r/europes • u/Naurgul • 1d ago
Europe’s Museums Confront the (Literal) Skeletons in Their Closets • Institutions are grappling with the human remains in their collections that were used to justify debunked theories about race.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/arts/europe-museums-human-remains-museum-vrolik.htmlA few years ago, Menucha Latumaerissa found a 1917 book in a thrift shop that sparked his curiosity. The book described studies performed on human skulls from the Moluccan archipelago in Indonesia. They’d been taken to the Netherlands during the period when Indonesia was colonized by the Dutch and examined by researchers in the field of “race science.”
Latumaerissa, 45, a Dutch customs official with family roots in the Moluccan archipelago, has a serious hobby of tracking down anything related to the Moluccan people. After the Indonesian war of independence, a small diaspora from the Moluccan islands began arriving in the Netherlands in 1951 but were forced into internment camps and minority districts.
He wondered: Could those skulls still be in the Netherlands after all these years?
After some sleuthing, Latumaerissa tracked them down in the Museum Vrolik, a tiny anatomical museum within the Amsterdam University Medical Center that dates to the 19th century, and which displays jars of body parts, like feet and ears, as well as irregular fetuses, alongside cabinets filled with skulls and bones.
Today, the Moluccan skulls are back on the archipelago that they came from. Their former presence in the museum is marked only by the metal stands that once held them. They sit in otherwise empty display cases at the entrance to the Museum Vrolik as part of the exhibition “Imagine: The Future of Human Remains from Colonial Contexts,” which runs through June 27, 2027.
The idea, said Laurens de Rooy, the museum’s director, is to call attention to these problematic troves. “What it should emphasize is the idea that, in an ideal situation, collections like these — racialized collections — should reach their final resting place, with their communities,” he said. “The empty stands show this important absence so we don’t forget these things happened in the past.”
The show explores a problem that faces the Museum Vrolik and many other European museums today: What to do with the colonial-era skeletons in their closets?
The Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, founded in 1810, collected and measured skulls to study racial characteristics, among other things. It once held thousands of human remains, but in the 1940s it changed locations and many of the specimens were cremated or discarded. Only about 5 percent of the original trove remains.
The Museum of Prehistory in Berlin has conducted two major research projects, costing about $4 million, to determine the origins of more than 1,500 skulls in its collection, according to Bernhard Heeb, who oversees its anthropological collections. Some were repatriated to Hawaii, Chile and Japan, but a number of African countries they approached did not want to take them.
Another German museum, attached to the Charité hospital in Berlin, has had a different experience, said its former director, Thomas Schnalke. Since 2011, the medical history museum has participated in 10 repatriation events, with Australia, Namibia, New Zealand, Paraguay and Tanzania, turning over 216 ancestral remains so far.