More about the project “Human Remains from Colonial Contexts”

Between 2024 and 2025, this research project investigated the provenance of human remains from colonial contexts held at MARKK – Museum am Rothenbaum: Cultures and Arts of the World in Hamburg and in two anthropological collections of the University of Göttingen. The project was funded by the German Lost Art Foundation.

One focus of the research was the so-called “Anthropological Collection”, which was assembled at the former Museum of Ethnology in Hamburg, now MARKK, between the 1880s and the 1930s and was transferred, though not in its entirety, to the University of Göttingen during the 1950s and 1960s.

More recently, skulls and skeletal remains were rediscovered at MARKK, 57 of which are currently believed to originate from colonial contexts. In some cases, particularly sensitive situations were identified in which a person’s skull and other skeletal remains are divided between the two institutions.

The ancestral remains identified at MARKK have been provisionally assigned to present-day countries in Africa and Oceania, including:

• Papua New Guinea
• Tanzania
• Federated States of Micronesia
• Solomon Islands
• Samoa
• Cameroon

Furthermore, the collection of skulls founded by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) was included in the research. The collection is now part of the Centre for Anatomy at the University Medical Centre Göttingen (UMG).

The collection comprises approximately 840 skulls, including 31 from Australia that entered the collection between 1793 and 1934 and for which a formal repatriation request has been submitted by Australia.

Both anthropological collections contain ancestral remains from various colonial contexts, regions and time periods. When deciding which collections of origin should be examined first, priority was given to collections for which repatriation requests had already been received or were expected, particularly from Australia, Palau and Namibia.

As the anthropological collection had been transferred over time from the Hamburg Museum to the University of Göttingen, both institutions share a joint responsibility for provenance research and towards the communities of origin. The project was therefore set up as a collaborative project. It also examined the circumstances under which the collection had been transferred from the former Museum of Ethnology in Hamburg to the University of Göttingen.

At the conclusion of the project, an international workshop brought together experts from the countries of origin to discuss the research findings. The results were published in a research report on the websites of MARKK and the University of Göttingen, and were incorporated into the special exhibition “Finding out: unjustly collected?” at the Forum Wissen.

Project Management and Co-ordination

Project Manager: Dr Holger Stoecker, University of Göttingen
Project Coordinator: Annika Dörner, University of Göttingen

Other project participants

• Birgit Großkopf
• Katharina Stötzel
• Emily Behlert
• Leonie Koch
• Tato Portia Rathokane

Workshop

• Uncovering Colonial Collections, Enabling Reconnection. Provenance Research and Repatriation of Ancestral Remains
24–25 September 2025
View the workshop flyer (PDF)