This week at the national museum of the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, Kaitip Kami opened a package that the FBI had accompanied from New York and saw right once what statue was inside.
According to Kami, the curator of the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, it included the skull of a male ancestor of the hill tribes of Malakula, his island home.
“I knew right away just by looking at it,” he remarked. “I know it, up in the bush, where it belongs.”
Kurt Campbell, the deputy secretary of state for the United States, was present at a ceremony on Thursday in the capital city of Port Vila to mark the largest repatriation of human relics, five boxes, after an eight-year FBI investigation.
The items included three enormous effigies known as rambaramp, each containing a man’s skull that was specially painted to represent the last moments of his life, and two skulls that had been sculpted using mud, according to Kami.
They were taken by the FBI in 2016 from the estate of a deceased New York collector who had gathered 200 holy objects from indigenous cultures all over the world. It is likely that they were stolen from a sacred men’s home in a bush community.
Chris McKeogh, an FBI agent in charge of the art crimes unit, who flew to Vanuatu for the event on Thursday, stated, “New York is the art capital of the world and because of that, is the art crime capital of the world.”
In an interview, he stated, “We don’t know who stole them or took them out of the country, but there is a market for human remains in the world; they are unfortunately trafficked and are collected.”
The largest of the Vanuatu effigies, at 11-1/2 feet in length and 700 pounds of weight, McKeogh said, presented the art crime team with its greatest logistical challenge to yet.
He remarked, “They are incredibly fragile—possibly the most fragile objects we have ever come across.”
After being apprehended, they were kept in temperature-controlled storage facilities in New York while FBI agents looked for information about their provenance.
In order to assist with the “massive, seized collection,” they got in touch with Indiana University anthropology professor Holly Cusack-McVeigh in 2018.
The Museum of New Zealand was able to identify the Vanuatu pieces, according to Cusack-McVeigh, who enlisted her students to identify similar items in museums across the world.
“Human skulls, funerary items (burial objects), and sacred items from cultural groups throughout the Pacific were traded extensively throughout the 18th and 19th centuries,” she told Reuters.
This year, the United States erected an embassy in Vanuatu. The FBI’s Rapid Deployment Team devised a plan for investigators to accompany the five specially-built containers on a multi-leg journey from Washington to that destination.
According to Kami, the Smol Nambas tribe from Malakula ceased to practice rambaramp fifty years ago when they became Christians. A man’s effigy can be used to identify him.
The tribe didn’t bury its dead; instead, they put the bodies on a platform and let the bones to fall out over a period of up to 50 days. After a year, they created a statue by shaping the skull with plant materials and mud, then putting it in a home dedicated to males.
According to Kami, “that’s where people go and steal all these things.”
Since the rambaramp is “part of a human being,” it should not be on exhibit outside of Vanuatu, according to Kami.
“We are very happy to have our ancestors back with us; it’s a happy moment for us.”
According to him, the museum’s largest repatriation of artifacts, including human bones from all over the world, is the effigies.
“We hold cultural heritage and the sanctity of these artifacts in the highest regard,” Campbell stated to reporters in Vanuatu.
