After the discovery, the display was removed, and the school started an investigation that consulted an outside specialist. After examining the remains, the specialist could confirm: these were the remains of a human. But since the consultation was only osteological, its provenance remained unknown. It would require a lot more work to trace who the person whose bones were examined had been in life. This is not unusual. Typically, human remains in schools have a long and complex history that is poorly documented and often forgotten. They were acquired many decades ago, and may have circulated between collections, and changed schools. The Danderyd Highschool now faced the same problem that many Swedish schools have faced before: what should they do with these remains?
Press photos from inside the Danderyd High School and of the skeleton that was used as a Halloween prop. The photos have been intentionally blurred for this blog.
As I have argued in the article Between Objects of Science and Lived Lives. The legal liminality of old human remains, human remains from historic contexts are situated in a legal gray area, and there are no clear laws on how to handle them. For any school that suddenly discovers that they have human remains in their closets, it is difficult to know what the right thing to do might be. They can turn to the police, to museums, to the National Heritage Board, and even to the Swedish Church – and many do, and find that not only do these institutions not feel that this is their business, but also that nobody can really advise them about what to do. This conundrum has been discussed in this blog before, and the case of schools has also been the subject of excellent reporting by Swedish Radio in 2016.
“What is well intentioned may still be ill advised.”
In the case of the Danderyd skeleton, the decision has now been made that it will be cremated and buried in the local cemetery. While this, at first glance seems to be a well intended course of action, it is highly problematic since no provenance research has been carried out on the remains and we therefore have no idea if this would be desired or even acceptable for this individual. What is well intentioned may still be ill advised. To put it bluntly, this act is more about satisfying the needs of the school and the local community than the needs of the person whose remains were used as a prop by that very same community only a few weeks ago. This is not good enough.
In several interviews with Swedish Radio and TV I have argued that given that there is likely to be a large amount of human remains in Swedish schools, this is not a problem that is likely to go away anytime soon. What we need is a proper inventory of what is out there, so that we can get an overview – not unlike the inventory that was carried out in Swedish museums in 2016. Once we have an overview we can develop support and guidelines. Ideally, provenance research should also be carried out so that we know what any appropriate course of action might look like.
This is a big job that will require specialist competence. It is not fair to expect individual schools to take responsibility for this. The situation in Sweden is complicated by the fact that the administrative responsibility of schools has been decentralised from the state to the county level (kommun) in a reform in 1991. Is is safe to say that the large majority of the human remains in Swedish schools were acquired long before then, and the responsibility of this necessary inventory and research must therefore fall upon the Swedish state and in particular on the National Agency for Education (Skolverket). When confronted with this request from me in a TV interview on Nov 15, the National Agency for Education predictably punted the question to the county levels, who in turn decided not to respond to the journalists requests.
What happens next will be interesting to follow, and while the future is unpredictable, one thing is for sure: if we do not take responsibility for this problem now, we will have another story just like this one break in a couple of years, and we will start the debate over. Again.
Update: Liv Nilsson Stutz published a short text in Swedish on the topic in Bi-lagan, a resource publication for biology teachers in Swedish schools, published by Uppsala University, in the fall of 2024.
Viewed from the outside, it often seems as if the Nordic countries are very similar in terms of culture and values. But despite their entangled political and cultural histories, and their cultural similarities, a closer look reveals interesting differences, and this is certainly the case for their professional attitudes to the ethics of collections of human remains.
The Nordic Network for Collections of Human Remains is an informal forum that organises different stakeholders in human remains collections, predominantly collection managers, but also researchers and museum professionals across the Nordic countries . The purpose of the forum is to provide a space for reflection and support in professional discussions and development of ethical practices. The Network organised a conference at Arkivcenter Syd, in Lund on October 26-27, 2023 (for full disclosure, Liv Nilsson Stutz has been a member of the steering group during the period 2020-2023, and was part of the organising committee for this conference). The purpose of the conference was to come together for the first time after the end of the pandemic, update one another on the state of the field in the different Nordic Countries, and strengthen both formal and informal ties and relationships throughout the community.
The conference invited speakers from several large collections across the Nordic countries to share their perspectives and experiences. Unfortunately the participant from Norway (Julia Kotthaus from De Schreinerske samlinger, at the Medical Faculty at the University of Oslo) had to cancel last minute, since she needed to prioritise her presence at a repatriation from the collection she manages. These presentations were inspiring in the sharing of protocols and experiences, but also showed the differences in approaches between countries.
Careful storage of human remains in a Swedish museum. Photo by Liv Nilsson Stutz (intentionally blurred).
The Danish model is interesting since it clearly separates ownership from deposition and curation. The former is held by local museums, while the latter is managed by essentially two centralized collections: ABDOU at the University of Southern Denmark (presented by Dorthe Dangvard Pedersen), and The human skeletal collection at the University of Copenhagen(presented by Niels Lynnerup, Marie Louise Jørkov, and Kurt Kjaer). This arrangement has interesting consequences for the management of processes. The facilities are all highly adapted for the preservation and study of human remains, and the research facilities support, track and assist in access to the collection by researchers, students, and even the public. It can be argued that this system that separates the human remains from their otherwise historical and archaeological context in order to prioritise preservation, control, and documentation, implicitly or explicitly categorises the remains almost exclusively as Objects of Science. It appears to be a very clear, but also unproblematising approach. The division has interesting consequences for the most significant case of repatriation of human remains in Denmark, Utimut – the repatriation of human remains and culturally significant objects to Greenland. The ownership of the human remains is now held by Greenland, but Greenland has elected to follow the same system for the management of collections of their human remains as that practiced for remains found on Danish soil, keeping them in Copenhagen. This case is always interesting to bring up in debates about repatriation since it is clear here that the Greenland side appears to share the same concerns for these remains as their Danish counterpart, and also feels that a practice that protects them as Objects of Science is valuable for them. But that does not mean that nothing has changed. There is a significant shift in the attitudes on behalf of the collection managers who do not claim control or ownership, but take the role as mediators and assistants. In this sense then, the Danish system is arguably more inclusive and progressive than in the rest of the Nordic countries, where ownership tends to be associated with the institution that holds the remains.
The Swedish system with decentralised practices and control was illustrated by presentations from two Swedish collections. The Historical Museum at Lund University was represented by Jenny Bergman and Sara Virkelyst who presented a newly established flow chart to systematically support repatriation processes in order to make them transparent and predictable for all stakeholders. The collections at the National Historical Museums were presented by Elin Ahlin Sundman. The issues of ethics appear to be top of mind for the Swedish institutions, but the decentralised practices result in great diversity in protocols and processes – which stands out as quite a contrast to Denmark.
Images from inside the Chapel of the Holy Ghost in the basement of the Casagrande House in Turku, a semi private place of worship that also serves as a resting place for excavated human remains from the later medieval and early modern period. Photos by Annina Souninen, and published by Åbo Underrättelser.
Finland seems to have the least regulation and formalised processes for the care of collections of human remain at the moment. With a law that currently calls for decisions of future reburial to be made before an excavation has even started, human remains, in Finland, appear to be treated more toward the end of “Lived Lives” than in the other countries. They are often reburied immediately – sometimes even before osteological study. It should be added, however, that this position in reality is almost directly dependent on the chronological age of the remains, with prehistoric remains being systematically collected, and historical remains more often reburied. The decision is often made by local parishes who hold a lot of the power in these negotiations. Liisa Seppänen from the University of Turku presented a hybrid solution with the case of the contemporary chapel in the Casagrande House in Turku. The historic building, previously known as Ingmanska huset, was built in the 17th century at the previous location of a Graveyard of the Holy Ghost Church in Turku. After being threatened with demolition in the 1980s, the architect Benito Casagrande purchased and renovated the building under supervision of the Finnish Heritage Agency, and it now includes businesses, shops, and restaurants. The remains of the people buried in the underlying churchyard (from the 14th century and to 1650) were excavated in consecutive projects from the 1960s and through the 1980s, and were collected by a dentist at the university who kept them as a teaching and research collection (predominantly the crania). After extensive lobbying, Benito Casagrande, managed to have the remains transferred from the university to a newly built chapel in the basement of the house, where they can both rest in a sacred space and be accessible for research. The chapel is not open to the public, but can be visited upon request. A small working group, of which Casagrande is a part, oversees the collection and makes decisions with regards to access and curation. The impact of a private citizen is, to say the least, quite extraordinary in this case – but perhaps this is not as difficult to reconcile in a system with a tradition of consultation with the leadership of local parishes. From a more traditional collection manager point of view, Risto Väinölä discussed he human remains collection at the University of Helsinki (LOUMUS) which is a heterogenous collection with a long and diverse history of collection, with potential for research but with limited manifested interest both on behalf of researchers and calls for repatriation.
In addition to the presentations of the state of the field in the respective countries, I also want to highlight two more conceptual papers. Karin Tybjerg from Medicinsk Museion in Copenhagen presented an interesting paper on historical medical collections as a foundation for amemnesis – the clinical medical process of recovering the medical history, usually referring to patient history, to understand medical states in the present, but here expanded to include a broader investigation into the field of medical science, medical history and medical humanities (she has published these ideas in an interesting paper in Centaurus 65(2), in 2023). Equally interesting was Eli Kristine Økland Hausken‘s paper Adressing Bare Bones and Human Remains about her work with exhibitions at the University Museum of Bergen and the underlying ethos of their activities to engage the local community by “lifting the curtain” on the process knowledge production and the history of institutions. I was somewhat surprised at the choice to exhibit a shrunken head, a South American Tsansta (an issue that has also been debated by curator Åshild Sunde Feyling Thorsen from the same intitution), and while I am personally not convinced, I was interested in the arguments in favour of making such an unconventional choice today.
The Old Department of Anatomy at Lund University. Image by Väsk, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
During the course of the conference, three panel talks explored several fundamental issues for the care of collections of human remains. The following topics were explored:
Panel 1: What is the value of collections of human remains? This panel explored the broader topic of the value of these collections for science, pedagogy and history in a time when they are increasingly questioned. Are they valuable? And if so, how?
Panel 2: How to make the collections accessible (including perspectives on digitalization, exhibition, and access for researchers). Should we? And how best to do this?
Panel 3: Accession and deaccession. What are our current challenges? This panel talk will discuss the responsibility (and cost) of accession and deaccession, and discuss the connections to repatriation and (re)burial.
Throughout these conversations it became clear just how entangled these issues really are. The final discussion, on accession and deaccession, also linked up the the local history of anatomy in Lund where a large part of the old and seemingly “worthless” or “problematic” collections from the Department of Anatomy were unceremoniously discarded in 1995 when the department was closed down permanently. Some remains were transferred to the Historical museum (the institution that received most of the skeletal remains) and to other institutions that had previous ownership of remains in the collection, but a shocking amount of wet specimen, ended up in containers to be destroyed or haphazardly collected from the street by private people, potentially to take on another life, now even more in the shadows and even further removed from ethical care. The date, 1995, serves as a reminder that it is not that long ago that these issues were hardly problematised at all.
Featured image: Poster for the General Art and Industry Exhibition in Stockholm 1897 (licensed CC BY-SA 4.0). While this poster from the 19th century shows a different political reality, it can be veiwed as a good illustration of the continued entanglement of the Nordic nation states.
The Ethical Entanglements project mainly focuses on collections of human remains in museums, but a significant process by which they get there today is contract archaeology. In contrast to the scientific practices that resulted in many of the older collections in museums, including ethnographic, anatomical and archaeological collections, these new additions to archaeological collections are dominated by a practice driven primarily by development (such as the constructions of roads, schools and railway stations) – where archaeology is inserted as a measure to record and document cultural heritage before the destruction of these contexts for other purposes, rather than driven purely by scientific aims. To an extent this shifts the discussion. This means that it is not the scientific practice that is the root to the excavation and collection of these remains, but development. It also makes archaeology and collection into a protective practice, rather than an exploitative one. That being said, the ethical challenges remain the same, and the field, just like with the case of museum collections, lacks a clear regulation.
Participants in the workshop (from the left): Anna Tornberg, Caroline Ahlström Arcini, Lisa Hartzell, Liv Nilsson Stutz, Hayley Mickleburgh, Ina Thegen, Niels Lynnerup, and Clara Alfsdotter.
The workshop gathered experts and colleagues working with human remains from contract archaeology contexts in Sweden and Denmark. While presenting a broad view, the different perspectives all highlighted both a concern for ethical issues and an awareness of the importance of professional ethics, and a lack of clear structures, which results in a variation in practices and decision making.
Dr. Clara Alfsdotter, osteologist at Bohuslän County Museum presented the view from a regional museum in Sweden, and highlighted how, despite the existence of guidelines and recommendations, the interpretation of these very guidelines can vary and often depends on the single museum or, even individuals. These issues were discussed around two examples. In one case there were very different views within the museum whether it would be ethical to create an exhibition on the topic of syphilis in historic times using human remains in the mueusm collectons. The other example discussed how priorities in the field could favour the documentation of architecture over human remains. This example was especially problematic as it concerned a medieval monastery, where human remains can be expected.
Charina Knutsson, archaeologist at the museum Jamtli, and graduate student at the Linnaeus University Graduate School in Contract Archaeology (GRASCA) discussed the issue from the perspective of contract archaeology in Sápmi. Her previous research, published in her licentiate thesis Conducting Archaeology in Swedish Sápmi: Policies, Implementations and Challenges in a Postcolonial Context has demonstrated the lack of consultation with the Sámi communities in contract archaeology, and this disconnect potentially also affects how human remains are treated in the process. In her presentation she discussed that museums in the region all have policies regarding the handling of human remains, but there are no special recommendations for Sámi remains. The topic is current, but also still, to an extent sensitive.
Dr. Carline Ahlström Arcini, osteologist at the contract archaeology firm Arkeologerna opened her presentation with a moving account of how childhood visits to the paediatric ward at the hospital in Norrköping where her father worked as a physician, initially drew her to the field of osteology. This presentation reminded us of the importance of compassion as a key feature of a discipline that not only allows us to come face to face with an individual of the past, but also allows us to glimpse their lived experience, including pain and illness. Her presentation discussed how different stakeholders have different voices in the Swedish context, and that the Swedish church tends to be among the most critical, while the public ususally are mostly interested in the results. Who, we might ask, are the most important stakeholdes here?
Ina Thegen presents her paper on Danish contract archaeology.
A similar concern was raised by Ina Thegen, graduate student at Aarhus University, who placed these questions in the frame of her thesis that maps and problematises the connections between the legal frameworks, practices, and stakeholders in Danish contract archaeology. She too, points to the Church as a vocal stakeholder along with the media. But she also asked us to problematise if a stakeholder is less valid only because they do not represent the majority. She also discussed how human remains are categorised as movable objects and do not have a clear caretaker within Danish archaeology per se, but rather is under the purview of other disciplines (predominantly medicine), which may create a series of ethical challenges as they are not prioritised by the contract archaeology praxis.
Dr. Niels Lynnerup, head of the Forensic Department at the University of Copenhagen which holds the vast majority of human remains collected in Denmark by contract archaeology (the second depository is at the University of Southern Denmark / Odense), spoke on behalf of this other side of the Danish equation. From the perspective of a vast experience with a range of different contexts he underscored the importance of communication with all stakeholders as a fundamental step toward ethical practice – a theme that was echoed in the other presentations as well, thus highlighting a crucial arena for progressive and constructive work.
Discussion and exploration of concepts during the workshop. All eyes on Niels Lynnerup – who is out of frame.
Dr. Anna Tornberg, osteologist at the Department of Archaeology and Ancient History at Lund University, discussed the ethical implications of the Third Science Revolution on research. Her presentation highlighted the importance of keeping an eye on how funding agency priorities and publication strategies impact the research process by imposing a top down perspective on human experience in the past. While these new methods offer a lot of possibilities, they also present new ethical challenges that we must consider.
The workshop was very dynamic and inspiring, as the different presentations offered complementary views on a very current and clear professional challenge. We left feeling that we have only started to explore these complexities and are looking forward to more exchanges of ideas and experiences in the near future.
Ethical Entanglements 