Provenance research into the human remains held in ethnological collections is of particular importance. It concerns the remains of individuals that in many cases entered the collections of ethnological museums as a direct result of racist scientific and collecting practices.

There are approximately 2,000 human remains in the collections of the Ethnologisches Museum. Collections of human remains were created at different times and for a range of different purposes, and are closely associated with the emergence of anthropology as a scientific discipline in the second half of the 19th century. One thing that all such collections have in common is that they were historically not treated as actual human remains, but rather as mere scientific objects.

One of the first objectives of this provenance research project is to take a survey of the human remains housed in the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin. This will be followed by a preliminary categorisation of each of the remains into either “untreated”, “treated”, or “worked into cultural belongings”, which will help to develop a work plan to determine the priority of research into the respective contexts of acquisition and appropriation.

Special priority will be given to researching the contexts of appropriation of the skulls in the anthropological collections, which are still housed in the Ethnologisches Museum today. Urgent attention will be given to remains for which the museum has little or no provenance information. These include, in particular, skulls and bones without inventory numbers.

The broadest possible range (regional, temporal, known/unknown provenance) is selected at the outset of this research in order to represent the most comprehensive cross-section of the museum collections. These samples provide important insights into how further work on provenance research could be methodically expanded in future.

In addition to this research, an internal dialogue will be initiated within the museums pertaining to the handling of human remains, with the aim of developing an institutional position on how human remains are managed and processed in the collections of the Ethnologisches Museum in future. An open dialogue with different interest groups will also be initiated about the future of human remains. The focus here will be on involving stakeholders from societies of origin to discuss how the human remains should be engaged with moving forward.

Institutions: Zentralarchiv, Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
Project coordnation and research: Ilja Labischinski
Duration: since 2019