Bringing back the skulls

HISTORY

By CRAIG ALAN VOLKER
ALTHOUGH the German colonial period ended over 100 years ago and no one is alive today who can remember the Germans invading and controlling what is today northern PNG, the effects of this encounter can still be felt today.
Besides the Lutheran and Catholic churches that many people belong to, the plantation land that is still alienated from traditional use, and the famous Boluminski Highway that runs along New Ireland, there are memories of PNG that are kept alive through the collections of PNG art in many German museums. One of the most extensive collections is at the Uebersee Museum in the northern German city of Bremen.
During the late 1800s and early 1900s, Germans and other Europeans collected a great amount of PNG art, especially from the Sepik and New Guinea Islands regions. While some objects were sold to private collectors, much was placed in public museums, such as the Uebersee Museum. In addition to art, German scientists collected skulls and other bones to try to discover how different the people they “discovered” were from themselves. Large numbers of skulls from PNG, other Pacific islands, Australia, and Africa found their way into museum collections.
In some cases, these skulls were the trophies of colonial wars. In other cases the skulls were simply taken from cemeteries. But in many cases, especially in New Ireland, the skulls had been decorated and used for ritual purposes, and it was customary to dispose of them after the malagan or other rituals were over. Selling them to inquisitive foreigners was a way both to dispose of them and to get some of the valuable trade goods that the newcomers were introducing to their new colonies.
In recent years there has been a profound change in the way German museum curators, and the German public at large, view these collections of human remains. In the past, European racism meant that researchers viewed non-Europeans as objects of nature, worthy of study in the same way that they studied flora and fauna. But the horrible legacy of the racism of the Second World War has led most Germans to recognise the common humanity that all people share and the need to reassess whether it is ethical for them to continue holding the bones of foreign people in their museums. At the same time, representatives of formerly colonised people, especially from the former German colony of Namibia in Africa, have been very vocal in demanding that the remains of their ancestors be brought back to rest in their homelands.
With this shift in perceptions, the Uebersee Museum has begun contacting groups to repatriate human remains in the museum. This year a collection of human bones from Hawai’i were returned to Hawaiian elders in a ceremony at the museum. These bones will be buried in Hawai’i. At the ceremony, the Uebersee Museum Director, Professor Wiebke Ahrndt said, “We take responsibility for the errors of our predecessors. It is our duty to do our part to correct the injustices of the past.”

For many years the Uebersee Museum did not think that it had many human remains from Papua New Guinea. But some time ago, boxes were found that were labelled as containing skulls from East Sepik, East New Britain, and New Ireland. The skulls have had the soft flesh and brain material removed, probably by letting the body decompose several months in a grave and then digging it up. The skulls were covered with clay or wild bee wax and then decorated with lime, paint, shells, and plant material, such as coconut fibres to resemble human hair.
The museum contacted persons with connections in PNG who could help them identify the skulls and any living descendants here. One person is Dr Michael Mel, who will be helping to identify the Sepik skulls. I had previously visited the museum and the staff knew I lived in New Ireland, so I was asked to make inquiries in New Ireland to see if there was any oral history related to the skulls.
For the museum, it is important to try to identify the actual clan that they belonged to as a first step towards repatriation. Linking the skulls to specific clans is not easy. This information was not recorded by the European collectors a hundred years ago, and many times even the place of collection was not recorded, so that the skulls are simply recorded as “decorated skulls from New Ireland”. On the New Ireland side, the people at that time were nearly all illiterate, so we do not have local written records to rely on. We need to rely on oral history in the hope that some elderly person’s grandparent told them a story about white people obtaining decorated skulls and taking them away. If that story also tells us whose skull it was, or at least that person’s clan, we can start to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

While local people did not write down details about the skulls, early anthropologists and missionaries did. From them we know that the practice of decorating skulls was especially common in the Madak and Notsi areas of the central New Ireland mainland, but it also existed further north, almost all the way to Kavieng, as well as on the Tabar Islands. Decorated skulls found their way into malagan carvings in northern New Ireland and the Tabar Islands as well as in the uli ceremonies of central New Ireland. They were also used in rain-making ceremonies. We know that women’s and children’s skulls were used as well as men’s, although nearly all the skulls, even those of women and children, had coconut fibre beards to make them look masculine. We also know that in the same way that malagan carvings were burned or left to rot after their use, the skulls were also disposed of after the malagan, uli, or rain-making ceremonies, often by being thrown into the ocean. The last decorated skulls seem to have been made and used in the 1930s. After that, colonial government and missionary pressure stopped the practice.
The effort to get information about these skulls with an aim of possible repatriation to PNG has been undertaken at the initiative of the Uebersee Museum and is being funded through the German Lost Art Foundation. This effort has the full support of the German government. This is unlike some other foreign governments, such as the Japanese government, who prohibit the repatriation of human remains that are “owned” by a public museum, even to the families or clans of the deceased person.
Persons who would like to share any information about the practice of decorating skulls in New Ireland, the Sepik, or East New Britain and especially about stories of decorated skulls having been given to, or taken by, Europeans can contact me on [email protected] or at PO Box 642, Kavieng. Any information will be passed on to Dr Bettina von Briskorn, a historian at the Uebersee Museum, who is in charge of this project.