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Stolen Maori and Moriori remains held for nearly 150 years are to be repatriated to New Zealand in a first for the University of Oxford.
The lonely remains - koiwi tangata - include a male Maori skull with lower jaw bone and loose teeth, a half pelvis, shoulderblade and collarbone, a female Moriori skull and lower jaw and a male Maori skull and lower jaw which are held at the university's Museum of Natural History.
A further Maori skull and lower jaw owned by Christ Church but stored at the museum will also return.
Te Papa repatriation manager Te Herekiekie Herewini said while there was a market for Maori mummified heads in the 19th century and Maori traded them, graverobbers would have taken these bones to Europe where they ended up in collections.
"They are different from toi moko. These were stolen. These people [graverobbers] tended to be Europeans who came here and were entrepreneurs. They found out where our tupuna were buried and they were taken against our people's will and knowledge."
The trade period lasted from the 1840s to 1910, at a time when skull size was thought to determine intelligence, he said.
"What was happening was Europeans were exploring the rest of the world, they were meeting different races and that's when Darwinism came in.
"They wanted examples of different aboriginal skeletons, and they measured our skulls to find out where we fitted into the evolutionary scale.
"The darker-skinned people were at the bottom."
What institutions paid for these finds is difficult to establish but because buyers wanted legitimate finds, location information had to be attached to any potential sale.
"That practice, which once saw bones spirited away, is now helping to determine the final resting places of the bones because two-thirds of repatriations have enough information for Te Papa's researchers to find where they belong.
This will be a success for the national museum, in contrast to its experience in October when the French Culture Minister blocked the return of a Maori head from a museum there.
Mr Herewini said attitude change for institutions holding indigenous cultures' human remains would take time but the UK was a good example of positive developments.
Legislation passed in 2004 meant nine museums had been given powers to move human remains less than 1000 years old out of their collections.
France would move at their own pace, Mr Herewini said.
"We're still hopeful that the toi moko will return. The French Government will have to create a specific law to return that toi moko - that's how complicated it is."
Professor Jim Kennedy of Oxford said the repatriation was the first time the university had used its new claims procedure established in 2006. When considering requests, the policy required the university to assess the significance of the remains for education and research.
The university concluded that the items were not unique and that they were of no particular use in, for example, the study of migration patterns.
Preliminary approaches were made in 2005 as part of the Government's policy of seeking the return of human remains.
