This book book considers how these issues relate to collections of Indigenous skeletal remains, but also their resonance with emerging concerns about the relatively unknown history of scientific interest in Indigenous hair and blood samples. also explores the more recent practice of sampling for the purposes of DNA analysis, and issues concerning the data that has been produced from all of the above types of research. enables discourses of identity and scientific authority, an assessment their efficacy, and an exploration of ethical and practical challenges and opportunities by placing recent interest in applying scientific techniques to repatriation in their historical context. this book reveals new histories about scientific interest in Indigenous biology and the collections that resulted, as well as providing reflection for all repatriation practitioners considering scientific investigation when faced with the challenges inherent in the repatriation of unprovenanced or poorly provenanced Ancestral Remains. is an invaluable resource for researchers and professionals working with Indigenous Ancestral Remains.

In 1873 the German naturalist A.B. Meyer spent five months in New Guinea. He had expected "bloodthirsty and untamed savages" and was amazed to find "men of milder customs". His compatriot Otto Finsch returned from a voyage through Hawaii, Micronesia, New Zealand and Torres Strait declaring Germany's most respected anthropologists wrong. Human races could not be neatly distinguished: they "merge into one another to such an extent that the difference between Europeans and Papuans becomes completely unimportant". This richly interdisciplinary book explores the transformative impacts of personal encounters in Oceania on understandings of human difference, and illuminates the difficult relationship between field experience and metropolitan science in late nineteenth-century Europe.