Having witnessed the exhumation of a Roman burial It dawned on me - How long do you have to be dead before someone can dig you up - fiddle with your bones and call it archeology? when does it stop being grave robbing and become legitimate historical research? Im not making a judgement either way, its just one of those strange thoughts that pop up from time to time
I don't think there is a set period of time,actually. (unless there is something legal, I'm not aware of) Of course, you'll need an exhumation license to excavate human remains of all dates, no one has the automatic right to excavate your remains.
Its also worth remembering that archaeologists very often remove human remains on sites that are going to be affected by developement,so its not always a given fact that they are going to be studied anyway. A lot of burials of Victorian and later date are often reburied without much study as there is often not very much can be learned from them (or at least nothing to justify the expense of a through study)
Originally posted by Chris D: I don't think there is a set period of time,actually. (unless there is something legal, I'm not aware of) Of course, you'll need an exhumation license to excavate human remains of all dates, no one has the automatic right to excavate your remains.
A Local Authority can whip you out of your final resting place when your lease is up,can't they?
Originally posted by Chris D: I don't think there is a set period of time,actually. (unless there is something legal, I'm not aware of) Of course, you'll need an exhumation license to excavate human remains of all dates, no one has the automatic right to excavate your remains.
A Local Authority can whip you out of your final resting place when your lease is up,can't they?
I believe so, yes but I think they have to re inter you somewhere else "appropriate" ie another cemetary. I suspect though, you end up in a jumble of bits with sundry others.
In the U.S., rights in burial plots are perpetual. The relatives of the deceased have a perpetual right to visit and maintain a grave and headstone and to sue to prevent desecration, neglect, or removal of the body. These rights persist even if the property where the grave is located is sold, provided the grave site is dedicated as such or is in an area dedicated as a cemetery. It's possible to abandon a grave and lose these rights, although courts don't always agree on what constitutes abandonment. Some states have changed these rules by statute, permitting easier abandonment of cemeteries. Nevertheless, there is no fixed end to these rights. You can find a detailed exploration of American burial law in Richard Cunningham's Archeology, Relics, and the Law (1999).In most of the rest of the world, a perpetual right to a burial plot is rare. Iserson writes: Most European graves have long been considered temporary. In medieval Europe, for example, the poor were buried in vast common graves, the fosses aux pauvres. When one pit was full, it was covered with earth and an old pit reopened. The bones from the latter were taken to the charnel house and it was reused for new bodies. Even the wealthy, originally buried under flagstones inside the church, were eventually disinterred and sent to the charnel house. . . . Although the practice of reusing graves was banned elsewhere in Europe during the eighteenth century, it continued in Britanny, Naples and Rome. Through the nineteenth century in Breton, France, gravediggers continued to remove the bones from graves after five years. Gravediggers would reuse the graves in the cemetery six times during their careers. Reuse of graves is still common in most of Europe. Under English common law, rights to the grave terminated with the dissolution of the body. Iserson says: It bestows the "right of appropriation of the soil to the body interred therein until its remains shall have so mingled with the earth as to have destroyed its identity." This was one argument against using iron coffins, since they would not deteriorate in a reasonable time. Those who argued against iron coffins (which were used to thwart grave robbers, but that's another story) were right to worry. As the court in Gilbert v. Buzzard and Boyer (1820) warned: The period of decay and dissolution does not arrive fast enough in the accustomed mode of depositing bodies in the earth, to evacuate the ground for the use of succeeding claimants . . . . a comparatively small portion of the dead will shoulder out the living and their posterity. The whole environs of this metropolis must be surrounded by a circumvallation of churchyards, perpetually enlarging. Even then, though, there was an exception. The rights in the Buzzard and Boyer case involved plots provided for free. The court forbade burials in iron coffins unless the party requesting such a burial paid a fee. The graves of the wealthy, important, and influential were already treated as perpetual. The English rule is currently codified in The Burial Act of 1857, which prohibits removing remains from graves without a license. The Act does not apply in the City of London or some of the surrounding boroughs, where an exclusive right of burial may be purchased for a limited time and then renewed for up to 100 years. The problem with the dissolution rule is that it takes an awfully long time for bodies to disappear after burial, especially in a metal box. The study of what happens to bodies after they are buried is called taphonomy. William Haglund and Marcella Sorg have edited two books, Forensic Taphonomy: The Postmortem Fate of Human Remains (1997) and Advances in Forensic Taphonomy: Method, Theory, and Archeological Perspectives (2001), which explore the subject in terrifying detail. I gather from them that it's difficult to predict in advance how long it will take for remains to completely disappear. Nevertheless, it's possible to make some generalizations.
Its also worth remembering that archaeologists very often remove human remains on sites that are going to be affected by developement,so its not always a given fact that they are going to be studied anyway. A lot of burials of Victorian and later date are often reburied without much study as there is often not very much can be learned from them (or at least nothing to justify the expense of a through study)
What rot. I should point you in the direction of the Bullring and Cathedral sites in Birmingham, work around the Collegiate Church in Wolverhampton and numerous sites in London!
If a decent archaeologist finds a skelly, under whatever circumstances, the jobs done proper!!!
Its also worth remembering that archaeologists very often remove human remains on sites that are going to be affected by developement,so its not always a given fact that they are going to be studied anyway. A lot of burials of Victorian and later date are often reburied without much study as there is often not very much can be learned from them (or at least nothing to justify the expense of a through study)
What rot. I should point you in the direction of the Bullring and Cathedral sites in Birmingham, work around the Collegiate Church in Wolverhampton and numerous sites in London!
If a decent archaeologist finds a skelly, under whatever circumstances, the jobs done proper!!!
Nope. not rot at all. I've worked on quite a few excavations where our brief has been to expose and lift human remains where only initial recording (planning, photography and context record) has been required. Very often burials dating to the Post Medieval period are not extensively studied afterwards because the curating archaeologist who wrote the brief may not consider it worth it.
It does happen on larger sites, such as the ones you list yes,(and of course there was the awful case of the St Pancras cemetery when they were putting in the CTRL link where a lot were removed without archeological supervision) but on many smaller projects, eg a small drainage trench in a churchyard or a vestry extension we merely remove them and they are re-interred elsewhere in the churchyard.
Originally posted by Owain G: A Local Authority can whip you out of your final resting place when your lease is up, can't they?
I'm not sure that's the correct terminology. They tend to use more acceptable euphemisms, like Rationalisation of Perpetual Interment Configuration Policy.
Hi, There is a new directive from the Ministry of Justice which will make life more difficult when archaeologists want to study human remains - apparently, if permission is granted the remains must be reburied within two months of their discovery. This was in a Guardian article yesterday.
Severe cutbacks in researchers' freedom to study bones and skeletons from ancient graves have been imposed without warning by the Ministry of Justice. The move has caused consternation among archaeologists, who say that the restrictions will badly damage their ability to study Britain's past.
What on earth is the point of posting on this forum if a post about ARCHAEOLOGY is edited down to THREE LINES that are now completley out of context ??????
Originally posted by alianne: Hi, There is a new directive from the Ministry of Justice which will make life more difficult when archaeologists want to study human remains - apparently, if permission is granted the remains must be reburied within two months of their discovery. This was in a Guardian article yesterday.
Sebastian Paine, the chief scientist has posted a response to the concerns over on the Britarch list.
Sunday's article in The Observer ("Anger as burial site digs are blocked": 2 March, p.24) has raised concerns that, following changes introduced last year by the Ministry of Justice in issuing licenses under the Burial Act (see statement in Britarch last June), excavations of archaeological burial sites are being blocked, and that a new requirement to rebury excavated human remains within two months is causing large problems for the study of human remains.
One of these concerns is unfounded, the other very overstated.
As far as we know, no excavation of an archaeological burial site in this country has been or is being blocked as a result of last year's changes; and the requirement to rebury within two months applies only to a small proportion of burial excavations, and is not new - it goes back to the Disused Burial Grounds (Amendment) Act 1981.
However these changes have created problems and uncertainties. The archaeological and scientific study of human remains is important to our understanding of our past, and archaeologists have a good record in dealing with the ethical issues and human sensitivities involved. Subject to appropriate safeguards, it is important that archaeologists have enough time to study excavated archaeological human remains properly, and it would be regrettable if requirements to rebury made it impossible to apply new techniques such as DNA and stable isotopes to important groups of human remains excavated in the past.
English Heritage has for the last nine months been working with the Ministry of Justice, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and sector representatives, including a representative from CBA, to try to resolve these problems. They result from a review of laws which are old and unclear, and it will take a little time to find the right way forward; but we are optimistic that a good outcome can be found.
And now I know a new word as well! 
