MEETING THEM: essays and invocations about human remains in a university collection

Abstract

How can you meet somebody you know nothing about? Provenance projects regarding human remains (bones, tissues, and alike) hope to tell the stories of those silent faculty members "stored" in department collections. After writing pages upon pages of scientifically concise and neutral case reports, I decided that I may as well throw them away. Who would want to read this besides experts who are already in the field and those seeking specific information about human remains in the collection? Even worse - does a dry scientific report even reflect what provenance research with human remains really entails? Were my heartfelt, personal reflections and even tears shed while working with those human remains merely byproducts, or actually valuable facilitators of my research? I banished the dry scientific report to my archives for the time being and started over by writing a poem. This book draws from experiences I made while working at a Berlin university’s collection. Next to scientific essays and real provenance cases, each chapter includes personal anecdotes, poems and hand-drawn illustrations to introduce key topics of provenance research.