Thursday 28 May, start 16.00 hours (walk-in 15.45 hours)
In September 2025, the Dutch government decided that a collection of no less than 28,000 fossils from the Naturalis collection would return to Indonesia. This Dubois collection, which had been excavated in Indonesia at the end of the nineteenth century under the direction of the Dutch paleontologist Eugène Dubois, had been requested by Indonesia for decades. Less known, however, is that the call for restitution already sounded in colonial times. What was the importance of this ‘scientific collection’ for the Dutch, Dutch Indisch and Indonesians?
