Basically a 200 year old pair of false teeth are going on display. They had belonged to the Archbishop of Narbonne who died in 1806. They were retrieved from his coffin after an archaeologists dig.
The archaeologists were digging at St Pancras graveyard ahead of building work on the Channel Tunnel’s new rail terminus.
Now, I understand that given the finite quantity of land available for new developments, plots such as graveyards that are no longer in use (by not in use I mean their population is no longer being added to) may be sold off and redeveloped.
The first part of my pondering is just how unused should a graveyard be before it is OK to build on it?
Secondly, I presume when a graveyard is going to be built on they remove the previous occupants to an ossuary or whatever? Anyway, is it seemly for grave contents such as false teeth to be utilised in museums etc? Again how old should the grave be? There are foreign culture grave goods littering museums (egyptology etc).
This topic pops up from time to time here but I don’t think we’ve ever come up with a definitive conclusion. I guess that’s why they call them “Great Debates.” Someone in my Anthropology class asked “Why do we show Egyptian remains but protect Native American remains?” Morally, what’s the difference?
As to how much time is “enough” there isn’t a definitive answer. For me I’m pretty comfortable with a century or two but for others even 5,000 years isn’t enough. I have no problem with putting the remains of Ancient Egyptians or artifacts from their graves on display anymore then I would for Greek, Colonial Americans, or even Native Americans. Of course if somone dug up my grandmother and put her on display I’d be plenty pissed. Sorry, no definitive answer here.
I will state that I think remains and artifacts should be treated with respect. Of course how much respect does an ancient king command when he’s stuck behind a sheet of glass and on display for gawking tourist? I don’t know.
First–grave goods are not the same as human remains. The Archbishop does not need those false teeth anymore.
Attitudes about the dead vary in different cultures. Native-American remains have been “in the news” in recent years. Large numbers had been collected–& often fairly “new” remains. (I vividly remember the clutch of dead Native-American babies once displayed in San Antonio’s Witte Museum, dried out but not totally skeletal; I hope they were sent home. And Houston’s Natural Science Museum once showed the cutest pair of shrunken heads.) However, returning them is not always the answer, since some cultures avoid contact with their dead. In Canada, melting permafrost is sending coffins back to the surface–but Inuit tradition says those who touch the dead will be cursed. What to do?
European attitudes have sometimes been more casual. Remember Hamlet sitting in the graveyard, philosophizing about the jester’s skull? The jester whose remains were being removed to make room for Ophelia’s fresh corpse? Many of the dead only had a temporary right to real estate. The Truly Important got crypts in the church. Saints whose remains had not decayed (much) were sometimes displayed in glass coffins. And the head of Thomas Aquinas was removed shortly after death, since everyone thought he’d make Saint pretty soon.
Generally, it’s more OK to dig up your own ancestors than somebody else’s. Has anyone seen the TV series “Meet the Ancestors”? Remains & artifacts are examined to learn about the past. Often, a sculptor will create a reasonable facsimile of the deceased. The remains are treated with respect; recent ones are reinterred. After they’ve appeared on TV, that is!
I have to say, I winced a little when I saw the body of one Egyptian king on display in the Louvre. He was just laying on a little platform under glass, nude but for a bit of cloth draped over his hips. I kind of felt sorry for him, stripped of his ornate wrappings and all of his treaures. His ka must be really depressed, having to return to the Louvre every evening.
The bodies of criminals were often treated worse. Just a couple of months ago, I was set to the task of cleaning a human skull in the museum in which I work. It was the skull of a local murderer who’d been hanged in 1850. Afterwards, his bones were boiled to remove the flesh, ostensibly to be used as anotomical specimens, though the doctor who owned it in this case seems to have treated it as a souvineer.
We also have two skulls which are supposedly that of the same man: Perry the Peddler. The story goes that he lived in a nearby cave and after he died, some locals fetched his skull from it. Them Victorians were nutty with the souvineers, I tell ya.
As for my personal opinion on how long we should “wait” before remains are okay-to-be-viewed, it really wouldn’t bother me if they dug up my deceased family members’ bones today. The person I loved is dead and gone and if their bones can somehow be used to teach, that’s great. In a sense, it’s even better than just decaying in the ground-- this way, they will always be remembered.
Its like the ruckus over sunken wrecks like the TITANIC (sunk in 1912). Bob ballrd gets upset because people “plunder” the wreck? The bodies/human remains are long gone-all that’s left is a heap of rusting steel-who cares? As for digging up uncle freddy-graves which are marked, should remain.
Actually, the St Pancras excavation was something of an archaeological cause célèbre, as the archaeologists were only able to remove some of the bodies before the contractors moved in to bulldoze the site, leading to protests that forced them to agree to re-inter the remaining bodies. But the real problem was not that there were no rules protecting the site, but that the contractors were deliberately ignoring them.
The other point to note about English law on the subject is that the age of the grave is irrelevant - there is a statutory obligation that excavated/exhumed remains be respected, however old they are.