Episode 36

The Unsettling Business of Curating Human Remains

Here at The Dirt, we talk a lot about the things that people leave behind, but we’ve not spent much time talking about what’s left behind of the people themselves. That changes this week, when Anna and Amber discuss excavating, storing, studying, and selling archaeological human remains, and take a look at some of the legal and ethical challenges involved. Content note: this episode contains descriptions of violence done to deceased people and discussion of trafficked human remains.

To learn more about the topics discussed this week (and be advised that there are a lot of images of archaeological human remains included), check out:

They Sell Skulls Online?! A Review of Internet Sales of Human Skulls on eBay and the Laws in Place to Restrict Sales (Journal of Forensic Sciences)

Human Skulls Are Being Sold Online, But Is It Legal? (National Geographic)

FAQ (Pandora’s Box UK)

The Long Ethical Arc of Displaying Human Remains (Atlas Obscura)

Human Remains: The Sacred, Museums And Archaeology (Public Archaeology)

Prof. Bob Muckle on Twitter

Mourning an Aboriginal death (Creative Spirits)

Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (Wikipedia)

Grave Injustice: The American Indian Repatriation Movement and NAGPRA

NAGPRA as a Paradigm: The Historical Context and Meaning of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 2011 (Proceedings of the Ninth Native American Symposium)

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) (via National Parks Service)

Repatriation and Traditional Care (Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology)

Repatriation Office (Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History)

Give Me My Father’s Body (1986), and the Dollop episode about Minik

The Basics of Section 106 Review (National Trust for Historic Preservation)

NAGPRA: Section 3 vs. ARPA vs. NHPA: Section 106 (National Parks Service)

Full Text of National Historic Preservation Act of 1966

A Citizen’s Guide To Section 106 Review (Advisory Council on Historic Preservation)

How the archaeological review behind the Dakota Access Pipeline went wrong (The Conversation)

Israeli Law, Jewish Law and the Archaeological Excavation of Tombs (International Journal of Cultural Property)

Israeli Archaeologists Dodge the Law to Study Human Remains (Ha’aretz)

Inside India's Underground Trade in Human Remains (Wired)

Bones of contention: The global trade in archaeological and ethnographic human remains (Saving Antiquities for Everyone)

This Archaeologist Uses Instagram To Track The Human Skeleton Trade (Forbes)

The Insta-Dead: The rhetoric of the human remains trade on Instagram (Internet Archaeology)

Meet the Living People Who Collect Dead Human Remains (Vice)

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The Dirt Podcast
Archaeology, Anthropology, and our shared human past.

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The Dirt Podcast

As science communicators in anthropology and archaeology, we hosts of The Dirt acknowledge that we hold a position of considerable privilege and opportunity, and commit ourselves to continuous learning, unlearning and reflection. We recognize that our disciplines, as well as our own lives, are rooted in and propped up by settler colonialism, white supremacy, and dispossession.

We now reside on the stolen ancestral territory of the Shawnee and Haudenosaunee and on the lands of the Muscogee and Cherokee Nations, but over its lifetime, The Dirt has also been produced on the unceded traditional territory of the Piscataway Conoy and Cedarville Band of Piscataway Indians, as well as that of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, Patwin and Miwok peoples and all those dispossessed by Cession 296. We offer our show as a platform for Indigenous scholarship, history, and cultural expression, through citation and conversation, and we welcome the opportunity to host and compensate Indigenous scholars of archaeology and anthropology as interview guests.

Likewise, we encourage all listeners who reside in settler-colonial states to learn about on whose land they reside, their place in the ongoing process of colonization, and how to contribute materially to reparations and Indigenous sovereignty.