A tattooed Maori preserved head and skeletal remains have been handed over by academics at the Birmingham University to a delegation from Te Papa.
The toi moko and koiwi tangata were discovered in the university's anatomy department.
A delegation from Te Papa is in Europe collecting eight toi moko and five koiwi from five different institutions in England, Ireland and Guernsey.
Arapata Hakiwai from the museum Papa says a handover ceremony was held at the university "for the elders to tell the ancestors they're going to journey home soon".
Museum staff will bring the heads back and hold a special ceremony at the end of the month.
Birmingham University staff say the remains have not been used or displayed and their presence at the university is a mystery.
Medical college spokeswoman Dr June Jones says there were no records about how the items came to be in storage at the university, but when they were uncovered the instuttion knew it had to give them back.
"We believe that to keep them would be wrong. They belong back with their own people, to be treated with the dignity and respect they deserve."
She says the paperwork that accompanied the items was believed to have gone missing during renovations at the medical building over the last century.
"It's most likely from Victorian times when we had a lot of wealthy people in Birmingham. Collecting heads was an activity, a hobby, for some men."
The handover was arranged as part of a repatriation programme run by the New Zealand museum, which says that more than 400 items of human remains are still in the UK, based on records kept by museums and other sources.
Researchers estimate there are 650 Maori remains held world-wide, mostly in European institutions.
