Of Skulls and Polar Bears

It’s an unusual juxtaposition: a ceremonial artifact standing about three meters tall, crafted from colorful printed fabric banners, wooden poles and ropes, next to the green steel chamber of an iron lung. On the shelf behind these objects, you can see casts for ancient column capitals, with a massive fin whale skull positioned in the middle, spread across several pallets. “Our biggest object,” says Wibke Kolbmann, who heads up Museums & Collections at UZH.

We’re in the large object storage area of UZH’s collection center, located in Buchs in the Furttal valley of the canton of Zurich. The room brings together items from UZH’s various collections, including zoological, archaeological, ethnographic and medical artifacts, which are housed across the five floors of the building. Here, amid a metal workshop, logistics facility and former tennis hall, lie cultural treasures of national importance. “UZH’s collections are part of Switzerland’s inventory for the protection of cultural property,” says Kolbmann.  These objects have been deemed worthy of preservation and protection, not just for the university but for the nation as a whole.

Michael Krützen, head of the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, retrieves a container filled with primate skulls from one of the numerous rolling shelves in the Anthropological Collection’s storage room. Seven skulls of collared mangabey monkeys are stored inside, protected and stabilized with foam inlays. “The primate collection at the University of Zurich is one of the most significant worldwide,” he says. The collection was built up mainly starting in the 1940s, with significant contributions from Adolf Hans Schulz, who was an anthropologist and the department head at that time.

“Anthropological research used to focus on measuring and comparing skulls and bones,” Krützen explains. This approach is now considered outdated. Contemporary anthropology has shifted its focus to questions about behavior and evolutionary development. “Research has evolved beyond focusing on bones,” notes Krützen, whose own studies concentrate on dolphin behavior.

Nevertheless, he says, the collection still holds “tremendous value” for current research questions due to its scope and quality. The collection’s roughly 11,000 objects, consisting mainly of skulls and bones, document around 90 percent of all known primate species. “Building a collection like this would be impossible today,” says Krützen. The practice of shooting animals on expeditions and shipping them to zoological collections belongs to a long-gone era. Today, new specimens are occasionally provided by zoos or private collectors.

According to Krützen, the collection is a historical treasure that should be preserved. “Especially since we don’t know what kind of research will be possible in the future,” he says. Scientists can now analyze tooth enamel, for example, which provides insights into primates’ dietary habits. Research of this kind would be impossible without these collections, since there wouldn’t be any samples to analyze.

Across from the primate collection, there are gray cardboard boxes densely packed onto rolling shelves. Hidden from sight, these boxes house human remains, mainly skulls. They were used until the mid-20th century for racial research, a practice now rejected by science. “When the collection was being assembled, nobody questioned the origin of the objects,” says Krützen. Things are different today. The cultural context of the remains and how they were acquired are important considerations. The answers to these questions affect whether and how the collection can be used for research purposes.

Krützen believes that researchers must respect the cultural and religious customs and traditions of the places where the human remains originated. “When it comes to these matters, I think ethical concerns take precedence over potential scientific insights,” he says. For example, all human skulls in the collection could be digitized, making them available to researchers without requiring the presence of the physical object. “However, some cultures object to creating digital representations of human remains,” he says. “This is something we have to respect.”

Frank Rühli, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Director of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine (IEM), also considers the respectful treatment of human remains to be paramount. Nearly a decade ago, the IEM established a dedicated human remains collection, separating and re-housing thousands of human specimens from UZH’s Medical Collection.

Among these remains are skeletons, bones, medical specimens of human organs from forensic medicine and the University Hospital’s pathology department, in addition to a small number of mummies. “This collection is valuable for both teaching and research,” says Rühli. The specimens are especially useful for demonstrating examples of rare diseases or injuries. For Rühli, it’s crucial that these remains receive the same respect as patients would. He and his team have developed a code of ethics for this purpose and have also published scientific papers on the topic.

Treating these objects and specimens respectfully also involves understanding where they come from. Objects sourced from hospitals or archaeological excavations generally pose no ethical concerns. The Anthropological Collection’s shelves also include boxes marked with “Herero”. In the early 1900s, tens of thousands of Herero people died at the hands of German colonial forces in Namibia, through military retaliation and in concentration camps. This is considered to be the first genocide of the 20th century.

“The origin of these skulls is problematic,” explains Krützen. “But we have to face the past.” He champions transparency when it comes to questions of origin. The provenance of Herero skulls held in Swiss collections was the subject of a University of Basel Master’s thesis last year. The institute is currently processing requests from the Australian and New Zealand governments for the repatriation of human remains so that they can be buried in their native soil.

While it is usually possible to trace how a skull entered the collection, determining the specific region or family of the individuals, much less their identities, is nearly impossible now. “As soon as we have determined which skulls in the collection are actually from Australia, we’ll get in touch with the government about the next steps,” says Krützen. The Anthropological Collection is not the only organization confronted with questions concerning restitution, or the return of sensitive objects.  Sensitive objects refer not only to human remains, but also to sacred, ritual and ceremonial objects or burial artifacts as well as objects that may have been acquired illegally, such as stolen items.

One example of how to handle this issue can be seen in “Benin Dues”, a current exhibition at the Ethnographic Museum, which is part of the Benin Initiative Switzerland with seven other Swiss museums. Over the past three years, the museum has worked together with partners from Nigeria to investigate the provenance of the nearly one hundred objects from the Kingdom of Benin in Nigeria that are held in Swiss collections.

They found that more than half of the objects – art and cult objects made of brass, ivory and wood – definitely or very likely originate from the looting of the royal palace in 1897. This includes 14 of the 18 objects owned by the Ethnographic Museum. The willingness to comply with restitution requests is very high, curator Alexis Malefakis explained last year in an interview on the UZH website. However, the provenance of individual objects is often not entirely clear. The museum is now examining the next steps for a possible return to Nigeria.

“We should have a standardized approach across the entire university when it comes to questions about decolonization, provenance research and restitution,” says Krützen. Guidelines are currently being developed with the Conference of Institutes with Collections (KIMS) at UZH, which Krützen co-manages with Mareile Flitsch, the director of the Ethnographic Museum. “It is important for university collections to network with each other,” says Kolbmann. “Not only within UZH, but also with other universities in Switzerland and abroad.” To foster these networking connections, UZH and ETH teamed up to host the Annual Conference for University Collections this past year, held in Switzerland for the first time. In addition to facilitating discussions on restitution, digitization and outreach, the event allowed UZH to present its collections to fellow experts from other countries.

By housing the collections together in Buchs, they have not only been physically brought together but also benefit from being stored in ideal preservation conditions. “Fluctuating temperatures and moisture pose the most significant risks to collection preservation,” explains Sirpa Kurz, who prepares zoological specimens at the Natural History Museum of UZH. Both factors are continuously monitored in Buchs. The rooms containing zoological specimens are also fitted with pest traps, which undergo routine checks. These measures serve to protect the often aged and fragile objects from further deterioration.

Kurz oversees the Zoological Collection specimens, which have occupied seven rooms since this summer. Here lions, polar bears and ibexes – as well as ducks, seagulls and deep-sea fish – are lined up one after the other on long rows of rolling shelves according to their zoological classification. Too large for the shelves, a moose, a bison and two baby elephants stand together on pallets in the middle of the room.

Their previous home was an underground parking garage on Irchel Campus, where the delicate specimens spent long years in less than ideal conditions. “Before the move it was completely gray, and now it’s a real white mountain goat again,” says Kurz, gesturing towards a specimen on the shelves.  Twenty-five people spent half a year on the restoration project, cleaning moose and polar bear pelts with compressed air, wiping glass eyes, using owl feathers to remove dirt from hummingbird specimens and carefully tending to delicate fish fins with cloths, sponges and cotton swabs.

Members of the cleaning team wore protective suits and respiratory hoods while working, accessing different parts of the cleaning line through an airlock system installed in the old storage facility. “Many of our specimens are from the 19th and early 20th centuries,” notes Kurz. “Back then, preservation techniques involved using various toxic substances to prevent pest damage.” These are prohibited today. New specimens undergo cold or nitrogen treatment to eliminate pests before being added to the collection, ensuring no unwanted organisms enter the storage area.  The Buchs facility houses a nitrogen chamber where specimens undergo four to eight weeks of treatment before they are relocated to the actual storage area.

The collection center itself is not open to the public, but some of its treasures are exhibited in the university’s museums – around 1,000 zoological specimens are on display at the Natural History Museum, for instance. “In this way, the collections contribute significantly to educating the broader public about science,” says Kolbmann. Despite showing just a fraction of the university’s collections, UZH museums attracted over 200,000 visitors in 2023, proving that their appeal extends far beyond academic circles.