Andreas Reischek’s Late 1800s Collecting in Aotearoa/New Zealand in the Context of Repatriation Rhetoric and Today’s Digital Online Markets

Damien Huffer1* and Constanze Schattke2

From 1877 to 1889, Austrian collector Andreas Reischek travelled to Aotearoa/New Zealand to document and collect natural history specimens, accessioned by Vienna’s Museum of Natural History in 1892. While he is now notorious for collecting birds, he also collected Māori cultural heritage, including grave-robbed ancestral remains (kōiwi tangata). This collecting occurred at the request of local museums, private collectors and for his own interest. Somewhat unique for European natural historians of the time, he recorded most of his activities in diaries written in both English and German. In this paper, we present an overview of an ongoing project to digitise the diaries and use qualitative digital humanities tools to ‘close-read’ them to further understand how his theft of the dead was justified and described. Coding for seven themes emergent in the diaries’ text (achieved manually and via NVivo) reveals different motivations that contributed to Reischek collecting human remains, ranging from personal to institutional, but less-so financial. Analysis of the diaries is compared to thematic analysis of a snapshot sample (n=55) of posts depicting the sale or display of Ancestral remains between 2019 and 2026 within one prolific Facebook group. Following the same methodology as for the diaries illustrates how the buying and selling of Indigenous ancestors (Māori and otherwise) occurs within today’s online human remains trade; how it is rationalised, and how its rhetoric draws heavily on the same colonial attitudes Reischek upheld. Finally, we will discuss how the repatriation of these kōiwi tangata have been framed in the media in Austria, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and globally. Overall, we demonstrate how diverse memory culture can range within a museum, from first-person accounts such as the diary to the collected human remains and other specimens itself. These stolen human remains were thoroughly researched in recent years in advance of their repatriation to the Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, in 2022. Reischek’s diaries, however, represent an important and rare window into collector attitudes and practices at the time.