Canaries mummy coming home after 200 years

[RedGlitter]

Friday, August 18, 2006

MADRID, Spain (Reuters) -- A Madrid museum is set to return a centuries-old mummy to the Canary Islands, adding impetus to an international trend for human remains to be handed back to their countries of origin.

A Spanish Senate committee wants Madrid's Anthropology Museum to return remains of a member of the Canaries' aboriginal Guanche people which arrived in mainland Spain in the 1700s, said Rafael Gonzalez, of Tenerife's Museum of Nature and Man.

The transfer now has to be approved by Spain's parliament.

There has been a growing demand from around the world for the return of human remains collected by museums during the heyday of Western colonial empires.

Gonzalez, the Tenerife museum's head of archaeology, was not sure when the Madrid mummy would return. But he told Reuters he wants the Canary Islands to recover all remains of the Guanches -- a people related to North African Berbers who were conquered by Spaniards in the 15th century.

"We want mummified remains of indigenous Canary people to come home. We don't care about archaeological artefacts, but the people who created the culture should be here," Gonzalez said.

The Guanches mummified important personages and the Madrid remains, dating from before the Spanish conquest, are now on display in a glass case.

An Argentine museum returned two Guanche mummies in 2003, and Gonzalez said he would like a museum in Manchester, England, to send back another.

It was not immediately possible to obtain a comment from Manchester Museum, but its former director said there was a trend to negotiate the return of remains with groups who can demonstrate some ancestral or cultural link.

"There's been a growing awareness that, of the materials that are held in museums, human remains occupy a very specific moral category," said Tristam Besterman, director of Manchester Museum from 1994-2004.

Museums in Argentina, Britain and the Netherlands have all agreed to New Zealand requests to return tattooed Maori heads. Sent in chests marked "this way up", they have been formally welcomed by wailing women and men blowing on conch shells.

One of the biggest collections of remains are Egyptian mummies, held in collections in many parts of the world. But so far, the Egyptians have not asked for them back.

"Their own vaults are full of them," said Besterman.