Skulls and skeletons from Namibia in Berlin

Abstract

From 2010 to 2013 the Charité Human Remains Project researched the provenance of the remains of fifty-seven men and women from the then colony of German South West Africa. They were collected during German colonial rule, especially but not only during the colonial war 1904–8. The remains were identified in anthropological collections of academic institutions in Berlin. The article describes the history of these collections, the aims, methods and interdisciplinary format of provenance research as well as its results and finally the restitutions of the remains to Namibia in 2011 and 2014.

Community Awareness and Restitution of Isanzu Ancestors’ Human Remains from the University of Göttingen Collections to Mkalama District, Tanzania

“…On the other hand, some scholars have to recontextualise and develop new practices and approaches for the restitution of Ancestor human remains, while others analysed the shifting role of museums in relation to the restitution of human remain collections in parts of the world such as New Zealand (Hicks, 2020; McCarthy, 2014; Tythacott et al, 2014) or Australia (Pickering, 2020). In addition, some studies suggest that the restitution of Ancestor human remains should go parallel with financial reparations and cultural remembrance such as memorial sites, while others focus on the findings of provenance research conducted into human remains and evaluation of the historical documents and contemporary sources (Karangwa et al, 2022; Kowalak, 2022; Stoecker and Winkelmann, 2018). Based on the foregoing, we argue that the local communities, i.e.…”