Provenance research blog #4 out now

In this blog series, the Colonial Collections Consortium presents a historical object or collection from a colonial context or situation, currently (or until recently) stored in a museum in the Netherlands that has been the focus of provenance research. Our latest blog focuses on the Dubois collection, until recently part of the collection of Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden.

The Dubois collection consists of approximately 28,000 fossil specimens gathered by Dutch scientist Eugène Dubois in the former Dutch East Indies. Over time, they acquired cultural and political significance, both for Indonesia and the Netherlands, and have been at the centre of restitution debates for several decades.

As you will read in this blog, the nature of the collection, the layered meanings it has acquired throughout the years and the decades-long discussions about its rightful ownership made the provenance research particularly complex and multidisciplinary.