United States. Human Skeletons Disappear From Museum Halls
With the approach of Halloween and the Day of the Dead, celebrated in Mexico from October 28 to November 2, storefronts and clubs around the world turn orange, black, and white, filling with illuminated pumpkins, ghosts, skeletons, and witches. Quite the opposite is happening in US museums, which have asked themselves not only an ethical and moral question, but also a legal one: is it permissible to display human remains in a museum?
After thinking about the problem for a long time, they came to the conclusion that this is not so, and the American Museum of Natural History in New York (AMNH), one of the most famous and renowned in the world, announced recently that “it will remove its huge collection of human bones, approximately 12,000 pieces, from exhibition.” But the AMNH administration went further: “Some of the human finds,” it was announced, “will be returned to their descendants, or at least an attempt will be made to find them, and the rest will be stored.”
In a statement relayed to CNN, Sean Decatur, president of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, said that “no one who died, except those who chose to donate their remains to science, ever agreed to end up on display in a museum collection.” According to Decatur, this is essentially “exploitation.” And here is the result: skeletons and mummies, along with tools, musical instruments, and accessories of various types, “made from human bones,” will no longer be available to the public.
This particularly concerns pre-Columbian musical instruments, the 11th-century Mongol remains, and Native American bones. “None of this is essential to the structure of the museum and its exhibitions,” said Decatur, according to whom “complex legacy of the collection of human remains” needs to be reconsidered once and for all.
Decatur emphasized that 26% of the remains in his museum’s display cases are from “Native Americans exterminated during European colonization.” There are also the bones of five Africans enslaved to work in the fields, found during the demolition of the cemetery in the early twentieth century. In any case, this is “a very small percentage of the entire collection,” said Kendra Snyder, a spokeswoman for the New York Museum.
Beyond the museum collections, “the time has come for President Decatur to reconsider the policy on the collection of human remains” from archaeological sites and their subsequent conservation. “Even with cultural objects,” Decatur said, “we must always re-evaluate the real need for them to be displayed to the public.” Finally, the president of the American museum recalled how, between the 19th and 20th centuries, archaeologists used research to find evidence of white supremacy: “They reinforce patterns of racial contempt,” Decatur concluded.
