Kumresh Chetty, from the provincial Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport, gave a presentation on the province’s museum policy on human remains.
Further discussions are needed on how human remains housed at the Simon’s Town Museum should be reburied, a public meeting concluded at the weekend.
The meeting at the museum on Saturday discussed the reburial of a Khoisan child’s skull and other partial remains thought to be of European origin.
The child’s skull was found protruding from a sand dune above Windmill Beach and below the Simon’s Town golf course in 1978.
Museum manager Cathy Salter said UCT archaeologists had been called in to excavate the child’s skull adjacent to a shell midden.
The child was likely aged between 8 and 12 and had been buried some 2000 years ago, according to dental analysis.
The other remains were found during the construction of the new Simon’s Town Magistrate’s Court in 1978 on the corner of St George’s Street and Cole Point Road.
“There are no complete skeletons, and the remains probably came from burials along the seashore, before the building of the Dutch East India Company Hospital in 1765 and its associated burial ground,” said Ms Salter.
Ms Salter said the purpose of the meeting was to decide whether further scientific analysis was needed for the remains found at the magistrate’s court site and to plan appropriate reburials for all the remains.
In 2019, osteologists had briefly inspected the bones from the magistrate’s court site and concluded they might be European, she said.
“They saw signs of scurvy and syphilis on some of the bones, but could not give more information without scientific testing.”
Ms Salter said the museum would prefer that any further human remains found in the area be reburied in Simon’s Town in accordance with the wishes of their descendants and/or the community in the area.
She asked the community to help the museum develop a policy on how it should handle such discoveries in future.
Kumresh Chetty, from the provincial Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport, gave a presentation on the province’s museum policy on human remains and described how remains from the Hout Bay and Montagu museums, among others, had recently been reburied.