Rethinking the Exhibition of Human Remains: A Bio‐Psycho‐Social‐Spiritual Framework Integrating Death Studies, Death Education, and Terror Management Theory

Collections of old human remains in museums are currently under increased scrutiny and pressure. On the one hand they are problematised from a post-colonial and human rights point of view as the material remains of historic and ongoing structural violence connected to scientific knowledge production. On the other, new methods in archaeological science have led to increasing demand for destructive sampling. Without guidance and support by laws and formal standardised professional guidelines, museums may find themselves squeezed from two opposing sides. Based on an analysis of laws and professional guidelines, and a large-scale survey of the practical handling of old human remains in Swedish museums, this article argues that the lack of a shared professional process that recognises the complexity of old human remains as both objects of science and lived lives, risks undermining the role of museums in their relationship to both the public and the research community.

In the past three decades, human remains in museum collections have become the focus of contestation. This paper analyses the construction of the issue in Britain. The literature on contestation in the museum primarily identifies external influences: the market, the pressure of social movements and intellectual currents. I propose an additional influence of internal activism. Drawing on empirical material, I demonstrate important campaigning activity waged by actors inside the institution. The activities of campaigning museum professionals in promoting this issue is a response to a crisis of cultural authority, which has come about after decades of unremitting questioning of the purpose of the institution. The museum is traditionally understood as contributing to the cohesion and reproduction of capitalist society, as reinforcing dominant ideologies. These observations raise the question as to whether this function continues when members of the sector disown and question their authority.

This article addresses the complex intersection between ethics, museums and pathology collections through a historical analysis that dates back to the 18th century, when medical ethics began to be codified. The text explores the current context, where ethical concerns expand to the medical collections. The objective of this article is to analyze the complex ethical issues involved in the preservation and exhibition of human remains in museums and medical collections, considering historical developments, contemporary challenges and the need for a contextualized ethical approach. To achieve this objective, a methodology was adopted that combines historical research, critical analysis of academic literature and ethical reflection addressing issues related to the preservation and exhibition of human remains in museums and medical collections. Some of the results achieved in this critical analysis include identifying the lack of common guidelines for dealing with human remains in museums, highlighting the delicate balance between conservation and access. It is argued that an effective ethical approach must recognize the complexity of human remains, considering them both as scientific objects and as lived lives, and emphasizes the importance of historical contextualization to ethically discern the treatment of these collections. Ultimately, it is concluded that medical ethics and museological approaches are subject to continuous change, highlighting the importance of keeping up with transformations in the field. Keywords: Deontology; Scientific heritage; Museology

The 1980s and 1990s saw dramatic sea changes in the archaeological engagement with the dead in Australasia and North America, typified by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990. However, it has only been far more recently that different, distinctive, but still fundamental challenges to the archaeological study, display, and curation of mortuary remains have affected the UK, Europe, and Scandinavia. While classic examples of disputes over the archaeological excavation of human remains have deep roots in the late twentieth century, the last decade has seen significant shifts and challenges for mortuary archaeology (see Sayer 2010a). In this regard, the UK situation is instructive, if not necessarily typical. At the turn of the millennium, the Working Group on Human Remains (whose final report was published in 2007) created a strong political climate which encouraged unconditional returns of ancestral remains acquired from elsewhere in the world and held in British museums. This was rejected by many institutions which had to balance such edicts against their acquisition policy (DCMS 2003), but its impact was to encourage a more open atmosphere of discussion. Slightly later, the impact of the 2005 DCMS ‘Guidance for the Care of Human Remains in Museums’ provided a strong (if not binding) steer in terms of aspects of curatorial acquisition, research protocols, and collections management advice, designed to systematize best practice. Importantly, it enshrined a three-fold conceptual principle that human remains are of ‘unique status, are often of high research value, and should be treated with dignity and respect’ (DCMS 2005: 16). This document provided an important mandate for archaeological excavation, research, and curation, at a time when calls for repatriation and reburial were on the rise. However, it was an ‘aspirant code of ethics’ which as Redfern and Clegg (2013: 2) argue, was not enforceable: relying on the professionalism of both individuals and institutions for its implementation. (In addition, the 2004 Human Tissue Act also impacted on those institutions holding human remains or fragments of them, less than 100 years old, though archaeological examples of this are rare.) Some UK museums began repatriating parts of their ethnographic collections much earlier than this: Besterman (2004: 3) reported that Manchester Museum had decided to return human remains acquired as recently as 1992.

The discovery of the well-preserved body of a 2,000 year old man at Lindow Moss near Wilmslow, Manchester, UK, in 1984 provided archaeologists and forensic scientists with a veritable time capsule of evidence concerning life during the late Iron Age and early Roman period. Not only was the body of considerable antiquity, but the forensic examination established that the man had suffered a violent death. He had been hit on the head, apparently garrotted and had his throat cut (the so-called ‘Triple Death’) in what appears to have been a ritual sacrifice to the gods. Exhibitions about Lindow Man, as the body came to be known, were held at the Manchester Museum in 1987 and 1991 to widespread acclaim. This article discusses the approach taken by the museum in its most recent exhibition about Lindow Man (April 2008-April 2009) which proved to be unexpectedly controversial. Acknowledging alternative interpretations of Lindow Man’s death, and changing attitudes towards human remains in society, the Museum adopted a polyvocal approach to the exhibition. Eight specially-selected contributors shared their personal thoughts and theories about the dead man. These included a forensic scientist, peat diggers involved in the discovery, a landscape archaeologist, a member of the local community, a Pagan and museum curators from both the British Museum and the Manchester Museum. Personal items belonging to each of the contributors appeared alongside more conventional museum exhibits in order to explore the different meanings that Lindow Man has for different people. The design of the exhibition was also challenging and made innovative use of MDF. Public response to the exhibition was mixed, though still broadly favorable. Thousand of visitors’ comments cards collected during the course of the exhibition provide a rich resource for future study of the public response to the debate about human remains in museums. Discovery and interpretation When the remains of an adult human male body were discovered during commercial peat extraction at Lindow Moss, near Manchester, during the summer of 1984, the police became involved in case they were linked to the disappearance of a local woman. After preliminary radiocarbon dating indicated that the remains were indeed ancient, Lindow Man, as the body became known, underwent painstaking archaeological investigation and forensic examination by a team of archaeologists and scientists led by Dr Ian Stead at the British Museum (STEAD, BOURKE & BROTHWELL 1986; STEAD & Turner 1987). The man had died violently, from blows to the head, perhaps being garrotted and having his throat cut. This classic pioneering study could not answer all of the questions definitively and there has been protracted debate ever since amongst archaeologists, anatomists, anthropologists and others about how, why and when he died (CONNOLLY 1985; TURNER & SCAIFE 1995). Subsequent work seems to show that Lindow Man dates from the late 1 century AD or early Roman period in the North of Britain (GOWLETT, HEDGES & LAW 1989). More recently, the debate has embraced the ethics of displaying human remains in museums (e.g. VASWANI 2001; RANDERSON 2007). The Manchester Museum exhibition The Manchester Museum’s exhibition Lindow Man a Bog Body Mystery (19 April 2008 – 19 April 2009) drew upon research carried out over the last 25 years and explored the different meanings that Lindow Man’s body holds for different people. This was not the first time that Lindow Man had been displayed at the Manchester Museum. Earlier exhibitions in 1987 and 1991 explored Lindow Man’s life and times and presented the results of the latest forensic work. Much had changed in the meantime,

<span style="font-size: xx-small;"> Although the issues of retention and display of human remains have become topical over the last decade, the thoughts of museum visitors about this topic have not been registered, despite their being the museums’ main stakeholder. The vast majority (82.5%) of 300 respondents questioned in the summer of 2002 at three British museums displaying ancient Egyptian human remains supported the idea of having these remains on display. However, a small percentage of visitors (14.2%) wanted the remains displayed in a "more appropriate and respectful environment", and this may be the key future challenge for collections with human remains that have no cultural descendants. This paper summarises research into visitor perceptions of ancient Egyptian human remains in museum collections and on display in the United Kingdom and suggests further research into the various aspects of human remains in museums, particularly regarding more recent remains or those with cultural descendants. </span>

The Musée du Quay Branly held an international symposium, “From Anatomic Collections to Objects of Worship: Conservation and Exhibition of Human Remains in Museums,” in Paris on February 22–23, 2008, at the museum's Théatre Claude Levy Strauss. The main purpose of the 2-day conference—opened by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication's Christine Albanel—was to stimulate an international debate on a multidisciplinary basis concerning the roles and responsibilities of museums in the exhibition and repatriation of human remains. The subject turned out to be topical, originating from the case of thetoi moko, the Maori tattooed head belonging to the collection of the Natural History Museum in Rouen, France, since 1875. The restitution of thetoi mokoto the Papa Museum in Wellington, New Zealand, deliberated by the city of Rouen, was recently banned by the Administrative Tribunal of Rouen, on request of the Ministry of Culture at the end of 2007. The head actually belonged to a municipal museum, which was in fact part of the Musées de France, and therefore it was considered part of a public collection. Accordingly, the 2002 French statute providing for the inalienability of state properties was applicable.

In 2022, the ashes of Preben Holger Larsen were repatriated to Denmark, and interred at the Mindelunden Memorial Park on the outskirts of Copenhagen. Larsen was a member of the Danish resistance to the Nazi occupation of Denmark during the Second World War, and for this was imprisoned at Neuengamme Concentration Camp in northern Germany, where he was killed in 1944. However, after the end of the war, Larsen was listed on a Memorial at Mindelunden for those Danish freedom fighters whose remains had never been found. Larsen’s cremated remains had, in fact, been taken from Neuengamme by Frederick Murgatroyd, a Lieutenant Colonel in the British Army Medical Corps, and brought back to the UK. After Murgatroyd’s death in the 1950s, the urn containing Larsen’s ashes, together with twenty photographs from Neuengamme and Bergen-Belsen, was given to the former Wellcome Museum of Medical Science in London, and in 1982, loaned to the Science Museum with the rest of the Wellcome museum collection. In this article, we explore how Larsen’s remains came to be in a museum collection, how they were rediscovered and their identity confirmed, and the efforts towards their repatriation. The ethical collections management of human remains in museums is a complex and evolving field, and repatriation is receiving significant attention across the sector. This is an unusual case, but one with important lessons in collections management, archival research, public access to museum documentation, and the review of human remains in museum collections.

The display of ancestral human remains in museums is a contentious ethical issue, raising concerns around the dignity and respect for ancestral lived lives versus the role of remains for education and scientific enquiry. Against the backdrop of recent debates sparked by the deinstallation of ancestral remains at several museums (e.g., the removal of the Shuar tsantsas at the Pitt Rivers Museum) and revisions of national and international ethics codes, this essay explores the role of two methodologies - a trial and interactive workshop - in producing inclusive spaces to support ethical decision making and practice. Digital participation technologies were used to support an accessible mode of participation that was anonymous - allowing attendees to express opinions about emotive and challenging subjects, such as ancestral human remains. For both examples, attendees and participants identified key priority and action areas for the sector and within their places of work. The activities will contribute to a wider research project that is investigating value and ethical disagreements and polarization within museums.

Although the issues of retention and display of human remains have become topical over the last decade, the thoughts of museum visitors about this topic have not been registered, despite their being the museums’ main stakeholder. The vast majority (82.5%) of 300 respondents questioned in the summer of 2002 at three British museums displaying ancient Egyptian human remains supported the idea of having these remains on display. However, a small percentage of visitors (14.2%) wanted the remains displayed in a appropriate and respectful environment, and this may be the key future challenge for collections with human remains that have no cultural descendants. This paper summarises research into visitor perceptions of ancient Egyptian human remains in museum collections and on display in the United Kingdom and suggests further research into the various aspects of human remains in museums, particularly regarding more recent remains or those with cultural descendants.

Two laws governing the disposition of Native American human remains in museums and institutions have had a profound impact on anthropology, and especially physical anthropology. In contrast to the perception of constant conflict between Native Americans and physical anthropologists, the repatriation process based on these laws has been in large part harmonious between institutions and Native peoples in the US. Despite misconceptions, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAPGRA; 25 United States Code (U.S.C.) 3001-3013) was not intended to halt further research on Native American remains in museums. In fact, court decisions have affirmed that the documentation of human remains produces information no other methods can provide, and provides necessary evidence to be incorporated and weighed, along with other evidence, in evaluating "cultural affiliation," the legal term for the required connection from federally recognized Native American groups to their ancestors. The wide variety of osteological data collected at the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), Smithsonian Institution, have proven indispensable when evaluating cultural affiliation, especially when other information sources are unhelpful or ambiguous, and provide an empirical basis for determining the ancestry of individuals whose remains will be discovered in the future. To date, the claim-driven process at the NMNH has resulted in the affiliation and repatriation of more Native American remains than any other institution in the country. Repatriation experiences at the NMNH demonstrate the changing relationships between museums and Native peoples, the continuing important contributions that physical anthropology makes to the repatriation process, and the importance of physical anthropology in understanding the recent and ancient history of North America.

During the colonial period, museums did not just passively benefit from the plunder of human remains and culturally sacred items. When Britain sent a punitive military expedition to Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) in 1863, it was accompanied by Richard Holmes, a staff member of the British Museum, whose purchase of loot from the expeditionary force institutionalised the plunder of cultural heritage. His inclusion in the expeditionary force was carefully planned, though the belongings he took — mainly manuscripts, religious items and emblems of power belonging to the Ethiopian royal family — were not the intended focus of his participation. Whilst the UK’s 2004 Human Tissue Act had a beneficial impact on the treatment of human remains in museums, objects belonging to colonised people are often still positioned as artworks or artefacts, evidencing ignorance of the deep personal and spiritual links that connect them back to their communities of origin. This article draws on our professional experience of curation and research in museums and libraries, as well as the impact of ICOM’s new Museum Definition on our practice. Joint research on the Maqdala expedition led us to question assumptions about the legacy of empire in museums and to scrutinise unexpected connections in the history of museum collections. This article addresses the problematic relationship between collecting and imperial power, the false dichotomy between ‘artefacts’ (belongings) and ‘human remains’ (ancestors) and the need to decolonise collections through further research and the recognition of ongoing cultural and physical violence.

Museums are increasingly taking the cultural values of source communities into account in their representational strategies, and that means that they now face the challenge of explaining to their publics how social responsibility toward distant source communities informs the choices each museum makes. This article examines how the National Museum of Denmark attempted to inform and discuss with the Danish public the museum's decision to not exhibit scalps in their temporary exhibition on Native American culture, Powwow: We Dance, We're Alive. Building on the new, contingent museum ethics proposed by Janet Marstine, the editor of the Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics, I show how the museum succeeded in engaging users in questions of museum ethics. However, this specific debate on human remains in museums developed into an encounter between a global, museological discourse on the responsibility of museum institutions toward indigenous groups and a common discourse in Danish political debates that views consideration toward the sensibilities of specific ethnic groups as a threat toward free speech and rational knowledge.

Human remains are a fundamental part of the archaeological record, offering unique insights into the lives of individuals and populations in the past. Like many archaeological materials human remains require distinctive and specialised methods of recovery, analysis and interpretation, while technological innovations and the accumulation of expertise have enabled archaeologists to extract ever greater amounts of information from assemblages of skeletal material. Alongside analyses of new finds, these advances have consistently thrown new light on existing collections of human remains in museums, universities and other institutions. Given the powerful emotional, social and religious meanings attached to the dead body, it is perhaps unsurprising that human remains pose a distinctive set of ethical questions for archaeologists.

This study explores the impact of death representations on openness to death education among university students in teaching and education degree programs. Drawing from Terror Management Theory, the roles of future time perspective (FTP), death anxiety, and the ontological representation of death as total annihilation were analyzed. The results show that viewing death as annihilation negatively impacts FTP, reducing the ability to think about the future. Diminished FTP increases negative thoughts about death and lack of death acceptance. When FTP still allows making sense of life despite death, it reduces death rejection, however, it does not increase openness to death education, activating proximal defenses. Conversely, when death representation constrains FTP, death thoughts emerge that lead to desiring death education pathways, activating distal defenses. The study highlights the importance of addressing death representations and developing a healthy time perspective in training programs for educators.