Museum as Necropolis: Ancestors, Remains, and Collections

Five hundred years ago, in Europe, systematic collection of human remains for dissection and study began with medicine. Most commonly, grave-robbed or gallows-scavenged remains of the criminalized, the deviant, and the poor were made into objects of anatomical training. By the late 18th century, the rise of natural history and ethnographic museums prompted the formation of racial anthropology collections in centers of knowledge production, amassed via global colonial and imperial networks and almost always used to undergird white supremacist political projects. Within the United States, unique factors converged facilitating the collection of human remains, resulting in a number of widely known anthropological and medical skeletal collections still in use within institutions today. Circumstances such as the enslavement of Africans, the Indian Wars, the Civil War, the influx of immigrants, emerging ideas about racial typologies, and scientific competition with Europe all impacted the collection process. The practice of collecting cadavers and remains specifically targeted marginalized people. With the development of archaeological research in the 19th century, collectors filled these same, and new, museums with excavated ancestors. By the mid-20th century, as racial sciences moved from bones to blood, brains, psychometrics, and genes, and as medicine moved into increasingly microscopic and molecular dimensions, many of the “bone rooms” of the 19th and early 20th century subsided, although never submerged, in prominence in museums and universities. Forensic anthropologists, paleoanthropologists, and bio-archaeologists continued to collect and study bodily remains, recent and ancient. 

By the end of the 20th century, novel digital imaging technologies like CT scanning, and the advent of molecular techniques applicable to bone, including isotopic and genetic analysis, reanimated human remains collections as sites for renewed scientific inquiry. Simultaneously, particularly in settler-colonies like Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, Indigenous people achieved legislation (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, NAGPRA, in the US-American case) providing measures for the repatriation of stolen Indigenous ancestors in museums, and for the protection of those still buried. Over the last three decades, efforts to expand these protections, such as a recent proposal for an African American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (AAGPRA), have developed alongside increasing pressure for museums to more carefully research and display the ancestors they house. More generally, these movements aim to empower descendant communities to make decisions about their ancestors held in museums, including questions of repatriation, reburial, and repair – questions which museums can no longer evade.