VIENTIANE, LAOS – The new Lao National Museum building is complete but the interior has not yet been finished, so the ceremony to dedicate the bones of Tam Pa Ling took place at the old museum, in the center of the old city and across from the National Stadium. It was formerly the French governor’s mansion, with French colonial architecture that is weathered and crumbling. The main entrance is in the center of a long, covered porch held up by golden columns.
The director of the Ministry of Information and Culture welcomed me to the museum with a handshake and escorted me to a table on the stage at the front of a large room. A display case held the fossils that my colleagues and I had found, bones that spent 50,000 years buried in a cave at the top of a mountain a few hundred miles away.
Dozens of people were there for the ceremony – the men dressed in crisp business suits and the women in traditional wrap skirts of Lao silk. Some 20 journalists were among them, focusing their cameras on the bones and on us.
Finding a home for the bones of Tam Pa Ling here in the capital city of Laos has special meaning for me. As a paleoanthropologist, I am acutely aware that in earlier centuries, colonial powers often took control of other nations’ cultural and natural artifacts. As a result, many archaeological and natural history specimens ended up in museums or collections far from where they were recovered, often leaving their country of origin by unethical means.
Since the 1960s, there has been a growing backlash against colonially associated collections and the idea that Western academics have the sole right to interpret these collections. The issues are never straightforward, but they are slightly easier to reconcile when dealing with cultural or ethnographic objects that have clear associations with specific individuals.
As a signal that the old approach is no longer accepted or acceptable, legislation like the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in the U.S. has helped address concerns about the ownership of human remains or cultural objects that have associations with living groups.
Researchers like us, working in Laos or elsewhere in the world, have an ethical obligation to work with local people to tackle difficult issues around the final resting place of the artifacts we uncover. Here in Vientiane, for example, there are no climate-controlled storage facilities for fossils, as there are in Europe or the U.S. The museum does not have locked storage cabinets or cameras to prevent theft or damage to displays.
We were lucky that, as a result of our shared concerns, the government of Laos allowed our team to temporarily remove the Tam Pa Ling fossils from their nation of origin so that we could study them with scientific equipment that is not available here. With the help of the French Embassy and the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, we have provided the Lao National Museum with casts of the bones to be put on permanent display while the original fossils are safely stored by the Ministry of Heritage and Culture in Vientiane. It’s a solution that we can all live with.
We have been working at Tam Pa Ling for seven years, and this dedication ceremony makes me think about where we will be in seven more years. It will take us years to finish digging in Tam Pa Ling before we are satisfied that we’ve collected all there is to find. There are tens of thousands of caves in the limestone mountains of northern Laos, too many for us to ever fully explore. But we are slowly starting to look for other sites that might have been good places for early humans to settle. And we are starting to train Lao archaeologists and Lao students so that they have an integral role in the research being done here.
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Finding a home for the bones of Tam Pa Ling
Discovering the bones of Tam Pa Ling
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