Harvard returns two skulls believed to belong to enslaved people to Brazil

Remains will be buried with funeral rites once identification is complete

Two skulls believed to have belonged to Africans or Afro-Brazilians enslaved in Brazil were returned to the country on Wednesday, ending a four-year campaign to recover the remains from Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, where they had been used in racist eugenics studies. Brazilian diplomats flew the skulls home in padded boxes packed inside a reinforced suitcase, and the remains were welcomed back in subdued ceremonies in Salvador and Rio de Janeiro.

The skulls had been outside Brazil since the 19th century — one taken about 190 years ago from Salvador, the capital of the state of Bahia, and the other about 160 years ago from Rio de Janeiro. Their return lands in the country that received more enslaved Africans than any other during the transatlantic slave trade, and the Brazilian government has pledged that the remains will now be buried with funeral rites as soon as an identification process is complete.

The existence of the skulls was revealed in 2022, and Brazilian researchers sought their return from Harvard but said they faced a drawn-out process that moved forward only after the Brazilian government became involved in late 2024. In recent months, concerns grew that Trump’s conduct toward his Brazilian counterpart, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, could derail the repatriation. The handover nonetheless went ahead.

Carolina Dias dos Reis, a Brazilian government official who travelled to Boston to sign the agreement with Harvard, said restoring the individuals’ dignity was central to the return. “It’s very important to restore the dignity of these people, which was taken from them in life and in death,” she said. “We need to recover our past as a country, however difficult and violent it was, so that we can understand what we are living through in the present: the consequences and scars of structural racism,” she added.

Slavery was abolished in Brazil in 1888, but nearly a century and a half later Afro-Brazilians make up the majority of the population while occupying the bottom of every socioeconomic indicator, dominating the statistics on hunger, poverty, gender-based violence and victims of homicides committed by criminals or the police.

At the handover ceremony at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, Ivanir dos Santos, a history professor and a cleric of the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé, poured a glass of water on to the ground as researchers received the suitcase. “It was a ritual act because you cannot deal with the remains of our ancestors without paying reverence to them. This is not a research object … for us, that person is still alive in memory and as our ancestor,” he said.

It is not precisely known who either individual was. The skull taken to Salvador is believed to have belonged to a man who took part in the most significant urban slave revolt in Brazilian history, an 1835 uprising in which about 600 African Muslims attempted to seize control of Salvador, then the country’s second most important city. Police defeated the rebels, killing 70 of them. The man died at a hospital, and a US diplomat, Gideon T Snow, is believed to have sent his skull to Boston. The Bahia Islamic Cultural Centre, one of the most active campaigners for the skull’s return, has named the man Arakunrin, meaning brother in Yoruba.

Even less is known about the second person, whose skull was initially recorded only as “an individual … exhumed from the ‘streets of Rio de Janeiro’” in the 1860s. Brazilian government officials said on Wednesday that Harvard researchers had told them some features of the skull — including that it was smaller than that of an adult man but larger than that of a child — suggested it may have belonged to a woman.

The person believed to have taken the skull to the United States was Walter Hunnewell, a student from a wealthy Boston family who took part in an expedition led by the Harvard professor Louis Agassiz, who was in Brazil trying to document physical types to support his racist theories. Bruno Veras, a historian who was part of the group that closely followed the repatriation, cross-referenced diaries, letters and maps of the city and believes the skull may have been taken from a cemetery for newly arrived Africans who either did not survive the long Atlantic crossing or died soon after disembarking. “To steal a skull and take it to another country was violent even in the context of racist research,” Veras said.

Researchers in forensic anthropology at local universities will now try to confirm the sex of the individuals and other information through measurements of the skulls — the skull in Salvador is complete, while the one in Rio is missing its jaw — and microscopic analyses. If necessary, they will seek authorisation to carry out genetic or dating tests. The skulls will not be displayed in museums or have their images released.

“This history of slavery cannot be undone,” said Irina Feisthauer Silveira, a diplomat who carried one of the skulls. “But acknowledging the mistakes of the past with transparency is a first step towards building a more equal, just and less violent future.”