Museum’s Riveting Exploration of Its Controversial Human Bones Collection Promises an In-Depth Investigation

A New York City museum with a controversial and immense collection of human bones is making significant changes to how it manages the remains. The American Museum of Natural History possesses 12,000 human remains, some of which are less than a century old. In a recent staff announcement, the museum’s president, Sean Decatur, stated that the time has come to investigate the acquisition of these remains, according to the New York Times. Decatur acknowledges in his memo that “human remains collections were made possible by extreme imbalances of power,” often gathered unethically.

Decatur further notes that researchers from the 19th and 20th centuries utilized these collections to further flawed scientific agendas rooted in white supremacy, including eugenics. The museum’s possession of particular remains has sparked controversy, such as the remains of 2,200 Native Americans that are being repatriated to their descendants at a pace deemed too slow, the remains of five Black individuals exhumed in 1903 from a cemetery for enslaved individuals, and the remains of 400 mostly impoverished New Yorkers whose unclaimed bodies were given to medical schools in the 1940s and later transferred to the museum in a potentially illegal process.

As part of the changes, the museum will remove all currently displayed human bones, and anthropologists will identify their identities and origins. Additionally, the museum will enhance the storage facilities for the remains. Decatur emphasizes the importance of understanding exactly what the museum possesses and being able to thoroughly describe it. The Guardian reports that other museums, such as Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum and Penn Museum and Harvard University’s Peabody Museum, are also facing scrutiny regarding their collections. Read the entire article on the New York Times. (Read more bones stories.)