Exhibiting human remains: an issue at the intersection of ethics, museology, archaeology, and law

The exhibition of human remains represents a strongly debated and controversial subject. Scholars recognize the ethical issues that arise when displaying human remains in museums. Many have raised concerns regarding their right preservation and the respectful treatment they should receive, but also the possible reactions and feelings elicited by their display in their descendants and in the public in general. From a scientific point of view, the analysis of human skeletal remains represents a unique source of information for enhancing our understanding of histories, with both local and global implications. Human skeletal remains are generally considered part of the cultural heritage. Still, they are seldom, if ever, explicitly mentioned in European countries’ cultural heritage legislations, nor are they covered by any specific law. To try and solve some of the ethical issues raised, experts have drafted guidelines for museums professionals, both on international, national, and internal level. Nonetheless, while human remains are present in many European museums’ collections, up until now this tendency has been more an exception rather than the norm. With this research, we aimed to cover the many different perspectives related and intertwined in the understanding human remains’ exhibition in museums. This project collected information on the handling of human remains in museums with a broad geographical scope. We investigated the perspectives of both museums’ visitors and professionals through surveys and interviews, and compared the results obtained for different European countries. We also applied an ancient historical perspective to a debate that was so far mostly focused on modern and contemporary history. Doing this also meant to insert in the debate a whole category of human remains, the archaeological ones, that scholars had, up until now, left on the side, with very few exceptions. Fundamental and original results of this work are a synthetic catalogue of regulations museums and states adopt in exhibiting human remains, a first catalogue of European museums hosting human remains in their collections, and a broad investigation of museums visitors, covering European and non-European countries.