When I pass away, I want to be buried with a tree, so that my descendants can carve their names into it and I can know them a little bit forever. My sister once proclaimed that she wants her funeral to be a masquerade ball so that when someone opens her casket, expecting an elaborate prank, it would really just be her dead body. I know friends who want to be buried by family or have their ashes spread in the ocean or be kept in an urn and looked after by their children. Morbidly or sarcastically or jokingly, whatever the fashion, everyone has thought of where they will go when they set sail toward the light. So what becomes of the remains left without a voice?
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Nestled in the William E. Upjohn Exhibit Wing of the Kelsey Archaeological Museum are the human remains of a mummified child. Their name, favorite toy and loving caretaker, is left a mystery. Researchers at the museum write on the associated plaque that the child lived around the beginning of the Roman occupation in Egypt, when Roman census records showed very high rates of child and infant mortality. The museum received the mummified remains in 1971.
In a project led by Engineering student Grant K. Martin in 2002, CT scans revealed that the mummification of the child in the Kelsey was primarily made up of cloth, rather than actual human remains. The scans showed that wood was also part of the bundle, meaning that the child’s body wasn’t strong; whether the result of a sickness or because the family had to wait to mummify their child is unclear.
Now the child, who was once as alive as you or me, lies behind the glass of a display case close to ancient funerary items in the exhibit.
As an archaeology student at the University of Michigan, I can admit I find it upsetting that the mummified remains are out in the open when the child was supposed to be entombed forever, to rest peacefully and undisturbed. I think of the family that spent weeks working to mummify the child. It was jarring to see the mummified remains in the museum. In class, professors reiterate over and over again that the human remains we study are people, not artifacts, and that they must be treated with the utmost respect and dignity. The Kelsey pledges this in their policies on the stewardship of human remains, emphasizing that access to the remains in their possession are heavily monitored by the museum’s oversight committee who must carefully review each access request — even those of the museum’s personnel staff and curators.
Displays of human remains are extremely controversial within the archaeological community. As archaeology moves into the future, ethics take more of a forefront in the field and in the classroom. Learning about how old archaeologists would use their research to enforce race and gender-based stereotypes, and provide evidence for how women have always, even in the stone age, been the weaker gender, has become a preface to introductory courses in the subject. Often, guests are brought into class or to field schools to help students understand how they affect the communities they work in. Archaeology is destructive, and that destruction does not exist in a vacuum at the dig site — it affects people in the modern age, too. Educators are trying to steer new archaeologists away from the old archaeology and urge them to value the voices of the community they work in, wherever that may be in the world, above their research.
In every class, every field school, every discussion with outside organizations, the handling and treatment of human remains is dissected from every angle, and we always end up at different conclusions. As I dive deeper into the field of archaeology, I can see how research on human remains can yield information that is just not accessible through other means: It can expose sexist biases old archaeologists had when studying burials, provide evidence in cases of crime from decades ago and give insight into the individual’s life rather than the society they lived in. It tells the stories, not of historical figures like Julius Caesar or Charlemagne, but of the actual creators of culture — everyday people. However, I have concerns about how different communities around the world feel about archaeological sites in their backyards. In some instances, bioarchaeology can be a source of pride and connect people to the past. In other cases, it can be seen as a step up from grave robbing, because in the past it was exactly that. Each community has a different view, and it is essential that as archaeologists, we listen first and foremost to how the community connected to these sites, artifacts and remains feel. Old archaeology was about finding the biggest, most valuable item at the site and throwing the dirt back in once everything else was sold for parts. The knowledge and research that’s been lost because of that is atrocious — not to mention the damage done to the communities they worked in. Now, their spoils are floating around museums across the globe, with no context on how to treat these remains with dignity and no way to confidently connect them to the culture they came from. The mummified child in the Kelsey is an example of a problem modern archaeologists have struggled to address.
Some museums have decided to remove human remains from displays altogether due to these ethical and cultural concerns. For example, The Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University has removed more than 113 human remains, including Egyptian mummified remains, decorated skulls and their infamous shrunken human head display.
Archaeology is an intense passion for me. The idea that I can discover a personal detail about someone who lived a couple millenia ago from a few cut marks on animal bone is incredible. When connections can be made between the past and the present, or when methods from thousands of years ago can be incorporated into the future unfolding in front of us, I feel so much hope about what our world will become. Every time I have heard of archaeological cases where ancient women were in power, or where there was a lack of inequality between sexes, it inspires me — for a few minutes, I feel invincible. I feel less alone with archaeology. It tells a million different stories of people who were different from me, but felt the same things, had the same fears and loved the same way. People amaze me; in every time period, in every place, there was always passion, always creativity, always family. Even as the circumstances changed, every person has felt grief and rage and love and found ways to express that, even if we don’t know now what those ways were.
Time is a tapestry, with each vertical thread representing the inherently human patterns across millenia and each horizontal thread a life. We are bound to our place and to our patterns. An archaeologist’s job is to look at the tapestry — the art it forms, the way threads come together like people, the way they fall apart like empires, the spinsters who sat by the spinning wheel, creating the history we have today. Archaeologists examine each knot, each string, each pattern. The design it creates is unmistakably beautiful. When given the full tapestry, we can ask: Who are we? What makes us special? What history are we creating today?
But we must also ask, if archaeology also requires running a knife along that thread and tearing the art to pieces, how can we ensure the safety and protection of the very thing we are tearing apart? What use is it to know the past if we use it to justify hurting people in the present?
Every aspect of archaeology has something enjoyable in it, but the ethics are questionable at best and deteriorating with time at worst. As we move away from the past and weave our future, there can be a place for archaeology. It’s in the archaeologist’s hands to ensure that every scoop of dirt, every scrape of the trowel has a purpose. We need to ensure that as we create the future of the field, we center inclusion and prioritize the voices we unearth, as well as the modern communities we garner this information for. Archaeology doesn’t have to die; it can choose its fate as long as it allows others to choose theirs.
Statement Contributor Meghan Dwan can be reached at mkdwan@umich.edu.
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