Provenance research and historical sources for understanding nineteenth-century scientific interest in indigenous human remains: The scholarly journals and popular science media

The nineteenth century saw the proliferation of scientific literature in the form of academic journals, popular journals, magazines and newspapers. Buried within this literature is a myriad of information on the discovery, collection and discussion of Ancestral Remains. Over the last thirty years, much of this material has been digitised and become word searchable. This transformation has opened up new capacities for provenance research into ancestral remains. This chapter acts as a guide to the nineteenth-century literature and explains the type of provenance information that researchers can find within the literature. The chapter also charts the growth in scientific literature and some of the various networks that sat behind the different nineteenth-century publications to provide contextualising information for the provenance researcher.