The story begins with the appointment of Maximilian Daublebsky von Sterneck as commander of the Austrian Imperial and Royal Navy in 1883, which opened a new era in which commercial and scientific endeavors became official tasks of the war fleet. The Navy institutionalized its cooperation with the Natural History Museum Vienna, whose curators wrote collecting instructions and, as the study describes them, veritable wish lists for the ships. Because hiring scientists for the voyages was too expensive, crew members with demonstrated interest and talent were tasked with collecting, and it usually fell to the ship’s physician, who possessed basic knowledge of natural sciences and physical anthropology. Through this arrangement, even Austria-Hungary, a power with little colonial success of its own, thoroughly exploited the colonial travel and trading networks built by its neighbors Germany, France and the United Kingdom.

Two corvettes anchor the study: the S.M.S. Frundsberg, which sailed to East Africa in 1884 and 1885, and the S.M.S. Saida, which traveled to South America and circumnavigated Africa in 1886 and 1887. These armed vessels, crewed by 209 and 318 men respectively, were centerpieces of power and knowledge during their voyages, bringing back botanical, zoological and mineralogical objects as well as ethnographica and human remains. Aboard the Frundsberg, physician Emmerich Billitzer received written instructions from Josef Szombathy, head of the museum’s anthropology department, to collect human remains from hospitals, prisons, execution sites and private collections, with geographic origin and ethnic affiliation recorded as precisely as possible so the remains could represent local racial types for later racial studies. The instructions emphasized quantity: if more crania and bones were present than could be taken, the best-preserved crania were to be preferred, even if fleshy parts still clung to the bone.

The archival record allows the researchers to reconstruct the collecting days almost hour by hour. On 30 November 1884, one day after the Frundsberg reached Bagamoyo in today’s Tanzania, Billitzer exhumed the remains of a person who had decayed for roughly three to four months in a palm grove, still not fully skeletonized, with a string of beads on the left lower arm and a ring, objects now held by the Weltmuseum Wien. A missionary of the Holy Ghost Fathers led him to the site. Because Nyamwezi porters, who dominated the caravan trade between the interior and the coast, camped near the mission in Bagamoyo, and because several East African societies used sacred groves as burial places, the authors conclude the palm grove was very likely a burial site from which Billitzer exhumed the remains. Later that day he collected a second calvarium and a third cranium lying freely accessible on the shore. Three years later, ship physician Stefan Paulay, who had traveled to Vienna for collecting training before his mission, gathered sixteen crania from the bushes of Bagamoyo in the same area, strengthening the suspicion that a grave site first plundered by Billitzer was revisited by Paulay. Paulay also exhumed four allegedly Sakalava crania from graves on an island near Nosy Be in Madagascar and plundered the burial goods, a collection Szombathy valued at 280 guilders.

To read violence directly from the bones, the researchers applied a non-invasive bioarchaeological framework that distinguishes three forms of harm. Interpersonal violence is assessed through healed, healing and unhealed trauma. Structural violence, following the concept introduced by Johan Galtung, refers to the systemic denial of access to essential resources by social hierarchies, colonialism among them, and is sought in non-specific physiological stress markers such as cribra orbitalia, porotic hyperostosis, caries and signs of inflammation, which correlate with malnutrition, anemia and poor health. Epistemic violence describes knowledge produced by science that harms the Other through its interpretation, and its markers include the ways crania were transformed into objects: ink inscriptions of provenance, year and collector written directly on the bone, pencil landmark points for craniometric measurements, mustard seeds used to gauge cranial volume, preservative coats, and screws attaching mandibles to calvaria.

The osteological results are sobering in their ambiguity. Of the 22 inventory numbers still present in the collection, most individuals were young adults, and 13 were estimated as female. No perimortem trauma was detected, and only two cases of possible antemortem trauma emerged: a healed depression fracture on the right frontal bone of one individual and a healed or actively perforating blunt force wound on the frontal bone of another, both of which might indicate interpersonal violence but could also be accidental. Notably, this reassessment overturned earlier findings: a 2010 analysis had attributed perimortem trauma to six individuals, including one suspected trepanation and two cases of post-mortem disarticulation, all of which were reclassified as pathological origins or non-metric traits. The frequency of severe pathological markers also proved lower than previously recorded, underscoring how observer-dependent macroscopic estimation can be.

The taphonomic assessment, entirely absent from earlier research, revealed the museum’s own fingerprints. Of 101 recorded alterations, the majority were caused by curators, followed by written applications and environmental changes. The most common alteration was ink notes applied to the bone surface, mostly the left parietal, while preservative coats and paper notes in the boxes followed. Seven identical notes document when an individual was removed from and returned to the depot, proving that crania were displayed in the department’s permanent exhibition between 1977 and 1997, an educational display organized around a hierarchical racial characterization of humanity that was finally closed and re-evaluated in the late 1990s after a major public debate. One cranium showed such pronounced weathering, together with the absence of a mandible and non-pathological porosities, that the authors suggest it had tumbled across an abrasive surface such as sand for a long period, a phenomenon known as a tumbleweed cranium.

The study also confronts the ethical weight of multiple, sometimes contradictory datasets. Sex and age-at-death estimations exist in three sources: the museum’s inventory catalogue, the first scientific description by Viennese physician Augustin Weisbach in 1889, and the 2010 thesis, and the new analysis produced considerable differences from some of these. Because such estimations are not absolute facts but adjustments to predefined categories shaped by Western ways of thinking, the authors argue they must be handled within what Zuckerman and colleagues have called relational ethics for bioarchaeology, which stresses the second layer of agency human remains acquire through the individual stories told by their data. The authors acknowledge that their own work may itself represent a form of epistemic violence and therefore chose not to publish images of the remains, and they openly invite representatives of the Nyamwezi and Sakalava communities into the conversation, since no local affiliated communities were involved in the research.

Ultimately, the study demonstrates that markers of violence can be found at both the collecting and the curating stages of a collection’s life, even if the osteological record offers only non-specific clues, while the archival record describes circumstances of structural violence with striking clarity. Numbering the individuals, the authors note, removed them from their individual presence and made them objects of knowledge, a transition from human persons to specimens that the training voyages of the Kriegsmarine exemplify. Although Austria may not have acted as a colonial power in the conventional sense, its collecting enterprises made it a clear beneficiary of the global colonial situation, and the continued existence of such osteological collections perpetuates colonial and racial stereotypes even when restitutions occur. Acknowledging the circumstances that created and named these collections, the researchers conclude, is essential for making informed decisions about future collection management, particularly because the remains remain valuable scientific resources for reconstructing the lives and histories of past populations.

Subject of Research: Colonial-era violence in the formation and curation of an osteological museum collection from Tanzania and Madagascar

Article Title: Ships and Bones: Violence contributing to and consisting in osteological museum collections

Article References: Schattke, C., Wolf, D., Berner, M., & Eggers, S. (2026). Ships and Bones: Violence contributing to and consisting in osteological museum collections. Annals of the Natural History Museum Vienna, 127, 85-94. https://doi.org/10.3897/anhmw.182645

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/anhmw.182645

Keywords: osteology, bioarchaeology, colonialism, human remains, museum collections, Austro-Hungarian Navy, Tanzania, Madagascar, structural violence, epistemic violence, provenance research, provenance