Human remains from Palau return home

Ceremony for the restitution of human remains to Palau on 25. Photo: Uni Göttingen / Peter Heller University of Göttingen and State Ethnographic Collections of Saxony hand over human remains from collections to Palau In a formal ceremony on Monday 25 March, the University of Göttingen will hand over the ancestral human remains to Palau. Human remains from Palau that are currently still in the State Ethnographic Collections of Saxony in Leipzig will also be returned: a skull, a plaster cast of a skull and a sample of hair. The delegation from Palau entering the hall Photo: Uni Göttingen / Peter Heller There are two collections at the University of Göttingen that still contain a large number of sacred human remains from former German and other European colonies, including Palau. The Republic of Palau, an island archipelago located in the westernmost Pacific Ocean were colonised by the German Empire in 1899. The human remains taken from Palau were acquired in the course of the -Hamburg South Seas Expedition- (1908 to 1910) of the then Museum of Ethnology in Hamburg. Ethnologist Paul Hambruch travelled to the Palau archipelago as a member of the expedition in 1909 and, as documented in his diary entries, collected several human remains.