Human Remains Excavation

[sniper]

well, from my experience, I know cases of church bodies treating excavated remains with disdain, if not downright disrespect, but then I also know of units doing the same thing. I also know of a Medieval Jewish cemetery (one of only two in the North of England) that is now a lovely supermarket, and excavations of Bronze Age tombs that were only interested in pottery grabbing and thought all the human bone was animal. I think there is still a deep seated belief in archaeology that human remains are in a category somewhere below that of finds and they don't really need to be studied, that it is fine to leave them dirty and mouldering away in plastic bags while the finds from the same graves are conserved and displayed. Think it was Oxbest some time ago on here who expressed the belief that we don't need to study them and that its common sense to say short lives, hard lives, bad teeth, arthritis. That reduces human remains to diseased things and is extremely simplistic. Just in terms of the pathologies, every site I work on I see things I haven't seen before, but more than that, these are the people who made everything that is seen by some as proper archaeology and they deserve to be studied and understood.

++ i spend my days rummaging around in dead people ++