial of the skeletons to book-burning. And it is not always possible to identify descendants who can lay a credible claim. In some instances there have been positive political ramifications to the storage of skeletons. For example, human remains from archaeological sites helped to discredit the myth of early 19th-century America that Native Americans were not capable of having made the massive earthworks dotting the mid-American landscape. The issue has a particular resonance in South Africa, where archaeological finds have refuted the apartheid-era myth that the subcontinent was largely uninhabited before Europeans arrived. Similar violence characterised British contact with Australasia. In Tasmania, skins and shrunken heads were regularly collected as trophies. In 1868, the body of the last full-blooded Tasmanian was fought over by rival teams of physicians; one made a tobacco pouch of his skin. Horrified, the last Tasmanian woman left a will asking to be cremated and buried at sea. The will was ignored for 40 years while her skeleton hung in a museum. Scientists who wish to study archaeological finds are struggling to deal with the legacy of distrust and
Archaeologist Jim Allen from LaTrobe University in Victoria has discovered evidence of continuous human habitation over 35 000 years in Tasmania. Last year, descendants of Tasmanian aborigines, backed by cultural heritage legislation, successfully demanded the return of all that had been found. In Israel, Orthodox Jews are campaigning to have all skeletons in Israel reinterred. Last year, Israel’s attorney general handed down a new interpretation of the 1978 Antiquities Act which only gives scientists the right to study human-made objects, but not the makers of these objects. As a result, all human remains younger than 5 000 years have been cleared from the shelves of the Antiquities Authority, and the older ones are seriously threatened. Governments and museums are grappling with the wishes of groups who wish to reinter the body parts of their ancestors. But what about instances where there are no biological ancestors — or where indigenous peoples were decimated so completely that no clear cultural descendants exist? Here South Africa has contributed an entirely new dimension to the debate. In the case of the Bushman trophies housed in the Natural History Museum in London (see main story), the museum refused to supply artist Pippa Skotnes with photographs of the heads for an exhibit on Bushman material, culture and history she is developing with the South African National Gallery. The museum said it wished ‘to avoid the offence that may be caused’. Furthermore the museum sought clear evidence of views of ‘Khoisan’ peoples concerning such an exhibition. Skotnes pointed out the exhibit concerned many cultural traditions that are now essentially dead, and establishing who the legitimate Khoisan bodies or groups were was almost impossible. ‘If you are looking for ‘Khoisan’ support for this project,’ wrote Skotnes, ‘then it could only really come from these long dead victims of cultural genocide.’ She argues that, although shocking, the dried heads provide tangible evidence of a process (genocide) that many people do not know took place. In her view, displaying pictures of heads is a way of laying that evidence before the public.
The British museum will consider using the heads for scientific purposes, such as recovering DNA, and yet they deny their value as part of a process of exposing previously suppressed histories. The debates on the various continents have little in common, except perhaps that the issues raised are usually not about the dead at all, but about the living. They are but one strand of a larger issue. In the case of South Africa, it is the deliberate act of nation-building in a country confronting its colonial past. In Israel, it is the struggle between secular and Orthodox Judaism. In North America and Australasia, it is the struggle of original inhabitants for political recognition. Scientists are now forced to consider whether the means — study of dubiously collected human remains — justify the ends, historical research. Andrew Sillen is associate professor of archaeology at the University of Cape Town.