Harvard Returns Two Skulls Taken from Enslaved People in Brazil — After 190 Years and a Four-Year Diplomatic Campaign

Two skulls believed to belong to enslaved Africans or Afro-Brazilians were repatriated from Harvard's Peabody Museum after a four-year campaign. The remains were used in 19th-century eugenics research.

Two skulls, one taken from Salvador roughly 190 years ago and another from Rio de Janeiro about 160 years ago, were returned to Brazil on Wednesday after spending more than a century at Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Both are believed to have belonged to enslaved Africans or Afro-Brazilians in the country that received more enslaved Africans than any other during the transatlantic slave trade. The repatriation required a four-year campaign by Brazilian researchers and ultimately direct intervention by the Brazilian government, which became involved in late 2024.

The Salvador skull is believed to have belonged to a man who participated in the 1835 Malê Revolt, the most significant urban slave revolt in Brazilian history, when roughly 600 African Muslims attempted to seize control of what was then the country's second most important city. He died in a hospital after the revolt was crushed and 70 rebels killed. A US diplomat, Gideon T. Snow, is believed to have sent his skull to Boston. The Bahia Islamic Cultural Centre, which actively campaigned for repatriation, named the man Arakunrin — meaning brother in Yoruba. The Rio de Janeiro skull was taken in the 1860s by Walter Hunnewell, a student from a wealthy Boston family, during an expedition led by Harvard professor Louis Agassiz, who traveled to Brazil to document physical types in support of his racist theories. Harvard researchers have indicated some features suggest the skull may have belonged to a woman. Historian Bruno Veras, cross-referencing diaries, letters, and maps, believes it may have been exhumed from a cemetery for newly arrived Africans who did not survive the Atlantic crossing or died shortly after landing. The existence of the skulls was revealed in 2022, and Brazilian researchers immediately sought repatriation. They described a drawn-out process at Harvard that only accelerated once the Brazilian government applied diplomatic pressure. Concerns that friction between the Trump and Lula administrations might derail negotiations proved unfounded. Brazilian diplomats physically carried the skulls on flights back to Salvador and Rio de Janeiro in padded boxes inside reinforced suitcases. Both ceremonies were deliberately subdued. In Rio, Ivanir dos Santos, a history professor and Candomblé cleric, poured water on the ground as the suitcase was received — a ritual act of reverence. The skulls will not be displayed in museums or have their images released. Brazilian forensic anthropologists will attempt to confirm sex and other identifying information through measurements and microscopic analysis, with possible genetic or dating tests if authorized. The government has pledged funeral rites once identification is complete. The structural context is stark. Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, but Afro-Brazilians — now the majority of the population — remain at the bottom of every socioeconomic indicator, dominating statistics on hunger, poverty, gender-based violence, and homicide. The extraction didn't end with abolition; it evolved. The skulls themselves are artifacts of a specific extractive chain: bodies taken in life through slavery, taken again in death through grave-robbing, and repurposed as raw material for pseudoscientific theories designed to justify the original extraction. "To steal a skull and take it to another country was violent even in the context of racist research," said historian Bruno Veras. The repatriation is a material act of restitution — limited, delayed by nearly two centuries, but concrete. It surfaces the question Western institutions increasingly cannot avoid: what was collected, by whom, under what conditions, and what obligation follows from the answer.