The American Museum of Natural History says it is pulling all human remains from public display and will revamp how it maintains its collection of body parts with the aim of eventually repatriating as much as it can and respectfully holding what it can’t.
The skeletal remains of a nomadic warrior discovered in Outer Mongolia in 1925 are displayed before their removal from public viewing at the American Museum of Natural History, Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2023, in New York. Sean Decatur, president of the American Museum of Natural History, listens during an interview, Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2023, in New York.
The museum now holds around 12,000 sets of remains, including the bones of Indigenous people and enslaved Black people, often amassed in the 19th and 20th centuries by researchers looking to prove theories about racial superiority and inferiority through physical attributes.
The process of pulling human remains from public display will impact six of the museum’s galleries. Objects being removed include a musical instrument made from human bone, a skeleton from Mongolia that is more than a thousand years old and a Tibetan artifact that incorporates bones. In 2022, an estimated 870,000 Native American artifacts, including remains that should be returned to tribes under federal law are still in possession of colleges, museums, and other institutions across the country,Decatur said some of the remains in the museum are believed to be of five Black people whose bones were removed from a northern Manhattan burial ground during a road construction project at the start of the 1900s.
Decatur said the American Museum of Natural History’s holdings also include about 400 bodies that came from four New York medical schools in the 1940s, even though there’s no obvious process by which bodies used for medical training in anatomy should have ended up in a museum. Susan Lederer, professor of medical history and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin’s medical school, said that as the number of medical schools increased in the 19th century and dissection became an essential part of training, schools needed to find more cadavers.
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