To put it mildly, these are not everyday questions for Menucha Latumaerissa and Laurens de Rooy to answer these days. One, how do you export human remains from the Netherlands to Indonesia? And two, what on earth do you answer when customs ask if you have anything to declare?
De Rooy, director of Museum Vrolik, rolls an iron trolley through the doors of the Amsterdam anatomy museum. On the trolley are fifteen cardboard boxes. Each contains a human skull.
On 2 November, they will be taken to Schiphol Airport and stowed in the hold of a passenger plane bound for Indonesia. After a journey of roughly 13,000 kilometres, they will arrive in Amtoefoe, a village in the southern Moluccas. Home at last, Latumaerissa said.
The whole adventure began with a yellowed scientific publication whose leaves were slowly but surely coming loose. ‘Ethnographic essays,’ reads the cover. Latumaerissa found the 1917 booklet at a thrift shop in Amstelveen a few years ago…
