Serious question, sorry!

[snooper]

Does anybody know when grave robbing turns into archaeology?

Let me amplify that.

If I want to dig my granny up and move her to a different graveyard, I need all kinds of legal authority and I may not remove anything from whatever was buried with her.

When an archaeologist digs up a skeleton from a burial, (s)he takes all the grave goods (and sometimes the remains) and puts them in a museum.

How long does a body have to lie in the grave before an archaeologist can dig it up with impunity?

I'm sure somebody here knows.

 

[SnoopDog]

Well I don't know but don't you think that it must be a loooooong time before so????
And I suppose that before something is labeled as archeology, it has to be some kind of 'general interest', you know what I mean.
Anyway, be sure to get specific information from...I don't know who....but probably all info you get on here might not suffice.
But if you want to just 'move' her, why would you 'keep' something???? I mean.....oh well.
Snoopy, from snoop to snoop

 

[dr_mabeuse]

This is actually a pretty hot topic in archaeology, especially in American archaeology/anthropology where native Americans have demanded return of disinterred ancestral remains for proper burial. It's a sore issue in Israel too, where ultra-conservative religious groups consider any disinterment to be a criminal act and insist that all human remains be given a religious burial. They've shut down a number of digs by protests and legal actions.

I would think that a minimum requirement would be that there be no living relatives of the body being exhumed, i.e., no one who would have legal control of the remains. Other than that, I don't know.

---dr.M.

 

[SensualCealy]

This is kinda weird, but not to me... my father use to be a caretaker of a cemetary and for almost 10 yrs I lived within the grounds of one of the most beautiful piecefull areas in my city.

Now to get to business, you would still have legal hurdles to overcome. It is illegal for anyone to exhume a body without legal documents. You will have to give just cause as to why you want her body moved, and moving her just because you are moving to a new area isnt good enough.

Im not sure if the archelogical aspect would work but usually in a grave yard most people know whos there and why. There isnt much to find out unless you think she may have been murdered, then if you can come up with enough information to back up your claim, the police can exhume her.

I would look in the library or on line and see if you can find any info pertaining to the Cemetary organization in your area, most belong to a group that they are governed under.

Good luck and happy digging,
Cealy

 

[oggbashan]

Does anybody know when grave robbing turns into archaeology?

How long does a body have to lie in the grave before an archaeologist can dig it up with impunity?

I'm sure somebody here knows.

Depends on your local laws. In the UK no archaeologist can disturb any grave 'with impunity'. If human remains are found in any excavation, archaaeological or not, work stops until the authorities decide whether the remains are recent or ancient.

If it is in a graveyard, the relatives have to be notified of the intention to move the body and their consent has to be given. If the exhumation is at the request of the Police to aid in solving a crime they prefer to have the relatives' consent - unless the relatives did the dirty deed.

If the remains are identifiable e.g. in a downed aircraft from WWII, a specialist unit removes the remains for re-burial in a cemetery. Whether RAF or Luftwaffe, the remains will be buried with military ceremony.

If the bones are old they still have to be treated with respect and if they have to be moved they will be re-interred in consecrated ground. The Museum of London has 10,000 plus skeletons from a mass grave at Spitalfields Market. Once examined, which will take about 5 years because of the quantity, the skeletons will be buried in consecrated ground.

It depends on local country or state legislation. Finding human remains can cause such problems on a building site that unscrupulous builders have been known to rebury the bones without telling anyone. They couldn't keep 10,000 bodies concealed, nor to be fair the contractors at Spitalfields did they try. They cooperated fully with the authorities and the archaeologists and assisted even though the archaeology delayed work by weeks.

Og

 

[Wills]

Does anybody know when grave robbing turns into archaeology?

How long does a body have to lie in the grave before an archaeologist can dig it up with impunity?

Grave robbing never turns into archeology.

Many grave robbers would proclaim to be archeologists - their purpose is turn a profit by finding and selling a rare artifact.

Many Archeologists are accused of being grave robbers because they disturb / dig in 'hallowed ground'.

Cultural values are important here. A place that is a burial site to an indigenous culture has a different 'cultural value' to finding bones in the scrub or the excavation for a building.

In all cases permits are required to excavate remains. The UNESCO convention of 1970 ended wholesale archeological digging without pre-dig research, justification and permits. The UNESCO agreement has been adopted by most countries. In most cases permits will not be issued for digs in 'cultural or historic burial sites'. Where such digs do take place it is generally because remains have been uncovered through spreading urbanisation.

 

[snooper]

Thanks Og and Wills.

For those who misinterpreted me, no, I don't want to move my granny.

It arose because there is a program in the UK called "Time Team" and they were cheerfully digging up bodies from the 15th and 16th Centuries, and not from a battlefield but from a forgotten graveyard. I am sure from the dating that those must have been buried with due Christian ceremony and I wondered if there were any limits on this thing.

Then I started playing with the Erotic Horror idea of an archaeologist who digs up a body that comes back to life; sort of "Incest with my Egyptian mummy" idea, and there didn't seem to be any background I could find on the internet on this.

I'll chase the UNESCO rules.

 

[oggbashan]

Thanks Og and Wills.

For those who misinterpreted me, no, I don't want to move my granny.

It arose because there is a program in the UK called "Time Team" and they were cheerfully digging up bodies from the 15th and 16th Centuries, and not from a battlefield but from a forgotten graveyard. I am sure from the dating that those must have been buried with due Christian ceremony and I wondered if there were any limits on this thing.

Then I started playing with the Erotic Horror idea of an archaeologist who digs up a body that comes back to life; sort of "Incest with my Egyptian mummy" idea, and there didn't seem to be any background I could find on the internet on this.

I'll chase the UNESCO rules.

"Time Team" makes everything LOOK simple.

Before they can do what they show on TV they have to go through the same procedures as any other archaeologists but they make it look as if they don't.

The professional archaeologists involved with 'Time Team' would stop any digging if the rules were broken. The preparation for one of their digs takes months of paperwork and requires licences for the excavation. 'Time Team' is popular archaeology but is conducted with the same professional standards as any other archaeological work. The skill is in the editing to make the programme interesting, immediate and apparently spontaneous.

Those involved are experts in their field. There is argument in the archaelogical world about the morality of 'Time Team's' approach. It appears that it is worthwhile because it gives the general public a feel for the importance of archaeology and respect for our buried past but some people are still worried that the approach doesn't appear serious enough. It is serious. It is conducted to the same standards as any other dig. It just doesn't look as if it is.

Og

 

[A7inchPhildo]

So you want to do a really really old Necrophilia story? Some paraphilias I just will never want to understand.

Archaeology is the primary means for reconstructing the human past when there is no written record (generally, more than 5,000 years ago), when the written record is incomplete, or when the written record is biased. The material remains of human activity often have aesthetic, political, and monetary value. Consequently, many people identify archaeology with the collection of political or economic treasures. This is promulgated, for example, in popular movies dealing with the exploits of fictional archaeologists.

 

[Dirt Man]

Is there anything more worthless to think about than some person, or persons digging in the dirt for any other reason than to acquire earthworms as bait for fishing, I sure don't know of it.

As Always
I Am the
Dirt Man

 

[Seattle Zack]

Recently, there was a court ruling here in Washington in favor of the archaeologists regarding "Kennewick Man," the bones of a Native American buried some 9,000 years ago.

(from the Seattle P-I)
The scientific community should be allowed to study the 9,000-year- old human bones known as Kennewick Man, a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel ruled yesterday, rejecting an appeal by several tribes claiming kinship and seeking to rebury the remains.

"I'm absolutely thrilled that the court has affirmed the public's right to knowledge and rejected this attempt, on religious grounds, to limit scientific inquiry," said Jim Chatters, the archaeologist who identified the remains after they eroded out of the banks of the Columbia River in 1996.

"We're very disappointed," said Rob Roy Smith, a Seattle attorney who represented the Colville Tribe and some of the other Northwest Indian tribes in court, arguing that federal law gave them the authority to determine disposition of Kennewick Man.

The three-judge panel, with an opinion written by Judge Ronald Gould, upheld a District Court decision that the tribes have shown no direct kinship to the remains and have no such authority.

Based on the court-authorized studies already done -- oddly enough -- to determine whether the tribes had the legal right to prohibit such studies, Kennewick Man has been determined by radiocarbon dating to be anywhere from 8,340 to 9,200 years old. Court-authorized DNA studies, done over tribal objections, were inconclusive.

Kennewick Man roamed the prehistoric Columbia Basin and, according to scientists, may hold clues to the many mysteries about how humans first came to the Americas. He has distinctive bone structure dissimilar to modern Native Americans and is believed to have died in his early 40s, though not from the stone spear point found embedded in his hip.

The Kennewick Man case challenges how the Department of Interior and other federal agencies had been interpreting a 1990 law, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

According to the 9th Circuit opinion, Interior mistakenly had been giving the tribes authority over all prehistoric remains based on the "extreme" definition of Native American as any "persons predating European settlers" -- meaning even, say, the remains of a Viking who died here prior to Columbus' arrival.

"We cannot conclude that Congress intended to pursue an absurd result," Gould wrote. The law, the court decided, should be interpreted to demand that the tribes first must show a direct relationship to these human remains before they claim authority over them.

 

[snooper]

... Archaeology is the primary means for reconstructing the human past when there is no written record (generally, more than 5,000 years ago), ...

A paeleontologist acquaintance assures me that writing about anything happening less than 10 million years ago is mere journalism.