/ 29 October 2010

Bone to pick with sensitive museums

Museums are increasingly getting cold feet about exhibiting human bodies and body parts, despite surveys showing the public is fascinated and quite untroubled by such displays.

In a book published this week, Tiffany Jenkins, a sociologist who is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics’ law department, says mummies and other human remains have been displayed covered by linen wrappings, in dark cases that have to be illuminated by pressing a button, displayed with warning notices or taken off display completely.

Examples she has uncovered in her book, Contesting Human Remains in Museum Collections, include bones showing rickets — a disease of poverty and malnutrition that produced deformity of the legs — taken off display at the Museum of London and the head of an Iron Age bog body, Worsley Man, removed at Manchester University Museum.

Manchester also covered its mummies with linen sheets, but uncovered them after ­public protest.

The Egypt gallery at Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery displays a body curved into a foetal position in a dark case that visitors press a button to illuminate and displays its mummies with their coffin lids half closed.

The Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro shows no images of human remains other than wrapped mummies online or in publicity material.

In the past decade some museums, such as the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, have returned human remains, including Maori heads to New Zealand.

Jenkins said demand for reburial was now coming from minority groups in Britain, including pagans and druids.

Manchester consulted the group Honouring the Ancient Dead, which campaigns for reburial of pre-Christian British remains, before removing the Worsley Man head.

Jenkins argued that museums were being “over-sensitive” to demands both from minority groups and in some cases their own staff, for greater “respect” for human remains.

“This is not driven by public demand, but professional insecurity. Unfortunately, it will penalise the millions who enjoy learning from the display of human remains.

“It will also impact detrimentally on the research environment, making it more difficult to study this important material,” she said.

“The profession is overreacting to the claims of minority groups such as the organisation Honouring the Ancient Dead.

“Curiously, it does not take into account the feelings of pagan groups which advocate the use of human remains in research and display, such as Pagans for Archaeology.”

A recent survey for the organisation English Heritage found that only 9% of people absolutely opposed museums displaying human bones, more than half supported such display, regardless of the age of the bones, and a further 27% supported them if the bones were more than a century old. —