The call of home is strong. But not everyone makes it. The remains of thousands of people, illegally and unethically collected as part of the historic bone trade, are still held in museums and universities around the world.
Working out who these individuals were, where they came from and how to get them home is a colossal job.
As part of that, Dunedin biological anthropologist Professor Siân Halcrow is about to head to Durham University in the United Kingdom to begin a more than $2 million, four-year research programme she aptly calls “Skeletons in the Closet”.
The first New Zealander to be awarded a British Academy global professorship, she will be researching the bioethics of anatomical skeletal collections in British museums and universities, looking at where these human remains came from, how they have been used and how they might best be treated or repatriated.
The graves of thousands of New Zealanders, mostly Māori, were targeted for the lucrative bone trade.
Halcrow, of the University of Otago’s Department of Anatomy, is aware how sensitive and challenging her work is. She has carried out similar research at universities and museums in the United States and, much closer to home, at Otago Medical School’s WD Trotter Anatomy Museum, the largest collection of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere. Founded in 1875, the medical school had close early ties with Britain, with professors of anatomy trained in Edinburgh and the Royal College of Surgeons of England, she says.
“We found evidence [in the museum] of the commodification and dehumanising of bodies sold from India, along with others bought from unknown sources overseas, or from marginalised local women.
“This made me want to extend investigations to Britain, to tackle the intersecting colonial legacies in skeletal acquisition and curation in Britain and its colonies.”
Quite separately from the bones collected for anatomical studies – unethically by today’s standards – the graves of thousands of New Zealanders, mostly Māori, were also targeted for the lucrative international bone trade.
“In the 19th and early 20th century there was a massive push for the development of museums and anatomy museums including human remains and animal remains,” says Halcrow. “Through the Kolkata bone trade, a lot of the skeletal material went to the US, the UK, New Zealand, Australia and other places from India. At the same time, there was obviously the trade of Māori remains and other indigenous peoples, such as Native Americans.”
Museums here were complicit in displaying Māori remains, she says. Some body parts, such as skulls, wore labels saying where they were from.
“Museums do not hold kōiwi tangata anymore, but there are a lot of anatomical human remains that we do hold that have been collected locally and those that were acquired from overseas.”
Research showed the acquired skeletal remains of infants and children were more likely to come from women who were unmarried or poor. “The mother may have felt a lot of stigma and shame because of the patriarchy at the time. We found a lot of [remains] were coming from institutions that housed unmarried mothers during pregnancy and afterwards.
“When we talk about structural violence, structural inequality for people in life and what happened to them in terms of access to healthcare … in the treatment of these babies, I think we’re actually seeing the continuation of that structural inequality, even in death.”
Moral imperative
Halcrow’s detective work has drawn attention from academics and curators around the world. University of North Carolina, Greenboro, bioarchaeologist Professor Gwen Robbins Schug tells the Listener Halcrow’s work is “a moral imperative”.
“This issue hits close to home for New Zealand, where Māori remains were disproportionately plundered for scientific collections, severed from their communities and treated as commodities rather than ancestors.”
Amber Aranui (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Waikato), a provenance researcher and archaeologist in Te Papa Tongarewa’s mātauranga Māori team, says Halcrow’s work is essential to ensure correct remedial actions are taken.
“Research was used against our ancestors to study them and make judgments about them. And now I feel like it’s really flipped – this type of science is actually being used to help reunite descendant communities with their ancestors. And I think that’s wonderful. I fully support any work that goes towards helping reconnect people.”
Halcrow remains a frequent visitor to Dunedin’s Trotter Museum. Its bones, other body parts and porcelain and wax models, have been used by generations of medical students and post-grad scholars, as well as by artists and visiting school students.
It’s not what you’d call a pleasant sight. In fact, it’s definitely one of those “once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it” experiences.
Tucked away in the rabbit warren of the historic Lindo Ferguson Building opposite Dunedin Hospital, the museum is brightly lit but a touch stuffy. On the wall outside, a poster promotes biological anthropology: “Understanding our journey – we look into the past to understand human origins and worldwide variation.”
This afternoon, the museum is crowded with medical students about to take a practical exam. In a side room, the shelves are stacked with large glass pots full of preserving fluid and containing various specimens. A plastinated (a preserving technique where bodily fluids and fat are replaced with a polymer) human leg with all its sinews and bones in place sits on a shelf in one corner; in another, there are some heads wet-preserved in pots.
In the past, an alcohol/water mix and formaldehyde were used for wet preservation. Today, the museum uses a solution of distilled water, sodium acetate, sodium phosphate, glycerol and formaldehyde.
Although the museum is in significant demand for research, past methods used to build up its human remains collection were as questionable as those used by bigger museums, says Halcrow.
“We have some archival evidence of where they were acquired, often from institutions – for example, the unclaimed bodies of adults. In the case of the babies, we looked at babies from mothers who were unwed or working class.
“What we consider ethical has changed, as has the legislation around the collection of these. So, it is not ethical for modern standards.”
Pursuing an academic career in the study of human remains provides a direct way to look at past human experiences, says Halcrow. She was keen on biology at school and began a science degree at the University of Auckland, with extra papers in gender studies and anthropology.
“I thought, ‘This is really interesting, but how can I put these things together – the science and the arts?’”
When she went to Otago for her third year, she found a very strong bioarchaeology research programme and a mentor in Associate Professor Nancy Tayles.
“It wasn’t until I really had the opportunity in the Trotter Museum interacting with the human remains there that I really got hooked. I liked the hands-on component of biological anthropology. From that, we could tell something about people in the past, how they lived, how they were adapting to the environment.”
For her fourth-year project, she was given the opportunity to work with infants and children from a large skeletal assemblage from Neolithic Period Thailand, and continued with that for her PhD.
Infant barometers
Whereas artefacts can provide cultural and social insights, human remains allow researchers to directly examine people’s health, adaptations and life experiences.
Halcrow says she became particularly interested in studying infants’ and children’s remains. “They are actively growing physically and also their immune system is developing. So, they’re very sensitive barometers or measures of population health. There’s a lot of things we can look at in an adult skeleton that are measures of infant and childhood stress.
“For example, we can look at adult permanent teeth, as we know that the crowns are forming during our childhood and there may be enamel defects as a result of physiological stress, and then we can start to think about what that might mean for them in terms of their early-life health experience.”
Changes in cultural sensitivity mean students and others studying bones and human remains now have more awareness of their origins.
“Part of the reason I’m interested in looking at individuals from the museum context, or the anatomy museum context, is because a lot of the students didn’t necessarily know where they came from. We did a lot of work telling life stories of people in the archaeological past, but we were treating the human remains in the anatomy museum more as specimens – ‘this is an example of a humerus, this is a femur’.
“They are looked at with more of a humanistic perspective now, but it’s important for us to talk about the past and where some of these individuals are from, and the ethics of their acquisition. A lot of the human remains of the past were either from the colonial bone trade out of India, or [the trade in] kōiwi tangata, a lot of them stolen from burial sites, part of a national and international bone trade.”
The bone traders made a lot of money at a time when museums were booming, she says.
How do biological anthropologists determine the origins of human remains? They can check historical records, death registers, museum acquisition lists and institutional records. Osteological analysis involves examining the bones using techniques to understand their age and sex and looking for evidence of bone pathology or injury that may have contributed to the person’s death.
There are also collaborative approaches with museum curators, bioethicists, anatomists and local communities.
However, even with such work, many remains, particularly from the 19th and early-20th centuries, have incomplete or unclear origins.
Searching for provenance
Halcrow’s upcoming research project in the UK stems in part from Durham University’s long relationship with Otago and both universities’ membership of the Matariki Network of Universities.
“I thought it was a long shot applying for the professorship, but there were a number of things that sparked it,” she says. “We’ve got that historical relationship – with New Zealand being a colony – and a lot of the [colonial] physicians were trained in the UK. The ways in which they were doing things were similar. But New Zealand’s much smaller and there’s obviously not as many museums, so you can’t do as much work here.”
Her objectives include:
■ A comprehensive survey of anatomical collections in UK universities and museums, including the provenance of human remains and their policies for dealing with them.
■ In-person interviews on the use of historical anatomical collections, including their teaching, educational outreach, curation and display and how these may have changed over time.
■ Establishing the provenance of the individuals in the collections and learning as much about their lives as possible.
■ Co-producing new practice and policy guidelines for anatomical skeletal collections relevant to Britain and globally.
She hopes to share the guidelines in a handbook, in academic journals, through seminars and conferences, and even plans a mobile museum exhibit suitable for adults and children.
Te Papa’s Amber Aranui says ethics are changing for the better in museology and science, and there is a growing awareness of the humanity of people who are in collections.
“In terms of this work helping with repatriation, our research and the way that we look at science has come a long way.
“There are many hundreds of our ancestors all around the world. I guess in the scheme of things we haven’t been as affected as some communities. I think about the Australian Aboriginals. I’ve seen letters talking about hunting Aboriginal people for their skulls and I think we’re quite lucky we weren’t affected in that way.
“It’s key for us in this line of work to be sure about the information that we have and to not make assumptions. That is the big thing, because the last thing you want to do is to take or bring an ancestor home that doesn’t belong here.
“That has happened in the past, not just in New Zealand but in other places around the world, where ancestors get sent to the wrong place. Science comes into that with the work that Siân is doing, and that can be very helpful.”
About 800 Māori and Moriori have been repatriated, she estimates.
The University of North Carolina’s Gwen Robbins Schug says Halcrow’s professorship will help repair some of the harms of the past and set a precedent for repatriation protocols. “By developing the first ethical guidelines for handling such collections, Halcrow’s research empowers Māori to reclaim their tūpuna and challenges museums to centre indigenous voices in restitution.
“This isn’t just about the past – it’s about reshaping the future of science to honour dignity over exploitation. New Zealand’s media and policymakers must support repatriation efforts, amplify Māori leadership in ethical curation, and hold institutions accountable.
“Halcrow’s work provides the blueprint. It’s time to carefully, thoughtfully and collaboratively act.”
Halcrow and her two children, 20-year-old Casey and Alia, 11, are now preparing for the move to Durham.
She says she cannot wait to start work on what is a massive research undertaking. If there is one thing she wants to achieve it is sparking important global conversations about ethical practice.
“I hope to revolutionise how institutions handle human remains, leading to more respectful and equitable practices.”
Exploiting our most vulnerable
An analysis of baby skeletal remains in Otago University’s WD Trotter Anatomy Museum shows how the bodies of society’s most vulnerable were used for medical education.
An article written for The Conversation late last year by Otago’s Siân Halcrow and colleagues Megan Southorn and Stephie Rose Lončar says New Zealand’s 1875 Anatomy Act allowed unclaimed bodies from institutions such as hospitals and asylums to be used for study.
The ethics of that starkly contrast with the 2008 Human Tissue Act, which mandates “explicit consent for the use of human remains”.
In the Trotter Museum they found the remains of at least 32 infants aged less than a year old and also bones of babies from five months in utero.
Seven of the 18 with records were born to unmarried mothers. Two of the babies appeared to have died during birth and four with developmental anomalies were likely kept for dissection as “anatomical oddities”.
“It can be argued that structural violence – the harm inflicted by societal structures and institutions – played a central role in the lives of these mothers and infants,” Halcrow and colleagues wrote.
“This was a period when single mothers found themselves in charity-run homes where their children were more likely to be relinquished to medical institutions.”
Nowadays, the remains are carefully looked after and are invaluable for teaching, the researchers say.
However, research into their origins is necessary to “contextualise them within their historical framework” and acknowledge “the social inequities that led to their creation and ensure contemporary practices prioritise respect and consent”.