Edinburgh University: Decolonised transformations

The June 2025 report by a working group of Edinburgh University DECOLONISED TRANSFORMATIONS CONFRONTING THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH’S HISTORY AND LEGACIES OF ENSLAVEMENT AND COLONIALISM focusses mainly on slavery an its current impact. At the en dit has an interesting recommendation for the university's Anatomical Museum and its 200 skulls.

9.6 Support the repatriation of ancestral remains to their original communities from the Anatomical Museum, with recommendations including (p. 119):

  • Clearer information online about the process of repatriation and who to contact.
  • Clearer narratives about existing repatriation efforts. Ringfencing money for descendant communities to visit their ancestors and build relations with Anatomical Museum staff.
  • Creating funded PhD programmes to support provenance research.
  • Establishing advisory boards linked to specific geographical areas.
  • Creating an accessible and searchable digital catalogue to assist descendant communities with finding their ancestors without reproducing colonial violence.
  • Hiring a dedicated provenance researcher (1.0FTE UE07) who will work on creating a database and be the lead on Anatomical/School of Medicine archives and provenance research to support repatriation claims.

 

Daisy Chamberlain (Summer Scholar, Anatomical Museum) began to investigate two skulls, which had been taken after the 1898 battle of Omdurman. She considers both as examples of colonial violence and anticolonial resistance.

RM* thanks for the contribution to this item