Enter an unassuming door within the University’s Anatomical Museum, located in the heart of Edinburgh’s old town, and you are greeted with a meticulously presented two-story room lined with dark wood, glass-fronted cabinets that houses a unique and confronting collection of human skulls.
The room stands as a lasting legacy of the University’s connections with colonialism and now to its own movement to address these.
Historical artefacts
There is growing pressure on the ownership of artifacts and ‘treasures’ historical collections held by museums and universities throughout the world. Public interest has led to much discussion over what should happen to these collections often amassed during the colonial era.
As one of the oldest educational institutes in Scotland, the University of Edinburgh holds more than a million items in its historic collections. Around 13,000 are anatomical artefacts and of these, more than 1,800 are skulls.
A large number of the skulls in the collection were amassed during the colonial period and given to the University under the direction of one of its former Principals, William Turner, who was also a Professor of Anatomy.
During the colonial period, explorers, scientists, and the military often took human remains from the lands they colonized. These were often donated to museums or other educational institutes in their home nations for the study of, now discredited, racial theories of superiority.
“The desire to compare human anatomy and physiology across races and nations was very popular,” explains Tom. “There was active collecting of skulls and other human remains from various nations and indigenous peoples to compare these with the explicit intent of trying to prove that white Europeans were superior.”
The University’s anatomical collection grew exponentially during this time and it led to the opening of its purpose-built Anatomical Museum and Skull Room in 1884.
Addressing historical wrongs
The study of phrenology was finally debunked in the early 1900s, however, the University’s anatomical collection remained.
“The University had this huge collection and no one really knew what to do with it,” says Tom.
The University began repatriations in 1947, but it wasn’t until the early 1990s that large-scale repatriations started to take place around the world.
After years of lobbying from Indigenous leaders, the Australian Government began funding the repatriation of ancestral remains from overseas. The University was the first UK institution to repatriate Aboriginal remains in its collection and, at the time, it was one of the few institutions in Britain to have a repatriation policy.
This work is now an ongoing process with the University often working behind the scenes to progress repatriation requests.
“We now work with communities around the world to facilitate the return of ancestral remains. There’s never a closed door,” says Daryl.
Daryl explains that, alongside receiving requests, the University actively engages people from a range of communities with its collections.
A recent example of this happened in the lead up to the repatriation of four Mudan warrior skulls to Taiwan in 2023. After identifying the skulls and verifying their origin, experts from the Anatomical Museum invited members of the University’s Taiwanese Society to visit the skulls. This directly led to Taiwan’s Mudan community making a formal request for the remains.
Ceremonial return
For many communities, the return of ancestral remains can have huge cultural, social and spiritual significance.
Lulji Ljaliguan, a resident of Shimen Village, a Mudan Township in Taiwan, shares his thoughts on last year’s repatriation of the Mudan skulls: “It was not merely a repatriation of historical artefacts; it represented the homecoming of our ancestors’ spirits to the land they cherished and defended.”
Before the formal transfer of the Mudan skulls, University representatives joined dignitaries to take part in a traditional Paiwan ceremony to honour the spirits of the deceased.
“The repatriation, conducted with the traditional ritual of Paiwan, ensured that the ancestral spirits returned to Taiwan in peace, thereby achieving actual closure,” Lulji explains. “The return of the ancestral spirits to Mudan is an eloquent testament to the profound cultural heritage and values of our Indigenous community.”
(image credit: Neil Hanna)
Overcoming hurdles
While many repatriations have positive outcomes, managing the process often carries legal, political and ethical sensitivities.
Daryl explains that it isn’t always easy to identify which community the remains should be returned to: “There can be challenges based on modern-day political borders or there may be multiple indigenous communities that have competing claims for the same ancestral remains.”
These complexities are all carefully considered as part of a well-established due diligence procedure. However, there is also a firm understanding that the process can be a very emotive experience for the receiving party, with the potential to ignite historical traumas.
“We need to carry out any repatriation in a very sensitive and discreet way, particularly when you are dealing with the remains of someone’s relative or ancestor.” Daryl says. “We may be interacting with people the first time they realise their ancestor’s remains are not actually in their community.”
A reimagined collection
The repatriation of human remains continue to gain momentum worldwide. The University of California, Berkley, has announced plans to return more than 4,000 human remains of Native Americans to their tribes. Germany has repatriated 95 Maori and Moriori remains to New Zealand and France has overhauled laws to simplify its repatriation process.
What does this mean for the University of Edinburgh’s collections?
“It doesn’t diminish our collection, it enriches it,” explains Tom. “Repatriation is an important step in the University addressing its own historical wrongs and more often than not, we end up building relationships with communities the remains have been returned to.”
Alongside the archival evidence of the skulls, the museum now has a collection of items gifted by the communities who have had remains repatriated to them. A display case housing some of the items sits by the entrance to the Anatomical Museum.
“These were given to us to acknowledge the repatriation and our looking after of the remains,” says Tom. “So, we are ultimately collecting again and the museum is becoming enriched with these new items that add another element to the story about these people.”
Lasting impact
The process for a repatriation can also be an opportunity to learn more about the remains, and generate true lasting impact for generations.
In 2019, the University returned nine skulls to the forest-dwelling Vedda tribe of Sri Lanka. There was a long-standing belief from the tribe that they were the first human groups to live in Sri Lanka, however, the default argument grounded on historical evidence suggested that tribes had never settled in Sri Lanka’s rainforest.
Brokered by experts at the Max Planck Institute in Germany who were working with the Vedda tribe, dental calculus was sampled from the Vedda skulls in the University of Edinburgh’s collection. The results clearly showed that the diet the individuals had was consistent with a rainforest diet.
“That’s the evidence they needed that would never have come to light and would have been argued for eternity,” explains Tom.
The research published following this is thought to be one of the first in the world to include a chief of a tribe as an author on a scientific paper.
The road ahead
While each repatriation is an example of how the University is addressing its colonial legacy, Daryl emphasises that they form part of a broader range of activities taking place at the University to consider reparative justice: “This is the University’s history and we can’t shy away from it. And now we are using this opportunity to do something about it.”
While the skulls are at Edinburgh, Tom and his colleagues in the Anatomical Museum remain the custodians of them.
“This is our past and we can’t change that,” says Tom. “What we can do, is do right by them now. And that, for me, is giving them the dignity and respect and care that they deserve.”
