The centuries-old history of the island of Haffjardarey, where the dead were buried separately from the bodies for four centuries until 1600 , has taken an important place in the cultural memory of Iceland. However, over time, relentless waves and rising sea levels began to expose the bones, washing them out of the island's graveyard.
In 1945, this cemetery became the object of the first emergency archaeological mission of the newly formed Republic of Iceland. The challenge was to find and examine the remains of the medieval inhabitants of Iceland , buried on Haffjardarey, before their remains were swept away by the wave. The mission was successful for the most part, but there was a problem: most of the skeletons found were without skulls.
The remains of a decapitated man, excavated from the Haffjardarey cemetery in 1945, are carefully packaged at the National Museum of Iceland in Reykjavík.
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The missing skulls are today in cardboard boxes on steel storage shelves at Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology. They once became part of the museum's eugenics research collection and represent, according to scientists, a "pure" Nordic race among a wide collection of human remains.
For Harvard, with its growing collection of eugenics, Iceland was like a time capsule for the "golden age" of the Scandinavian race. It was inhabited and subsequently cut off from Europe, keeping its "ideal" people in isolation.
View of the former medieval cemetery on the island in an undated photograph.A study by University of Buffalo anthropologist Sarah Hoffman found Haffjardarey to be one of the largest medieval-era archaeological sites in Iceland.
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Wilhelm Stefansson, in particular, wanted to study local teeth; he heard that the Icelanders never suffered from tooth decay because of their fish diet.
In Golden Harvest, Harvard collected more than fifty human skulls. The Icelandic newspaper Isafold called it a "shameful act" , accusing the team of acting without permission and under cover of night.
Archaeologist Steffanson excavates a burial at Haffjardarey during what may have been the first archaeological mission to Iceland in 1945.
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Before outrage could prevent their export, Stefansson sent the bones in four large cases to Cambridge by steamer. At the Peabody Museum, the skulls of unknown medieval Icelanders became known as the Hastings-Stephansson collection , named after the anthropologist and his student John Hastings, who helped him collect the remains from the Haffjardarey sands.
Today, there is interest from Icelandic and US researchers to return the Haffjardarey skulls back to the rest of the skeletons in the National Museum of Iceland in Reykjavik.
Archaeologists argue that this is not only good scientific practice, but also a morally and ethically correct action.
But will skulls remain in Cambridge, separated by the Atlantic and decades of history? What do you think?
