Bones of contention

A NZ anthropologist is out to ensure human remains held by museums and medical schools are better respected.

- BY PAUL GORMAN • PHOTOGRAPH BY EDITH LEIGH

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 UK 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.

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.”