Alas Poor Yorick!

Good Day to you all,

Since I have been working for the Eastbourne Ancestors Project, cleaning and preserving the Anglo-Saxon Skeletons found at the old Eastbourne College of Further Education site, the treatment of the remains has been the topic of more than the odd conversation, as we near the end of the preservation of the remains and the next steps are starting to take shape. This has led me to think a great deal about the process of excavation of human remains and their subsequent aftercare. Here follows my views and thoughts on the subject. I hope you find it interesting and informative.

The Britsh Museum, London - A wonderful Day out.

With a growing interest in the fate of human remains, archaeologists can no longer ignore the pressure to open up their practice to wider consultation and input. I think that most Archaeologists will claims that they deeply respect any human remains that they are excavating and treat them with great care and reverence. However, what constitutes respect varies widely depending on religion, culture, and professional discipline. The notion of how valuable, useful or sacred the human remains are can differ an awful lot, when looking from a purely scientific view to the religious.

Therefore what happens to human remains after they have been excavated, leads to a choice of either reburial or long-term retainment by a museum or archaeological society. So even though there are only two choices available it doesn't make the decision any easier. Due to the ever increasing popularity in human remains, and the fact that, legally, there can be no ownership of the corpse (The laws of England and Wales do not recognise the concept of property (i.e. a right of ownership) in human bodies or tissue except where remains have been treated or altered through the application of skill.) It has become popular belief, that the public should have more of a say in the decision-making process, in regards to the aftercare of human remains in Archaeology.

Human remains must always be treated as a special category, and because of this there must be a good reason for a museum to seek to keep the remains in stores, for either temporary or long-term use. The usual practice is for archaeologists to decide amongst themselves whether a certain human remains should be keep in a collection for further/future research or whether they should be reburied. However, again due to the ever increasing outside interest in the subject of human remains, it has come to debate about whether these questions (should human remains be kept or reburied, or should there even be a discussion over this topic) should be discussed by a broader community than just archaeologists, because they all have their own particular research interests and bias towards the subject.

In regards to this subject of the retainment of human remains, I believe that it is important that we find a clear balance between the obvious importance of retaining information from the human remains and the need for maintaining a high level of respect. The main discussion and dispute that occurs over human remains is whether after being dug up, cleaned and tested should they remain in a museum’s collection or immediately be reburied, there are also a group of people that disapprove entirely of the excavation of human bones. This group of people especially, raise the largest problem for archaeologists, because generally they do not go out looking or digging for skeletons. When skeletons are found immediate reburial is not always an available option for example the burial site that was uncovered at the old Eastbourne College of further education. The burial site was only discovered by accident when developers moved in and dug up the car park. The skeletons in this case had to be excavated and moved; otherwise they would have been destroyed under the new foundations of the new housing estate. (This is quite often how human remains are discovered when developers prepare to dig foundations for buildings or roads and accidently discover these burials.) In this cause, when looking at getting a balance between information retainment and respect for the remains, excavation and removal was seen as the best and perhaps only option. This is the project which is I am now working on and is called "The Eastbourne Ancestors Project" and can be found at Eastbourne Town hall. (Link to their Facebook page --> http://www.facebook.com/EastbourneAncestors?ref=ts&fref=ts Link to their Twitter page --> https://twitter.com/EBAncestors)



Eastbourne Town Hall - The present base for The Eastbourne Ancestors Project.

I personally believe that keeping human remains, in a museum or archaeological society’s collection is generally the most logical and economical solution, especially with remains that are well over 1000 years old. I believe this for many reasons, the first being, when comparing keeping a skeleton in a museum collection to reburying it; you come across a lot less problems. The main problem that occurs when talking about reburial, especially if a body is over 1000 years old, is that you can no longer be sure of the religious orientation of the remains, and therefore the type of burial they would have received, you cannot I feel allow yourself to apply modern day views or beliefs onto the remains, as none of them may be shared with the remains, making the reburial disrespectful and thoughtless. Another problem that you may encounter when dealing with reburial is space, or a certain lack of it. Especially in the case of the Anglo Saxon skeletons found at the old Eastbourne College of Further Education, 200 skeletons are very hard to rebury, especially as the site is no longer there (under a housing estate) this means looking for a plot of land which is not religious (no church graveyards) and is also large enough for all the bodies to fit in.

Then comes the question of how are you to bury them? For you will never be able to bury them in the exact same position that they were buried in to start with, they can be reunited with their grave goods, but positioning, orientation etc., cannot be replicated, especially as over time due to, in this case, bad conservation, the human remains are no longer in the condition that they were when they were found. This of course could be used against, those of us who believe that the excavation of human remains are ok, as they may say, if the human remains cannot be kept at the same level of condition and protected, then what is the point of digging them up in the first place. In this case, it would be fair to say that, without the excavation and removal of the skeletons, then they would no longer be in any condition at all, after being covered in concrete, and metal foundations, and therefore even though the original aftercare, was poor, the scientific information gained from them now, and the conservation program which they are now going through made excavation the most respectful and informative root to take.

One of the main arguments, that people have against the excavation of human remains is that due to there being no living relatives around, no one can "stand up for" the remains, and decide whether they can/should be dug up, however, it appears to me, that although human remains are to be treated with respect no matter what, the disrespect that people feel digging up the remains may have, are instead emotions, solely to do with how the living feel and little to do with the remains themselves.

I would like to make it clear that the above views and opinions are all based on my feelings towards the subject and are not necessarily shared by anyone else at the Eastbourne Ancestors Project. I have really enjoyed discussing these views with friends and family, and would be very happy to hear the views and opinions of all my wonderful blog followers!

I look forward to hearing from you all.

Maisie