Open debate: the Museu d’Arqueologia de Catalunya (MAC) has preserved the skeletons of two Vietnamese since the 1970s, acquired for museography and comparative bone studies. The two bodies apparently come from the Vietnam War and were bought in an international circuit that operated at the time, according to the memory that has remained at the institution. The MAC is tracing the old archives of the Diputació de Barcelona – at that time the owner of the museum – in search of documentation that supports this memory. For now, there is a note in the 1974 report that says: “In order to improve the practical exercises, a complete skeleton, some sectioned skulls and a disassembled skull with all its components have been acquired.” Is it one of those corpses?
The museum wants to collect all the information on the matter in order to come up with some kind of repair or dignified exit for the two skeletons, which have been used in the rooms of the MAC until recent dates.
Today they are removed in boxes to the paleopathology laboratory, awaiting a decision.
The director of the institution, Jusèp Boya, has opened a museum and ethical debate about his collection, which logically contains numerous human remains, and with this task the difficult question of the two Vietnamese has appeared.
One certainly belongs to a woman and is armed with irons that allowed it to be held upright, for studies or exhibitions, although it is now in storage, broken into parts.
The other is possibly a man, according to the estimates of Núria Armentano, professor of Biological Anthropology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and member of the Spanish Association of Forensic Anthropology and Odontology. As a MAC anthropologist, this debate pivots on her.
“The museum must do this work. It has identified a problem and is addressing it, in order to be a more ethical museum, with a vision of the 21st century. We want to open our own way, a Catalan way, which we will offer to the rest of the country’s museums, to walk this path together”, says Boya.
“Perhaps it will be necessary to think about a repatriation of these corpses or some kind of reparation”, says Boya.
Given the origin – a purchase – and the use that has been given to them, the two skeletons are not part of the museum’s inventory; if that were the case, and by law, they could not be the object of donation or destruction. “This makes it easier to find a way out,” says the director.
The museum could apply the measure it used at the end of last year with a controversial corpse it kept: the mummified remains of a little girl that had been kept in storage, apparently, since the 1960s.
The girl, anonymous, had then died at the Josep Trueta hospital in Girona due to hydrocephalus. A doctor from that hospital knew that the eminent doctor Domènec Campillo, with anthropology duties at the MAC, was studying the same disease in human remains found in medieval excavations and sent him the corpse from Girona; his family had not claimed him to give him a burial. Since then, that girl has been in warehouses in Barcelona.
For this reason, Boya contacted Cementiris de Barcelona and they agreed to give it a name. They called her Estel and on November 21 she was buried in the Montjuïc cemetery in a simple ceremony.
The line of debate opened by Boya is unprecedented so far in Spain: can human remains be exhibited or used in museums and their exhibition halls? How old? What to do with these human remains?
For now, the MAC has created a “bioethics working group” which has already held a meeting with museum directors and curators from the various headquarters.
“We want a more ethical museum, and with respect for the cultures that have bequeathed us human remains. In our museum we only have problems with two or three remains, but they do not come from excavations but from a practice that was common in many institutions, and from a market that was legal”, says Boya.
“We have to adapt to the international reality of our environment”, he adds.
The institution is already organizing for September or October, under the coordination of Armentano, some working days on this issue, to which it is planned to invite experts in international bioethics and museography.
Great Britain has years of advantage in this area, with debates encouraged by the Government for about twenty years.
The British have put a kind of indicative time barrier at one hundred years, and since 2019 there has been a lively debate about the removal of human remains from museum display cases. They do not exhibit remains of those who died less than a century ago, although the proximity and the cultural and religious contexts of each specific case must be taken into account.
“As a curator and osteologist, I consider it a privilege to be able to learn from the skeletal remains of people from the past,” explains Jelena Bekvalac, curator of human osteology at the Museum of London, “and when museum visitors see these remains, I think that there is also that feeling of experiencing and interacting with the past in an extraordinary way”. However, he adds, “the display of human remains must be carefully considered before they are made and, if they are displayed, they must be displayed only if their inclusion adds to the narrative of the ‘exposure and not simply exhibiting oneself in a lascivious manner. If there are human remains on display in a museum gallery, there must be notices to inform visitors in time.”
“The public has a right to the knowledge that human remains provide, it can be very valuable. We have to think about what it brings us and think carefully about how we display them and with which alerts or warnings. And, beforehand, take into account whether the exhibition offends anyone or whether someone has claimed the remains. But in any case, we have to go case-by-case”, says Nicholas Márquez-Grant, assistant professor in Forensic Anthropology at the British Cranfield University and expert in the field.
In Spain, heated debates have arisen regarding the Civil War graves, given the family proximity and time. There are excavation works that were paralyzed by the trauma it involved in some families. In these cases, “what do we do? Shall we show the leftovers? The same has happened in the countries that suffered the two world wars, and there the museums have had an exhibition challenge: to explain the war without the dead. With uniforms, gloves… With creativity,” says Armentano.
The MAC has a “star” element in the Iberian skulls pierced by Ullastret keys. “I am in favor of showing them”, defends Boya. “Without a doubt, in this debate there is an economic and commercial component, they often have appeal among the public, and a museum must take this into account, at the very least”, suggests Armentano. “But we must also take into account that today we are multicultural, with different sensibilities, and while the Mediterranean tradition tolerates the display of corpses in display cases, this is not the case among Jews or Muslims.”
That is why many museums already warn visitors that certain pieces of the exhibition may offend sensibilities. “There is a lot of talk about respect: towards the dead? And respect for the visitor and knowledge? The debate is very rich”, questions the anthropologist.
The aim of the Museum of Archeology of Catalonia is to prepare a guide or protocol that cultural institutions can use in these cases. “But a law is also not a 100 percent useful tool”, continues the anthropologist, “because, as happens for example with the abortion law, very deep questions of conscience appear”.
