The German Lost Art Foundation is currently funding a short-duration project “Human Remains in the Museum für Naturkunde” dedicated to researching the colonial provenance of human remains at the MfN. After the end of the project (December 2024), the project’s report will be available online in this page, as well as in the Proveana database.
In recent years, the Center for Humanities of Nature (MfN) has, through various research projects, worked on the MfN’s history of colonial collections. Recently, following the “We Want Them Back” public report, thus far unstudied colonial context human remains were identified. The main focus of this colonial provenance project is on three human skulls from colonial contexts:
The palaeontological collection contains the skull of an individual identified with an inscription that reads “Neuguinea” [New Guinea”] and an engraving and colouring in its frontal bone. The present underjaw is fastened to the skull with organic string. The skull has a catalogue number and a paper label attached that reads “Museum Umlauff,” which suggests that the provenance is connected to the Hamburg ethnografica and naturalia trading house owned by the family of Heinrich Christian Umlauff. The Umlauff company specialised in the international trade in exotic cultural artefacts, sold collections and provided "collected items" to "Völkerschauen". There is no information on whether this skull has been used for exhibition, research or teaching purposes, however, it is possible that it was used for teaching purposes before the 1990s. This is suggested by the placement in a former storage cabinet on the "History of Human Development", which contained skeletal parts and skulls for teaching purposes. A photograph of this skull was on display for several years on the website of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. The circumstances of the individual's acquisition and contexts for its use in the collections are analysed in this project.
During the preliminary assessment of the palaeontological collection, a set of 15 human remains of unknown provenance were identified. Neither of these individuals were attributed catalogue numbers, however some are inscribed with anatomical terms, in the same way as items in the teaching collection [“Lehrsammlung”]. Of these, one individual skull has a handwritten inscription on the occipital bone reading “Kamerun”. According to current knowledge and research carried out to date, the individual has neither been exhibited in the museum nor used in teaching in recent years. There is no inventory number, but the penmanship and ink colour of the inscription suggests similarities to other items of the comparative osteological collection [“Vergleichsammlung”].
A third individual skull has a handwritten inscription reading “Sundainseln, Sumatra” [“Sunda Islands, Sumatra”], also without catalogue number. Similarly, it is not known whether it has been displayed or used for teaching purposes. More research is conducted in order to ascertain the possible connections with the comparative osteological collection [“Vergleichsammlung”] or with the teaching collections [“Lehrsammlung”].
This project is documenting these specific three catalogue items, as well as the network of implicated actors and institutions, in the MfN and in Berlin, which relate to the circulation of colonial human remains. The three geographical colonial regions of “Kamerun,” “Neuguinea,” and “Sundainseln” are taken as extraction points that were of particular interest for collecting and the target of several expeditions. The MfN has large colonial context collections from these three regions. Other unstudied colonial geographical origins are not excluded from the project’s findings, and MfN’s archival documentation and, especially, the photography collection, is also being mobilized in order to transparently disclose as much as possible of the history of colonial human remains in the MfN.