Introduction: Mortuary Archaeology in Contemporary Society

Abstract

The 1980s and 1990s saw dramatic sea changes in the archaeological engagement with the dead in Australasia and North America, typified by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990. However, it has only been far more recently that different, distinctive, but still fundamental challenges to the archaeological study, display, and curation of mortuary remains have affected the UK, Europe, and Scandinavia. While classic examples of disputes over the archaeological excavation of human remains have deep roots in the late twentieth century, the last decade has seen significant shifts and challenges for mortuary archaeology (see Sayer 2010a). In this regard, the UK situation is instructive, if not necessarily typical. At the turn of the millennium, the Working Group on Human Remains (whose final report was published in 2007) created a strong political climate which encouraged unconditional returns of ancestral remains acquired from elsewhere in the world and held in British museums. This was rejected by many institutions which had to balance such edicts against their acquisition policy (DCMS 2003), but its impact was to encourage a more open atmosphere of discussion. Slightly later, the impact of the 2005 DCMS ‘Guidance for the Care of Human Remains in Museums’ provided a strong (if not binding) steer in terms of aspects of curatorial acquisition, research protocols, and collections management advice, designed to systematize best practice. Importantly, it enshrined a three-fold conceptual principle that human remains are of ‘unique status, are often of high research value, and should be treated with dignity and respect’ (DCMS 2005: 16). This document provided an important mandate for archaeological excavation, research, and curation, at a time when calls for repatriation and reburial were on the rise. However, it was an ‘aspirant code of ethics’ which as Redfern and Clegg (2013: 2) argue, was not enforceable: relying on the professionalism of both individuals and institutions for its implementation. (In addition, the 2004 Human Tissue Act also impacted on those institutions holding human remains or fragments of them, less than 100 years old, though archaeological examples of this are rare.) Some UK museums began repatriating parts of their ethnographic collections much earlier than this: Besterman (2004: 3) reported that Manchester Museum had decided to return human remains acquired as recently as 1992.