Berlin museum to return Aboriginal remains

BERLIN: A German museum said on Friday it would return the ancestral remains of indigenous Aboriginals to Australia, as European institutions face growing calls for a critical re-evaluation of their collections.

The Ethnological Museum in Berlin said it would hand back the mummified bodies of two children as well as human bones in a wooden coffin as part of commitments over the handling of human remains. It follows the return last week of the mummified heads of two face-tattooed Maori men to New Zealand from the same museum.

The Aboriginal artifacts had been in the museum’s holdings since 1880, around the time when remains of Australia’s indigenous population were sometimes removed and taken to universities and collections in Australia and around the world.