[This general article, published both in Germand and English, is about dealing with all sorts of remains in museums]
Oliver Dietrich, Harald Meller, Jörg Orschiedt und Alfred Reichenberger write:
In the course of the growing debate about exhibits from colonial and other contexts of injustice, the topic has increasingly come to the attention of the public and researchers in recent years.
Examples include the »Charité Human Remains Project«, which led to the return of skulls and skeletons from colonial contexts to the communities of origin, or the extensive provenance research project on 1135 skulls from the former colony of German East Africa, conducted by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation at the Museum for Prehistory and Early History in Berlin.
A strong influence of the English-language discussion can be seen from the fact that the term »human remains« is often used in publications instead of the German equivalent »menschliche Überreste«.
In 2013, the German Museums Association published guidelines for the ethical treatment of human remains, which also address archaeological collections (Heeb 2021) but focus on human remains from recent and subrecent non-European contexts in particular.
The »Jena Declaration« objects to the use of the »concept of race« in research and teaching on humans and thus addresses an important sub-aspect.
Their conclusion:
The State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology Saxony Anhalt with the State Museum of Prehistory takes this into account with clearly formulated regulations and training for its employees.
Also, for the exhibition of human remains, high ethical standards apply. Such exhibitions are never an end in themselves, but always serve to impart knowledge that can be directly illustrated only by the feature in question.
A ban on the examination of human remains would deprive us of an essential source of information on the 90% of human history, which only archaeol ogy can shed light on.
Without this in depth knowledge of ourselves, it would not be possible to clarify fundamental questions of humanity, such as whether war arises from our natural behaviour or is culturally determined and thus avoidable.
