15th February 2007, 10:04 PM
Where I work we have quite a robust but fair approach to discarding material, though we do try and make sure discarded material goes for teaching collections etc etc rather than just binning it if at all possible. The problem with discard policies towards human remains is precisely what has been mentioned in this thread before, that human remains are not just another class of artefact. It is certainly not appropriate to just bin human bone. It can be reburied on occasion, and that is sometimes requested by churches when the bone has been excavated from a present churchyard (though this throws up a whole load of other questions, such as whether the analysis of the bone is definitive, whether the digging of a hole to rebury is going to disturb more burials, whether burials should be stored in a crypt rather than reburied in the ground etc etc), but this only covers a very small amount of the human bone that is excavated. That still leaves you with an awfully large amount of human bone that has to be stored and has to be stored in appropriate conditions, and the amount will just keep going up. A big problem for many receiving museums. However, this problem should not be solved by allowing flawed requests for reburial from certain groups to go ahead (see the Druid's request on another thread), or just deciding on a blanket reburial policy, as was vaunted for the Museum of London collections (20 000+ skeletons) a couple of years ago and thankfully didn't (as far as I am aware) go ahead. As far as I am concerned, it is not for any one person or group of persons to decide what is and is not "important" enough to keep and what can be discarded. It reminds me of the old method of collection of human remains which kept the "interesting" specimens and the skulls and got rid of everything else. How can you tell what is "interesting" if you don't have everything else to compare it to??
++ i spend my days rummaging around in dead people ++
++ i spend my days rummaging around in dead people ++