Campaigners for ending the public display and sale of human remains will be encouraged by this month’s news from the DCMS that it plans to review its Guidance for the Care of Human Remains in Museums.

In a written statement to parliament on 16 September, Ruth Mackenzie, arts minister at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) wrote: “Since we first issued the guidance over twenty years ago, the legal, ethical, and moral conversations regarding the treatment and care of human remains in museum collections have evolved significantly.”

The announcement represents an important shift by the UK Government. It suggests it may be prepared to recognise that national standards in museums need to keep pace with contemporary best practice.

News of two major museum initiatives announced at the same time as this Government announcement, each involving the display and return of ancestral remains, could provide important direction and learning to the proposed reviewing committee.

The first involves the Egyptian mummy of Asru, a temple musician who died probably around 650 BCE now held in the collection of the Manchester Museum. Last year a public consultation was launched where visitors to the Museum were invited to vote on whether the unwrapped body of a woman named Asru should remain on public exhibition.

At this time, the Museum told us they were keen to rethink “how we care for those who have been entrusted to us and how we share their stories with respect and sensitivity.” The Museum has also considered the views of Egyptian colleagues and the Egyptian diaspora. As a result of a wide programme of consultation, the Museum has announced this month that Asru’s remains will be removed permanently from public display.

The Museum has offered another intriguing justification for their decision. They believe it also “aligns most closely with what we understand about [Asru’s] own wishes.” People of her status would have expected their mummified bodies to remain wrapped in their coffins and invisible to the living.

For the moment, Asru’s body has been removed to the Museum’s stores. There her privacy can be secured, sealed within her outer coffin. In the meantime, the Museum will take steps to consider whether a more suitable resting place might exist, or even whether a return to her community of origin is more appropriate.

Her disappearance from Manchester Museum’s Egypt and Sudan Gallery marks the end of two centuries of her public exhibition.

Collaboration with the source community was the principal driving force for the second museum initiative this month concerning the future of human remains in a UK public collection. The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford has arrived at an agreement to return the remains of thirty-nine Naga ancestors to Nagaland, a community in northeast India.

In 2020 the Museum announced a commitment to remove all its human remains from public exhibition. These included 219 items listed as Naga human remains collected over a century ago by John Henry Hutton, a colonial administrator and anthropologist in the Indian Civil Service and a second anthropologist and administrator James Philip Mills.

The announcement triggered an approach by the Naga anthropologist Professor Dolly Kikon who sought to connect the Pitt Rivers with the Naga Nation in order to work towards a process of healing.

There followed six years of collaboration with Naga partners, involving the Forum for Naga Reconciliation (FNR) and its Recover, Restore and Decolonise (RRaD) team, along with tribal elders, churches and communities across the Naga homeland. The process culminated in a ground-breaking visit by a Naga delegation to Oxford in June last year. More significantly, it also marked the first phase of a process towards repatriation, including giving delegates access to their ancestors for the first time since their removal from display.

The extent of collaboration between both parties was made clear at the close of their visit by the presentation of The Naga-Oxford Declaration on Repatriation. Described as a unanimous, intertribal statement, made in a united voice by the tribe Hohos with the FNR and RRaD, the nine tribal leaders declared: “We are sorry that it has taken us several decades but we are here now to reclaim and return you to the homelands where you were taken.”

In July this year a formal claim for the repatriation of 39 ancestral human remains was agreed by the University of Oxford Council, expressing the hope that work on bringing the ancestors home could now begin. A date for their repatriation is still to be agreed.

Community engagement, collaboration, respect and and sensitivity have become crucial elements of contemporary museum best practice in the care and treatment of human remains. Hopefully this new review, chaired by crossbench peer Sue Black, a forensic anthropologist and president of St John's College, Oxford and  expected to take 12 months to complete, will help national collections deliver the same respectful results where Manchester and Oxford are leading.

Photo: Manchester Museum’s Egypt and Sudan Gallery