How Arthur Baessler stole human remains from New Zealand

Abstract

In April 2019, ancestral remains of 109 individuals from several Berlin collections were repatriated to Aotearoa / New Zealand. This followed a request by the National Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa from 2010, addressed to the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, custodian of these collections at the time. The handover was preceded by our interdisciplinary and collaborative provenance research. The main goal of this research was to confirm that the remains in question were really from New Zealand, but also to shed more light on the context of acquisition. This article focuses on Berlin collector Arthur Baessler (1859–1907) who had acquired the majority of these remains when travelling to New Zealand in 1896/1897. We combine historical and anthropological investigation to clarify the provenance of the remains and to show how European collectors used the specific conditions in the colonies to collect the remains of Indigenous peoples. Our results are meant to support further research: more generally, when our findings on Baessler may be linked with other comparable collection activities in Germany and/or in the Pacific region, and more specifically to enable more local research in New Zealand to establish the right place and people for the remains to return to.

[Human Remains, New Zealand, Baessler, Provenance, Restitution]