Colonialism and museums

Three recent articles have highlighted the complexity of the issue of human remains in museums.

• Manchester Museum asks visitors if body of Egyptian woman should remain on display (July 2025)
• Museums should stop displaying African ancestral remains, says report (March 2025)
• Perspectives on human remains: a look at the moral and ethical arguments that surround the issue (June 2024)

In these instances, the dead were taken during a period of colonialist expansion, where the feelings of the colonised were disregarded.

The Egyptian body in the first article is from 700 BCE. We know a lot about Egyptian beliefs about the soul and the afterlife, so we can say with some confidence what this woman is likely to have believed and how she wanted her remains dealt with. I do not think that her body should be displayed out of the sarcophagus (if that is indeed how it is displayed - the article does not make that clear).

In the case of African ancestral human remains, the dead are far more recently deceased, and there is continuity with living cultures (both in Africa and in the diaspora). Again, these remains were taken during the colonial period, very likely without the consent of the relatives of the dead.

Similarly, Indigenous Australian, Indigenous North American, and Sami remains and artefacts are often kept in museums, and were also taken without the consent of those Indigenous Peoples.

It is clear in these cases that there should be an ethical process for repatriation of human remains to their countries and cultures of origin.

This is because there is a continuous link to still-extant Indigenous cultures.

Ancient British remains

That does not apply to ancient human remains from the British Isles, where any cultural continuity between ancient polytheist and animist religions, and contemporary Pagan revivals, is very tenuous. Everyone in Britain should have a say over what happens to human remains, as the British Association for Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology have pointed out.

In 2009, I proposed a compromise solution which would give archaeologists access to human remains, and create a sacred space for them to rest in. This need not be expensive; those who wish to conduct ceremony to honour the ancient dead could do so in museum store-rooms. 

Some museums are running out of storage space, so that might result in some reburying of human remains, and in that case, some sort of dignified ritual to rebury them would be appropriate.

I do think that where museums do display human remains, screening them in some way so that people have a choice as to whether to view them, and so that museum visitors approach the remains respectfully, is appropriate. There's an excellent example of this in the National Museum of Archaeology in Dublin.