10/11/2023 0 Comments Skulls and bonesStefansson in particular wanted to study local teeth he'd heard Icelanders never got cavities because of their fish-based diet. While Danish law in 1905 did not allow grave robbing in their colony of Iceland, Stefánsson secured permission from a local minister to collect skulls “disinterred by the sea.”įor Harvard, with its growing eugenics collection, Iceland was a time capsule for the Nordic “golden age.” It had been settled and subsequently cut off from Europe, preserving its "perfect" people in isolation. But will the skulls remain in Cambridge, Massachusetts, separated by the Atlantic and decades of twisting history? ‘Prime harvest’ or ‘shameful act’?įorty years before Iceland’s first archaeologists arrived to dig on Haffjarðarey, the young anthropologist Vilhjálmur Stefánsson led a Harvard expedition to the island. It’s not only good science, archaeologists argue, but also the morally and ethically right thing to do. Now, there’s interest by researchers in both Iceland and the U.S. to reunite Harvard’s skulls from Haffjarðarey with the rest of their bodies, located today at the National Museum of Iceland in Reykjavik. Those missing skulls sit today in cardboard boxes on steel storage shelves in Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, where they were once an addition to the university’s eugenics pursuits, representing the supposedly “pure” Nordic Icelandic race among the museum’s vast collection of human remains.Īre museums celebrating cultural heritage-or clinging to stolen treasure?
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