Given the hassle it becomes, I wonder how many discoveries of human remains go unreported, legal penalties or not. If it’s a commercial construction project, I’m sure they almost always get reported - the whole construction crew and any onlookers know about it, and someone will blab. But if a private landowner happens to find remains while digging up their own property, it would seem that if they rebury them and keep their mouths shut, they have a high probability of getting away with it. And this is one of those things that even a generally law abiding citizen might tend to view as “illegal but not immoral”. Laws like that tend to get bent if somebody thinks they won’t get caught, or the penalty is low enough that they’ll risk it.
Also, if we’re taking about just a random bone or two, not a whole obvious human skeleton, untrained people aren’t necessarily going to be able to distinguish a random human bone from a bone of a large animal. What about cases where a property owner digs up a bone, scratches their head over it, decides that it’s probably from a cow or something, and goes on about their business.
Undoubtedly true that many human remains are overlooked and not even recognised - especially if they have degraded in the soil, or are cremated remains. And some people believe their own convenience trumps doing the right thing and will just bulldoze them. But we work on the assumption that most people most of the time recognise there is a common good that is distinguishable from their own maximal personal benefit. Its nicer to live in a society that makes an effort to treat humans with dignity, both before and after they die than in one that doesn’t.
A long time ago, my grandfather would tell stories about farmers who would dig a foundation or cellar and find stuff. Usually it’d be a centuries-old trash heap with bits and pieces of whatever. Sometimes it’d be human bones. The gentlemen’s agreement was everyone would take their pick of anything valuable (arrow heads were apparently prized), and then rebury the rest wherever they were dumping the excess fill.
That was early 1900s. In the early 1800s, people actually went out hunting for old sites in order to loot them. Ohio had many, many smallholds of a Mound Builder culture. While some still exist, most were looted and destroyed.
When I was doing genealogy, there were several old church graveyards which were now woodlots on the edge of a cornfield. Only way to know it was a cemetery was the broken remains of gravestones scattered among the trees. Still managed to get some rubbings.
A shout out for Chief Okemos (Michigan). His grave was destroyed by road works in the 1930’s. He was enough of a local hero that they put up a replacement grave marker in the general area.
I certainly believe it is nicer to live in a society that treats living humans with dignity. And the bodies of the recently dead, especially when there are living mourners who care about them. I don’t really see a moral benefit to treating long-dead remains with the same gravitas. I recognize that others disagree with me, and I generally like to respect the law and all that. But I don’t personally care if my thighbone is given to your great-great-great grandchild’s dog long after I’ve been forgotten. I won’t be using it then. It seems like a benefit to all if that dog gets my bone and the ggg granddaughter gets to build her hot tub, or whatever.
But hey, my family tends to chose cremation, so our remains won’t be in anyone’s way.
We could learn a lot from European countries. They’ve been building on top of graves for centuries longer than us. Save Native American burial mounds and the like.
Another personal tie. When my mother was a kid digging in her yard in the late 1940s she dug up some bones which the family doctor (the old-fashoned kind that did house calls, was still the family doctor when I was a kid) identified as human. Years before my family owned the land, it was supposedly the site of a chain gang labor camp where the prisoners made bricks, and the stories went that the guards were really hard on the prisoners and any that died were buried on site. So that’s a possible source for the bones. As for other possibilities, I don’t know. The land was largely forested, so farmer in family grave is probably out. An old Cherokee is a possibility if the bones could survive that acidic clay soil for that long. The family story of the discovery doesn’t involve authorities or an investigation or an excavation, so the adventure probably ended with a shrug. For all I know the rest of the bones from that one person and maybe more are still there, a couple of hundred feet from where I sit right now.
So that’s a good point; I would assume there’s the same principle there too–unmarked grave on private land. Is there a general rule of thumb?
Tripler
I would reckon that with the history of European settlement, there’s less of 'em though.
Whenever there is a major project in the UK there is an extremely good chance of turning up a graveyard - it’s a small country and we’ve been burying folk in the more accessible ground for thousands of years - even if an area was fairly marginal in the past changes to the landscape through centuries if land management and more modern ground engineering means that such ground is usually a lot more accessible, usable and thus valuable.
An article purporting to answer the question in the U.K, as well as delve into other property issues surrounding remains, may be found here. From it,
Under the Burial Act 1857, once a person has been buried it is unlawful to disturb or remove the body without lawful authority. The exhumation of cremation ashes on consecrated ground can only be authorised by a Faculty from the local Diocese. Even on private land which is not a cemetery, under s.25 Burial Act 1857, exhumation requires a Ministry of Justice licence. Although the application can be completed by anyone, it must be signed by the next of kin and those of equal kinship.
A Spanish law professor, Dolores Utrilla, in discussing exhumation issue in the EU in general (and specifically about the exhumation of Francisco Franco), mentions that, “the [European Court of Human Rights] has revisited and further developed its exhumations-related case law, which is still in a nascent stage and is widely unknown, not least because it has evolved through a rather limited number of cases.” On exhumation of human remains: Strasbourg’s standards, EU Law Live, 11 June 2020. The brief article is interesting, but requires an academic subscription for access. I understand the quote as meaning that exhumation of forgotten remains may happen frequently, but it rarely becomes an EU court level issue.
That must be a Greenville thing - there’s a similar one in Greenville, NC:
Here’s a sensationalist news story on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=cI23GiVN8oo