Digging up human remains in the UK

[Marc Berger]

dignity bound and tied up in gravitas. Where to next? How about the Valetta convention and how the bodies got dug up in the first place. Not something that was considered in this world of the moj http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.u...policy.pdf. That valetta expects suitably qualified archaeologists to do the digging up which is what we do but then find that we have another law concerned with the opposite of excavation: "rebury". So what was the point of having suitably qualified archaeologists doing the digging up. Is it that when archaeologists "rebury" we have a special way. Is it that we should use all the pictures and measurements that we took to precisely align the remains in an identical burial environment so the remains may carry on their journey into taphonomy. Is excavation supposed to be a total destruction event used to justify all manner of expenses?

Reburying kind feels like we are not supposed to do the digging up in the first place-preservation in situ. The burial acts dont mention archaeologists which kinda means its licences are intended for anybody with a right to the reburial ceremony. That we should leave it to somebody who has been granted a licence and they have been granted a licence because that is part of the ceremony of eventual reburial and a journey of the body into oblivion (which obviously wasn't accomplished the moment when they died). That we might notice the angle of the hip and the fusing of some cusps and the severe case of anthrax is cause us archaeologists are odd and very rude.

Graveyards are funny things. Society wants to bury bodies in them to disappear, dust to dust so to speak, yet archaeologists or rather the hangers on to archaeologists like to go around claiming them as archaeological resources, sticking on preservation orders, listing, scheduling and claiming all manner of archaeological significances. Yet the very human archaeology was put there probably as not to decay to dust.....but unfortunately some of the buggers like bits to fossilise or dodge the slings and arrows of solution and mineralisation...and it has concerned me why some cremation practises went out of their way to burn the bodies just so they still had a few bits of bone amongst the ashes and then contain them in a pot and then bury the pot in the ground to...conserve them so maybe society does want the remains to ...remain. bizarre.

Oh and I am a commercial archaeologists, no salary, no pension, no contingency, dependant on what turns up. I have to find a living from this. Folks what I want to know is should you clean the soil from out of the skull or leave it there. I am a leave it there unless somebody pays me type of a archaeologist and don't get to leave it up to the site director/supervisor to ignore or at best make up a philosophy . Remember with dignity and gravitas.