Don’t Bury the Bones

On May 5, the largest collection of Aboriginal remains will be officially handed over to Australia’s Ngarrindjeri people – including remains recently returned from the Royal College of Surgeons in London and Edinburgh University. Since 2001, a working group in the UK has met to decide the future of old bones in British cultural and scientific institutions. While the focus of repatriation is on moral and sacred grounds, Tiffany Jenkins, director of Arts and Society at the Institute of Ideas, argues that valuable information about humanity could risk being lost.