PENN MUSEUM TO CEASE EXHIBITING HUMAN REMAINS
The Penn Museum (formerly known as the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology) has revealed that it has updated its policy regarding the treatment of relics, in accordance with which it will no longer exhibit visible human tissue. Wrapped mummified remains inside vessels may still be placed on view; these will be accompanied by warning signs. The museum will use replicas of human remains in its exhibitions and in all but its most advanced educational courses, in which the real thing may still appear.
“It’s about prioritizing human dignity and the wishes of descendant communities,” Penn Museum director Christopher Woods told regional Pennsylvania news service WHYY News. “We want to make sure that these are our front and center of how the museum operates.”
The revamped policy is part of a larger global reckoning regarding the handling by institutions of human remains, many of which can be traced to Indigenous civilizations or enslaved populations. The Penn Museum in recent years has faced criticism over its Morton Crania Collection, a group of skulls that were once the property of nineteenth-century physician Samuel George Morton, whose racist theories regarding intellect crucially influenced twentieth-century eugenics. The skulls are thought to have belonged to enslaved Philadelphians; the museum has apologized for the collection, and the bones are slated to be interred at the city’s historically Black Eden Cemetery, pending court approval.
The Penn Museum had earlier sparked a firestorm with its handling of a set of remains recovered at the site of the 1985 MOVE rowhouse bombing in West Philadelphia. Identified as likely belonging to a fourteen-year-old girl killed in the blast, the bones remained in the institution’s collection for years and were featured in online classes. An independent review found the museum guilty of “gross insensitivity.”
