Just been watching Bettany Huges Top ten Egyptian Mummies.

Quite an interesting program, in it she is often seen in one of the museums in Cairo housing dozens of Egyptian mummies on display.. THee mumies are often investigated and x-rayed.  I other programs I have also seen her and other historians handling skulls and human remains from various periods in history, including  Viking and Anglo Saxon etc.

In a recent Grand Designs program the developer unearthed Anglo Saxon human  bones. These had to be replaced where they found with suitable reverence and ceremony.  

The remains of Richard lll  after being exhumed were reinterned in Leicester Cathedral with a full ceremony attended by the Archbishop of Canterbury and other senior church leaders.

If you randomly dug up a grave in your local cemetery, even one hundreds of years old you would be prosecuted for desecration of the grave.

This lead me to the question - "At what point does digging up and generally interfering with human remains change from desecration to archeology, and why is it different?"






 

A passing souvenir-hunter has made off with your final quotation marks, now to be viewed in the British Museum on written application to the Director of Internet Studies.

It's a good question, Mark......Really couldn't say where I would 'fix the line'.

Quote from: FierceKitty on 29 June 2021, 01:54:06 AM
A passing souvenir-hunter has made off with your final quotation marks, now to be viewed in the British Museum on written application to the Director of Internet Studies.

It's alright.......I've found them.....and returned them to their rightful home.

Cheers - Phil.

It depends.
Her Majesties constabulary will pass it HM Coroner who will decide whether it is a crime scene or an artifact.

Can you now remove the poisonous lead and replace it with a led light, thanks (Shoots, eats and leaves. Thanks Rosie).

Not much use to that particular Egyptian now. TBH we'd still be searching for random lightning strikes to keep warm if scientific investigation wasn't carried out.

It's an interesting question, without a rational answer.
I think the problem lies in what the Americans call "Muh Heritage" (Best said with a Southern accent).

Richard III and the Saxons belonged to a religion which is still "live", so mis-handling their remains is a desecration.
The bad news for those mummies is that the Ancient Egyptian Paganism is no longer mainstream, so there's no big lobby batting for their interests.
See also Pagan norse, Britons, Romans and Greeks.

It's also worth noting differing approaches in modern life.
A typical urban Greek will have a grave for a short while before the bones are disinterred and added to a communal Ossuary.
Rather different to the British victorian Necropolis or sprawling American garden of rest.

If there's no one alive to remember anyone who was still alive to remember the deceased while they were still alive, I'm not sure anyone can really feel that much affront, beyond a sense of slight disquiet at it being a distant ancestor, though the fascination with knowing what happened to them may outweigh that. Maybe 200 years?

Though yes religious sensibilities may play into it in some areas depending on the local traditions. In some places, they have the mummified dead round for tea and parade them down the street on special occasions, as if they were still present and just having a long rest. Not sure how they would feel about someone cutting into them. Though again, it's usually only the dead in living memory for a couple of generations.

Think 'the line' has to be very 'fluid'.
Obviously, where a site will be lost to development / erosion, investigation is a Must.
Other sites not under threat can Vastly increase knowledge... cause of death, healed injuries, ailments, age, sex...place of birth... etc.
And scientific analyses have advanced enormously in recent times. Reburial rather than storage would have made much impossible.

Poor old 'Ice Man' has been poked around in, so many times. And a previously 'missed' arrowhead tuned up!  

Some Museum 'artifacts'... Mummies, Shrunken Heads, Scalps.. have been returned to 'owners',,, but think this may be more 'political' .

Then, there are 'Medical Specimens'. The articulated skeletons... a Dentst Cousin had a Skull to pore over... probably sourced from India. And my Late Grandmother's 'Massive' 'Growth', removed late 50s, may stlll be in a jar, somewhere. Don't want it back!  

Some UK graveyards ARE re-used. Headstones placed along walls. Presumably, any surviving bits collected and re-interred. It was rather 'refreshing' to see a 'grassy hump', without any marker for 40++ years, had been given a simple wooden cross... maybe as a result of 'Family History' research... when visiting an 'old' family grave, recently.

What is truly sickening, is the callous marine 'salvage' of metals from wrecks... even when 'war graves'.  
Or, the 'trade' in 'relics' for sale... without regard to human remains... often from eastern europe.  
Note: As a child, I picked up some small 'bits' of equipment... parachute silk, flack vest scales, oxygen tubing... from a B17 crash site on Cheviot. The fatalities were recovered after the crash, though.

I recently watched a WW2 TV dig on the 'Ostfont'... when the dig team reverentially boxed up the human remains and presented them to a War Cemetery staff member. I did get the impression that He was a little... 'Thank You... Now what am I supposed to do with THAT!' , though!  

I will watch TV progmammes with interest. As to what to d with the 'finds'... will leave to others.

It is a very fine line - It's all desecration but ultimately the decision rests on whether further information from remains will move knowledge forwards.

It absolutely depends on the laws in place in each country at the time the remains were discovered.
Currently countries follow specific guidelines which they have to adhere to. In the UK we have to have a "license to lift"  (apply to home office and details on the form must be a followed). Each individual case is considered eg whether it should be a case of preservation in situ or removal and retention. Most of those details are already agreed with the county archaeologist prior to any work being done. The coroner will only be involved if the remains are "recent". That's what happened with Richard III - Even though they were intending to find the bones the team doing the job (Leicester Uni) didn't apply for licenses beforehand.
That meant the skeleton they say is his stayed excavated but covered in tarp for a few days before they could lift it - Epic fail and room for cross contamination and interference!

Sometimes the decision to preserve in situ or retain is trumped by the reason for the dig and remains are reinterred elsewhere - eg the "plague pits" and Roman graves removed for the recent Crossrail expansion in London that some of my colleagues worked on or the remains of WWI soldiers which once identified are returned to the Graves Commission of their respective countries.

It is ALWAYS emotive when human remains are being dealt with and those in the archaeological profession take great care to always treat with care and reverence - Most these days are reinterred or preserved in-situ.

From a community archaeology standpoint NOTHING fires the imagination and interest of the public in an excavation more than human remains!

(I am on the Board of Directors of a commercial/community archaeological company)

Hi

I understand that there has been a certain amount of controversy regarding a skeleton only found in 2012 at Waterloo that is now in a museum:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterloo_Soldier

Personally I would prefer him to be re-interred with the relevant military honours.

Cheers Paul

Quote from: Scorpio_Rocks on 29 June 2021, 11:25:02 AM
It is a very fine line - It's all desecration but ultimately the decision rests on whether further information from remains will move knowledge forwards.

I very much appreciated your full and very thoughtful explanation to what I consider a serious ethical question. I  also appreciate others who tried to come up with some sort of rule. Making ethical decisions is one of the most difficult things humans attempt.

Your first line comes closest, I think, to answering an unanswerable question. If you believe that all human life is sacred as are its residuals then you have a basis for an ethical system which will always pose the question, "How do we now proceed?"

As with all ethical questions, it is never easy since we now have the questions, "What is human?"  "What are human residuals?" and "If those residuals ARE human, do they still have a say in the matter?"

The intent of the desecration more or less answers the question of how to proceed but we must always ask questions about the price of gaining knowledge or benefit. For example, It is possible that one day those questions may be asked about the origins of and the response to COVID 19.

FWIW, I have served on our local hospital's ethics board for the last eight year. It has been a humbling experience.

It is all very, very complicated (& I really do not want to start a controversial thread out of this).

But it can come down to a real challenge around what we mean by the words community/society/ethnic memory, heritage and culture.

We have seen it recently with the BLM movement in the UK, where c.14% of the UK population is of non-UK ethnicity and only 3.3% comes from Black or Afro-Caribbean stock*, yet the whole north Atlantic slave trade issue has become highly emotive & politicised- even though there is nobody alive today who even knew anybody alive, who was actually a slave under that aberrant system (I believe).

Similarly we have seen attempts to include the 'British Empire' within the same sphere of the BLM movement. I recently watched a debate where a lady of Arabic extraction ranted & raved on (there was no other words for it) about the evils of the British Empire - yet when challenged on the history and record of some of the Arab Empires misdeeds (and it was pointed out to her that it was Arab slave traders who had started the African East & West Coast slave trades in the first place) she chose to claim that was all "ancient history" and it was not at all comparable.
NB: British Colonialism cannot be condoned in any way but should be recognised as being a historic  'phase' that does not reflect the current values of the society we now live in. And I expect that in another 200 years time the fact that we mostly eat meat and drive polluting oil fuelled cars will be looked back on with similar horror by our heirs!

But cultural memory of an injustice (that has been rightly recognised as such with the North Atlantic Slave Trade) is so strong that the emotional response to the BLM movement has been huge and in some cases played upon and exaggerated (with violent consequences) for modern political ends (NB: I live in central Bristol not far from the site of the Colston statue plinth).
But if we look at slavery as a whole - most of Western Europe suffered similar levels of enforced and institutional slavery (including mass deportation of sub-cultures, branding and mutilation, ownership & trade, torture, even selective breeding programs) whilst under nearly 500 years of Roman occupation. Similarly the word Slave comes from the word Slav - used by the Norse Vikings who traded blonde western European slaves for hundreds of years to the Byzantine and Arab slave markets in the east. ****** the women in a systematic manner on-route to deliver a sort of horrific 'buy one-get one free' policy to their eventual owners. But culturally these historic 'wrongs' have passed into history now - I don't ask an Italian or Swede for reparation or to 'take the knee' as it is (quite rightly) ancient history. There are of course many other instances of historic slavery - there are virtually no organised human societies (be they Aztec, Inca, Zulu, Ashanti, Chinese, Egyptian, Sumerian, Mongol etc. etc.) that do not exhibit some form of slavery - it is a 'Human Sin'.

My own ancestors - on one side of the family were forced to flee their country in the late C17th because of systematic and state orchestrated religious persecution. I don't carry any animosity towards the perpetrators of that persecution, but that was over 300 years ago. But then I am not part of a specific cultural group, one that feels (to this day) that this persecution was a massive injustice - I was not taught by my parents or my religion or my elders that I had an injustice that needed to be avenged or righted.

But my point with regard to the issue of this thread e.g. 'Desecration' is around changes in cultural norms and reconciliation.
It was once acceptable for people to pay to view other humans with physical deformities (alive or dead) at circuses or side-shows - and that has (at least in the West) been stopped by a combination of Laws and also moral changes in society. In the same way as it was once acceptable to own another human being as a slave or bondsman. In the same way that it was once acceptable to have human remains on show as antiquities or curiosities, in a private collection or a national archive or museum.

Personally I think that the display of human remains to the general public - no matter how 'ancient' - is no longer acceptable in an way. Be it a 'bog-man' or Egyptian mummy or a more 'modern' set of remains from another part of the world.

However, there may well be a justification for retaining 'ancient' human remains in research institutions, if that will lead to a greater scientific understanding and knowledge. Be it a London plague-pit bone sample that helps us understand the impact of highly contagious disease or the image (& modern technology now allows strikingly detailed images to be retained) of the beautifully tattooed skin of an ancient Scythian warrior to allow us to marvel at a wonderfully creative lost human culture.

Sorry - a long ramble but this is one of those hugely complex subjects (also highly emotive).

Mark

I will declare an interest in that I studied archaeology for 3 years as part of my degree.

I think that archaeological excavations teach us a huge amount and I would be loathe to see them stopped or even curtailed. However there is an increasing tendency to leave parts of sites intact in hopes of better results from more sophisticated techniques being available in future.

The huge advances in scanning and 3D printing technologies seems to me to reduce the arguments for sticking huge collections of bones and artefacts in boxes in a museum basement in hopes some PhD student will examine them in a couple of decades time.

Of course, I doubt the dead care one way or the other, no matter what happens when we shuffle off this mortal coil. It is the living who are concerned and often have axes to grind (flint or otherwise ).

Where's "Homo Naledi Lives Matter!" when you need them    

Have been pondering on 'display' of 'real' Bones, Shrunken heads, Scalps, etc.
There are arguments for and against. But, consider this?

A 'display' of REAL items can bring home the REALITY to viewers, in a way that photographs or replicas cannot.
A real Skull with a hole in it WAS a real human being.
A real 'shrunken head is 'proof' that other cultures may have had concepts completely alien to our own.
Real Scalps... taken from Indians, (or convenient Mexicans), for 'Bounty', can show the appalling disregard for life of other peoples for avarice rather than 'ritual'.

Replicas can be 'dismissed' as 'It's just a Fake, anyway'. After all, man never did land on the Moon...

To take the argument further...
Photographic images of 'bloated, rotting' battlefield dead, charred tank crews... or the piled skeletal bodies of naked women... 'may' be seen as a further 'Degradation', even after Death.
BUT... without such... War is Glory, Death is Heroic... and a Civilised society could NEVER do this... could they? We ?
I have never been to Auschwitz... and do not intent to. BUT, actually BEING there... where the horrors were REAL... can be really ... REAL, to some who have gone.

If display of real remains,' brings home the message'... so be it.