Two Skulls Used in Harvard Eugenics Studies Return to Brazil

Two human skulls, held at Harvard University for roughly 160 to 190 years and used in eugenics-era research, arrived back in Brazil on Wednesday after a four-year repatriation campaign.

One skull is believed to belong to a man who took part in Brazil's largest urban slave revolt — the 1835 uprising in Salvador, when about 600 African Muslims attempted to seize control of what was then the country's second most important city. Police defeated them and killed 70 rebels. The man died in a hospital, and a US diplomat, Gideon T Snow, is believed to have sent the skull to Boston.

The other skull was removed from Rio de Janeiro in the 1860s. Brazilian government officials said Harvard researchers told them that its size — smaller than an adult man's, larger than a child's — suggests it may have belonged to a woman. Bruno Veras, a historian who tracked the repatriation, cross-referenced diaries, letters and city maps and believes the skull came from a cemetery for newly arrived Africans who died during or just after the Atlantic crossing. The person believed to have carried it to the US was Walter Hunnewell, a wealthy Boston student on an expedition led by Harvard professor Louis Agassiz, who was documenting physical types to support his racist theories.

"To steal a skull and take it to another country was violent even in the context of racist research," Veras said.

How did the remains come home?

Each skull travelled in a padded box inside a reinforced suitcase, carried on flights by Brazilian diplomats after negotiations with Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. The skulls' existence surfaced only in 2022. Researchers say the process stalled until the Brazilian government intervened in late 2024. In recent months, observers feared diplomatic friction between Donald Trump and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva could derail the transfer. It did not.

Ceremonies in Salvador and Rio de Janeiro were, by all accounts, subdued. Ivanir dos Santos, a history professor and Candomblé cleric, poured water on the ground as researchers received the suitcase in Rio.

"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.

What does this change for Brazil?

Not identity — not yet. Who the two people were remains unknown. The Bahia Islamic Cultural Centre, which campaigned for the return, has named the Salvador man Arakunrin, "brother" in Yoruba, but that is an act of recognition, not identification. Forensic anthropologists will now measure the skulls — the Salvador skull is complete, the Rio one lacks its jaw — and run microscopic analyses to confirm sex and other details. Genetic or dating tests would require separate authorisation.

The skulls will not go on display. No images will be released. The government has pledged burial with funeral rites once identification work ends.

"It's very important to restore the dignity of these people, which was taken from them in life and in death," said Carolina Dias dos Reis, the official who signed the agreement with Harvard in Boston.

The wider stakes are harder to measure. Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, yet Afro-Brazilians, now the majority of the population, sit at the bottom of every socioeconomic indicator — hunger, poverty, gender-based violence, homicide by criminals or police.

"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," Reis said.

Diplomat Irina Feisthauer Silveira, who carried one skull, was more reserved still: "This history of slavery cannot be undone. But acknowledging the mistakes of the past with transparency is a first step towards building a more equal, just and less violent future."

Whether Harvard discloses how many other such remains it holds, the source does not say. Two returns are a fact; the full accounting is not.