ABSTRACT
It is helpful to situate the emergence of the problem of human remains in British collections within the context of the rise of this issue in other countries, drawing out the similarities and identifying diverging trends. Although the contestations over human remains in Australia and America, and indeed in Canada and New Zealand, are different in each country, there are parallels in the way in which they emerged. In the early 1970s, a developing American Indian political movement and the Australian Aboriginal land rights movement gained support and achieved legislation on questions of religious freedom and land rights (Cove 1995; Tilden Rhea 1997). In this context, prominent debates were conducted over the failures of assimilation, the defi nitions of identity, and the rights of such groups to land (Smith 2004a). There was a congruent concern about the fate of cultural heritage and an interest in preserving the past, with a growing focus on heritage and its signifi cance to Western societies (Lowenthal 1985; Hewison 1987). Ideas about the problems of indigenous groups became linked to ideas about the importance of the past, and broader, anthropological concepts of culture (Brown 2003). As anthropologist John Cove (1995) observes, the Tasmanian Aboriginal rights movement formed in the 1970s, asserting its rights to land, as did similar movements in America and Canada, but broad social trends helped to reframe these demands over land into claims on historic cultural heritage.
