When does a corpse become an object?
Michael Shanks appears to be back online again after a summer hiatus. There’s an interesting post about the repatriation of human remains. The UK doesn’t really have the same repatriation issues that the US or Australia has. It’s not that we don’t have the bodies, but the peoples concerned are usually so far away we don’t hear them. In light of this lack of pressure you could argue that the new declaration on the repatriation of remains under a thousand years old is an example of surprisingly ethical behaviour.
The problem is why 1000 years? From a practical point of view it effectively covers the period after the discovery of the Americas and Australia. Though potentially there could still be issues of ancient American remains, though I don’t know if there are any in UK collections. On the other hand people don’t get magically get deader after a millennium. I can see how things look different when soft tissues still survive, but are one set of bones much the same as another? If they are don’t they all deserve respect? The archaeologists I’ve worked with have all shown respect when excavating human remains. So why should Michael Shanks feel guilty?
One possibility isn’t that he isn’t ethical, but if archaeology is ethical it’s often by accident. Somewhere (in the book Archaeological Ethics, I think), Brian Fagan argues that archaeology treats ethical considerations as an option rather than a central feature. The quote I’m think of is something like “By not placing ethical considerations at the core of their work archaeologists are acting in a deeply non-groovy way”. Those weren’t his exact words, he phrased it better, but I’m tired. I know there are ethical declarations, for instance the AIA insists that members uphold certain standards, but I can’t recall a serious coherent ethical text. Vitelli’s Archaeological Ethics, seems to be as close as we have. I don’t know if someone has sat down and worked out what we owe to our colleagues, the wider profession and the public if we are to be good archaeologists.
I’d love to be wrong about that. These may be the bits of Shanks and Tilley’s books that didn’t sink in when I read them.
It’s probably not enough to behave in an ethical manner, we also need to show that we have seriously considered the ethical implications of what we’re doing as archaeologists.
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