For nearly four centuries until around A.D. 1600, a community of Icelanders on the west coast buried their dead away from the mainland on the tiny island of Haffjarðarey. Centuries later, the relentless waves and rising sea levels that tugged at Haffjarðarey’s shores began to expose bones eroding from the island cemetery.
In 1945, that cemetery became the focus of what may have been the newly independent Republic of Iceland’s first emergency archaeology mission: to locate and excavate any remains of medieval Icelanders left on Haffjarðarey before they washed away for good.
By most scientific measures the mission was successful, with the skeletal remains of at least 50 individuals identified, excavated, and removed from the island for study.
But there was one problem: most of the excavated bodies were missing their skulls.
Those missing skulls sit today in cardboard boxes on steel storage shelves in Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, where they were once an addition to the university’s eugenics pursuits, representing the supposedly “pure” Nordic Icelandic race among the museum’s vast collection of human remains.
Nuna Teal adds: Sometimes one’s own family history intersects in unexpected and unpleasant ways with the history of others. Skull thief Vilhjalmur Stefansson (of Icelandic heritage) was a famously accomplished Arctic adventurer, explorer and flawed man whom I actually knew, because he and his wife lived with us in Vermont for many months when I was a little kid…
