As Europe's museums begin archiving their collections in digital format, skeletons are emerging — and not just of the physical variety. One South African tribe already says it will oppose the inclusion of images of its people's remains in any multimedia format.

The University of Vienna has started to digitize the collection made in the early twentieth century by Rudolf Pöch, considered one of anthropology's founding fathers. The project, headed by Maria Teschler-Nicola, will improve the collection's accessibility for researchers and store the delicate material in a sustainable way, using electronic records of physiological measurements as well as two- and three-dimensional scans.

But the full collection, which includes human remains and thousands of ethnographic artefacts, was gathered using unethical methods, such as grave-robbing.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, anthropological adventurers in search of exotic artefacts collected skeletal remains from ethnic groups in Africa, Asia and Australia, and sold them to museums in the West. There, they were often displayed in exhibitions purporting to show the evolution of humans from these supposedly 'primitive' origins.

Museums in Europe and the United States have now stopped displaying the remains of modern humans that were not acquired by donation. But it was not until 1995 that the Natural History Museum Vienna removed an exhibit depicting a Negro man as being below Caucasians on the evolutionary scale of development.

“There are maybe 300 sensitive cases in our collection,” says Teschler-Nicola. “We don't want to repeat the same mistakes, but we don't have any guidelines.” Such bones can be important research material for archaeoanthropologists, which complicates the museum's decision.

The Natural History Museum in London is also planning to digitally record its entire collection, and has yet to decide what to do about its own contentious human remains. The issue was raised at a meeting organized at the museum in March to survey the opinion of leading international scientists. An internal report from the meeting is thought to endorse continuing scientific study, including digitization, on human remains that may be subject to repatriation. “The decision on how to move forward is yet to be taken,” says John Jackson, science-policy coordinator at the museum. “There are constraints on whether those remains should be in the collection — whether it is ethically right has to be considered very carefully.”

“When repatriation requests are made there is an expectation that all studies have been done. This is not the case,” says Robert Hedges, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford, UK, who attended the meeting. “There is every reason for studying remains that are vulnerable to repatriation. You have to be aware that one is liable to lose information if remains are repatriated.”

Roger Chennells, legal adviser to the San Institute, a South African non-governmental organization that campaigns for the repatriation of the aboriginal San people's remains, some of which are in the Pöch collection, told Nature. “We have not been consulted, and we do not support any photographic archiving of our people's remains — we are opposed to it,” he says.

The University of Vienna and the National History Museum in London both hope to draw up guidelines in the next few weeks.