Grave Robbing Research Articles

Seis paddle dolls halladas en una tumba del Reino Medio y su patio en Dra Abu el-Naga

"During the 2017 and 2018 campaigns at Dra Abu el-Naga, six paddle dolls were discovered by the Spanish archaeological mission inside a Middle Kingdom tomb (EU 1018) and its courtyard, southwest of the entrance to the courtyard of the tomb of Djehuty (TT 11). Although they were found in plundered levels related to ancient grave robbery, they come from a funerary archaeological context in which there is also evidence of the period. Several of these female figurines stand out especially for their iconographic motives, unique examples of this type not documented in other paddle dolls. This study presents an overall assessment of these unpublished female figurines and contributes to our deepening knowledge"

The Inheriting and Developing of Online Grave Robbers Novel to the Ancient Grave Robbers Narrative ― Take Ghost Lamp(鬼吹燈) and The Graver Robbers’ Chronicles(盜墓筆記) for example

The Inheriting and Developing of Online Grave Robbers Novel to the Ancient Grave Robbers Narrative ― Take Ghost Lamp(鬼吹燈) and The Graver Robbers’ Chronicles(盜墓筆記) for example

"Osler Warned": Was William Osler a Grave Robber While at McGill or Was He a Victim (or Perpetrator) of One Final Practical Joke?

Bodysnatching was an illegal way to procure cadavers for anatomical dissection before the existence of effective anatomy legislation. As knowledge of anatomy was fundamental to medical practice, many famous nineteenth century physicians turned a blind eye to this activity or even participated. Sir William Osler, perhaps the most revered physician of all time, received his medical degree from McGill University in 1872 and then served as pathologist at Montreal General Hospital from 1874 to 1884, where he began a career which culminated in him becoming both the first Professor of Medicine at Johns Hopkins and then Regius Professor at Oxford. Quebec had been slow to enact effective anatomy legislation, and most of the cadavers in the McGill anatomy laboratory were resurrected; Osler's close friend and Anatomy Demonstrator Francis Shepherd was convicted of this offence on several occasions. In 1940, a letter was discovered in the archives at the McGill's William Osler Library, purportedly written in 1880, accusing Osler of being a grave robber while in Montreal. My paper dissects the letter to assess its credibility in the historical context of Osler's early life and the fact that Osler was a lifelong notorious practical joker with his own pseudonym, Dr. Egerton Yorrick Davis, who helped with his pranks. The provenance of the letter is analyzed and the paper explores, using historical context and forensic handwriting analysis, whether this letter is a revenge-motivated practical joke played on him by one of his famous colleagues or represents Osler's last practical joke for posterity. Clin. Anat. 31:632-640, 2018. © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation by Daina Ramey Berry

Reviewed by: The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation by Daina Ramey Berry Gregory D. Smithers (bio) The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation. By Daina Ramey Berry. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017. Pp. 261. $27.95 cloth) Daina Ramey Berry's impressive new book, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh, focuses on how enslaved people "recalled and responded [End Page 521] to their monetary value throughout the course of their lives" (p. 2). Berry's elegantly written book is part intellectual history, part social history, and part of the "new economic history" (p. 3). She expertly weaves these methodological approaches together in six well-conceived chapters that follow the life cycle of enslaved people in the United States from the early republic to the outbreak of the Civil War. Berry's work is part of a large and still growing historical literature that focuses our attention on issues of gender, sexuality, and reproduction in American slavery. She joins a conversation that includes recent works by Stephanie M. H. Camp, Jennifer Morgan, Walter Johnson, Thavolia Glymph, Edward Baptist, Sasha Turner, and Katherine Paugh. These historians have deepened our understanding of the coerciveness associated with American and Caribbean slavery, with particular attention to the violence associated with slave breeding practices and the violent separation of enslaved family members. Berry's voice in this conversation is forceful, clear, and compelling. This is a powerful book. She begins before life even starts, observing that an enslaved woman's value was routinely tied to her perceived ability to reproduce future generations of enslaved laborers. For slave owners, human reproduction was a source of wealth and a reminder to enslaved people of how the master class perceived their value in monetary terms. A key driver of economic prosperity in the slave South was, therefore, the reproductive capacities of enslaved women, a point that is not new to Berry's analysis but which is nonetheless well made in this book. In the context of this cruel system, even the unborn had monetary value, as plantation owners and slave traders factored potential values into their projected profits. As she takes us through the life cycle of the enslaved, Berry reveals how the assessed value of enslaved men and women rose as they matured through childhood, into adolescence, and reached their peak values during adult years. Over the course of these years, enslaved people became acutely aware of their enslaved status, something that children became painfully conscious of when they or a parent was sold away. For young women, the terror of enslavement [End Page 522] rose precipitously during puberty. As young girls experience menstruation and became young women, rape and forced breeding shadowed them, a violent reminder of how slavery commodified black bodies and their perceived reproductive capabilities for the financial gain of the master class. The commodification of black bodies did not only involve rape and coercive forms of reproduction; an enslaved person's value, while declining during their elderly years, continued to have financial value after death. The "postmortem commodification" of black bodies has gained growing scholarly attention in recent years (pp. 93, 99). Berry's analysis of grave robbing practices and the "domestic cadaver trade" is, therefore, a reminder of how medical schools profited and accumulated knowledge from the bodies of recently deceased enslaved people (p. 154). The Price for Their Pound of Flesh makes an important contribution to our historical understanding of the commodification of black bodies. Berry's analysis deserves a wide audience. Readers will find her approach to this topic engaging, and her weaving of African American voices into her narrative enlightening. However, some will be left wanting deeper dives into the economics of enslavement, while others will lament a missed opportunity to discuss the historical significance of "breeding" and the language associated with it ("bucks" and "wenches") with the level of detail this topic deserves. Indeed, basing such analysis on a single email exchange with another historian will strike some readers as a failure to adequately ground this aspect of...

Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums

Bone Rooms reconstructs the rise of physical anthropology in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. It aims to deepen understanding of the “cultural significance” of the skeletal collections created by scholars and museum curators (p. 14). Samuel James Redman maps a shift from an emphasis on racial classification of these remains to their use in efforts to understand evolution and early mankind. Two questions guide the discussion: What explains the “bone craze” of this period? and, How did this shift in emphasis occur? By the early twentieth century, U.S. museums had acquired an estimated 500,000 skeletal remains, largely Native American (Megan J. Highet, “Body Snatching and Grave Robbing,” History and Anthropology, Dec. 2005, pp. 415–40). Redman argues that the collections’ scope reflects anthropologists’ response to the myth of the “rapidly disappearing” Indian, rushing to fill their cabinets with bones acquired opportunistically from graves, building sites, world's fairs, medical schools, and battlegrounds (p. 72). He suggests the changing interpretation of these remains reflected institutional and biographical factors, including the decline in eugenics’ respectability with the rise of Nazism, the influence of the African American anthropologist William Montague Cobb's search for racial similarity rather than difference, and the rise of the Franz Boas school that emphasized cultural relativism rather than race.

Remembering the Dead in the Ancient Near East: Recent Contributions from Bioarchaeology and Mortuary Archaeology

Remembering the Dead in the Ancient Near East: Recent Contributions from Bioarchaeology and Mortuary Archaeology

The Allan Burns mummies: A history and future prospect of an anatomical collection.

Acquiring adequate resources for anatomy education has represented a challenge throughout the discipline's long history. A significant number of collections housed in anatomy departments contain human tissue of unknown provenance with some obtained in morally dubious ways. This paper outlines the history and future prospects of one such anatomical assemblage – the Burns Anatomical Collection, currently housed at the University of Maryland (UM). The collection originally contained more than 1000 anatomically prepared mummified human remains. They were produced by the renowned Scottish anatomist Allan Burns in Glasgow in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The prepared cadavers became a commodity and after Burns’ death, were acquired by his pupil Granville Pattison, who later sold them to the UM. While the origin of these human remains is unknown, historical data suggests that most of the cadavers for the collection were obtained through grave robbing. While intensely used in anatomy teaching in the nineteenth century, specimens from the collection should now be treated primarily as historical artifacts, appropriate only for teaching medical history and ethics. Other perspectives may include repatriating and reburying the human remains and providing a memorial service. Most importantly, this collection and others similar to it should initiate dialog and reflection on the ethical aspects of the past and present medical practice.

Bioarchaeological approaches to looting: A case study from Sudan

Looting is a significant destructive force at archaeological sites; grave robbing, in particular, leaves human remains and cultural heritage irreparably damaged. Al-Widay, a necropolis excavated by the Oriental Institute Nubian Expedition near the Fourth Cataract region of the Nile River, is a site with important implications for understanding the taphonomy of archaeological looting. Over 60% of the tumuli excavated at Al-Widay were disturbed in antiquity, making the site an ideal case study for examining the effects of looting on ancient human skeletal remains. Our research applies bioarchaeological methods of quantifying fragmentation to an assessment of “Culturally Significant Anatomical Regions” in order to evaluate the nature and degree of human disturbance activity at this necropolis. At Al-Widay, site reports document looted graves (n=22), unlooted graves (n=14), and a sample of graves (n=42), for which the level of disturbance is unknown. Fisher's exact test showed significant differences in the bioarchaeological patterning of looted versus unlooted contexts, and a cross-validated logistic regression model was used to sort five unknown graves into looted and unlooted categories, providing a quantitative bioarchaeological method for the identification of looting.

Hyena high jinks

Hyena high jinks

James Moores Ball: Ophthalmologist, medical historian, bibliophile.

James Moores Ball (1862-1929) was an ophthalmologist in St. Louis, Missouri, who excelled as a medical historian and collector of rare and historic books about the history of anatomy. During his lifetime, he was best known as the author of a comprehensive, authoritative, and popular textbook titled Modern Ophthalmology First published in 1904, there were five further editions. Ball was very interested in the history of anatomy and wrote two books on this subject, the first being a biography of Andreas Vesalius, one of the earliest in English, and the second a history of the resurrection men or grave robbers who sold corpses to professors of anatomy and surgery for teaching purposes. His legacy today is the 470 volumes of his personal library, which are now in the Archives and Rare Books department of the Becker Medical Library of the Washington University School of Medicine. These texts are one of their major collections, concentrating on the history of anatomy, beginning with a first edition of Vesalius's De Humani Corporis Fabrica and holding many important and beautiful landmark volumes of anatomical atlases.

What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American G.I. in World War II France

MARY LOUISE ROBERTS What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2013, 368 pp.The intimate relationships that developed between American soldiers and French women during the Second World War as represented in American films such as Catch Me If You Can (2002) or Words (2012) are shown to be always romantic, adventurous, and ending up with the formation of a family. By contrast, French films that deal with the same subject depict the harsher realities of such connections. In Leon Morin, pretre (1961), for example, the main character, a French woman, is heading home with her daughter when two GI's they meet on the way decide to escort them, one offering to carry her bag. When they arrive home, the aforementioned soldier insists that the woman accompany him upstairs, and then proceeds to slowly force himself upon her, being stopped only by the woman's cries and his friend's intervention1.Mary Louise Roberts' book, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France, is concerned precisely with the difficult encounters such as the one described above, which were made possible by the Allied invasion of in 1944. Amply documented, the author shows an impressive command of both American and French archival sources, as well as of the existing secondary literature dealing with the epoch.Right from first pages, the reader gets a sense of the taboo subject the book is dealing with when Roberts mentions that her late father felt uneasy with the prospects of his daughter unearthing what went wrong in Normandy (xii). However, unlike other recent revisionist historians who have dealt with WII, Roberts does not question the morality of the war2, but rather certain decisions and behaviors of American troops following D-Day.Divided into three parts, Romance, Prostitution and Rape, the book successfully brings light on the development of sexual connections - both consensual and non-consensual - between American soldiers and French women, placing them in the context of twentieth century French politics and international relations. The notion that the personal is political has become common knowledge today, yet scholars who take note of this tend to restrict it to the policies of the nation state. By going beyond this trend, Roberts' study makes for an important addition to the literature on the history of sexuality.The first part of the book deals with the American invasion of and the early contacts between the American army and the French civilian population. When dealing with the invasion, Roberts uses techniques from Alltagsgeschichte, the Annales School type of cultural history, postcolonial and gender studies to go beyond standard military descriptions of the subject. She is concerned with the manner in which both the Americans and the French reacted, and successively adapted to the sights, sounds and smells, of war torn Normandy.Nonetheless, one cannot feel but wish that when handling such a subject, Roberts would pay more attention to certain matters instead of others. For example, when dealing with the way that Normans dealt with the dead bodies of American and German soldiers, she notes that the French universally showed respect for the fallen Americans and nothing but contempt for the Germans, so much so that even small children took part in grave robbing. Considering that Roberts previously showed that Americans received a rather ambiguous reception in Normandy, one is struck by the stark contrast between the attitude showed towards the living and the dead. The motive for this differentiation is left unanswered, and the reader is left puzzled. …

Facsimiles of Flesh

AbstractEd Gein was a serial killer, grave robber, and body snatcher who made a lampshade from human skin. Now consider the detective who found that lampshade. Let's suppose that he would never want to own it; however, he does find that he wants a synthetic one just like it – a perfect replica. We assume that there is something morally problematic about the detective having such a replica. We then argue that, given as much, we can reach the surprising conclusion that it's morally problematic to consume realistic fake‐meat products. After explaining why we might the detective's replica lampshade morally problematic, we clarify the analogy between the replica and fake meat products. Then, we defend it against a number of objections, the most notable one being we can sever any association between fake meat and the real stuff without moral cost. We conclude by pointing out that our argument generalises: if it works, then there is something morally problematic about many fake animal products, including fake leather and fur.

Rejecting Racism in Any Form: Latter-day Saint Rhetoric, Religion, and Repatriation

Abstract The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints issued an online statement in February 2012 rejecting all racism, in any form. The statement followed nearly two centuries of tortured struggles with racism promulgated by church leaders, instituted in everyday practices, and integrated into Latter-day Saint scriptures. While rhetoric renouncing racism from the LDS Church is a welcome step, religions need to compliment language undoing racism with concrete actions. This article examines ways that the LDS Church may work towards actually ending various forms of racism. It focuses attention on the role of settler colonial grave robbery, the loot from which was used in the production of Mormon scriptures advocating white privilege. These acts of violence against Native people continue into the present, as illustrated by the recent occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge by Mormon militiamen, extensive trade networks in antiquities in Mormon communities, unethical uses of Native American DNA, and ongoing efforts by Utah legislators to undermine tribal sovereignty. Current rhetoric condemning racism appears to serve as a mask for the continued imbalance of power in a land-rich institution in which the highest positions of authority remain exclusively in the hands of white men. Reciprocal acts of repatriation, initiated but never finished by early LDS Church leaders, need to be re-activated if Mormons are to effectively repudiate racism in its many forms.

Kannjawou par Lyonel Trouillot

Reviews 233 discovery of love has somehow humanized him. Such things may happen in life, but not convincingly in this novel. Florida State University, emeritus William Cloonan Trouillot, Lyonel. Kannjawou. Arles: Actes Sud, 2016. ISBN 978-2-330-05875-3. Pp. 193. 18 a. An impoverished street serves as a microcosm of the whole in Trouillot’s new novel. Following a similar approach used by another Haitian author, Emmelie Prophète in Impasse Dignité (FR 86.6), Trouillot dissects the dynamics and dysfunction of his country via a focused study of a group of friends living in lack on the “rue de l’Enterrement.” Leading up to the local decaying cemetery, this street is not an altogether bad location to inhabit, we are told by Man Jeanne, the novel’s doyenne of sage advice and adages, since its presence and the tinkling sound of grave robbers toiling away in the night are helpful mortality reminders of just how soon all the street’s residents will join the ranks of the dead. The novel’s broader backdrop is a humanitarian occupation of Haiti by various international NGOs with numerous and equally damning references to the American Occupation of the country (1915–1934). Charlemagne Péralte’s contribution as a guerilla fighter during that period is lauded in the text and his photo prominently on display serves as inspiration for the more currently militant minded in the group. The band of five, as the clan is referred to, consists of the narrator, a self-described scribe whose penchant for studying life’s itineraries fuels the journal we are reading, his brother Popol, Wodné, and two sisters Sophonie and Joëlle. Following a brief sketch of the early years of the group’s friendship, the narrative quickly moves to the current status of young adulthood with its limited prospects for future success and overall sense of defeat: “Comment se révolter contre un ennemi qui change sans cesse de ton et de visage?” (21). To push back in some concrete way against the occupation, the friends form a cultural center in an alley, offering books, discussion, and wisdom as dispensed by the local, formally radical university professor, with whom the narrator has formed a bond via shared literature, despite their different class standings. Pivotal in the text is the neighborhood restaurant-bar, the Kannjawou, which serves as a dividing line between the rich NGO administrators who can afford to frequent it and the band of locals whose only member to enter does so through a wait staff door. A perfectly chosen metaphor of irony and class division, the term Kannjawou in creole connotes a vast celebration, a sharing, economically off limits to those of the rue de l’Enterrement in need of it most. The text’s chapters with their evocative style read easily and the panoply of characters and events that appear in its pages does not cease to intrigue: Halefort, the head grave robber arranges a mutually beneficial alliance with the local police while Julio, whose reluctant acceptance of his homosexuality deepens the narrative, walks fatalistically toward his encounters with paying army officers. As touched and concerned readers of this contemporary Haitian exposé, we are left in the end with the narrator’s own uncertainty regarding the future: “Quel soi-même on finit par être, au bout de quel parcours” (16)? University of Colorado Denver Linda Alcott Linguistics edited by Bryan Donaldson Anscombre, Jean-Claude, Évelyne Oppermann-Marsaux, et Amalia RodríguezSomolinos , éd.Médiativité, polyphonie et modalité en français: études synchroniques et diachroniques. Paris: PSN, 2014. ISBN 978-2-87854-609-5. Pp. 268. 17 a. Any utterance carries multiple levels of meaning beyond the core“message”itself, including a speaker’s attitude about the information conveyed, the reliability of the source of that information, and—in some cases—echoes of voices other than that of the speaker. These are the threads that unify the contributions to this volume, dedicated to intersections of three linguistic notions: médiativité, roughly a speaker’s indication of the source and reliability of information (“evidentiality” in the AngloSaxon literature); polyphonie, the presence in an utterance of voices or points of view other...

Leaping to conclusions: archaeology, gender and digital news media

In the autumn of 2013, a discovery was made in the Doganaccia necropolis close to the ancient Etruscan city of Tarquinia. A sepulchre was uncovered, mercifully and unusually unlooted. Inside were the remains of two individuals and a range of grave goods, allowing the tomb to be typologically dated to the late seventh or early sixth century BC. One of the individuals had been cremated, while the other was laid out in a supine position. Both were placed on funeral benches similar to those known from Etruscan tombs across the region (Steingräber 2009). This excavation was as unusual as it was spectacular—the equally vigorous efforts of nineteenth-century enthusiasts (Leighton 2004: 12) and twentieth-century tomb robbers (van Velzen 1999: 180) have left little of the Etruscan burial record undisturbed. Unsurprisingly, there was a great deal of media excitement over the burial, as its excavator, distinguished Etruscan scholar Alessandro Mandolesi, spoke with the press of his impressions of the remains and their relationship to the artefacts found in the tomb. Little of his exact words remain in the public sphere, but the impression he provided to the press was clear in the flurry of media reports that followed his statement. The ensuing media interest and archaeological developments present a number of serious issues for the practice of archaeology in an age in which digital media can magnify the impact of any major discovery. In addition, the interpretation put forward exposed the continued androcentrism inherent in many sub-disciplines of archaeology, which, 30 years on from Conkey and Spector's (1984) transformative publication, remain locked in deeply problematic interpretative patterns. This interpretation of the Tarquinia burial is emblematic of a far wider phenomenon, both within and beyond Italy, which has serious implications for future archaeological practice. This article unpicks both the media storm and interpretative paradigms that characterised this case study, and queries archaeological responsibility and visibility in an age of 24-hour news.

Looters, collectors and a passion for antiquities at the margins of Italian society

Unearthing old objects was for centuries a widespread activity in Italy. Artefacts were removed from the soil and re-incorporated into the social realm as votives, chits and treasure. Women and men knowledgeable about old things and old places were respected repositories of history. The twentieth century brought significant changes to this sphere of cultural activity: archaeology became a professionalized discipline, regulated by the state, and artefacts became scientific objects belonging to the Italian nation. Today, unauthorized excavators risk prosecution, fines and imprisonment. In this paper I ask: What is the effect of state power on the use and circulation of antiquities by unauthorized excavators and collectors? How do the men and women who inhabit the cultural margins distinguish themselves from each other? My analysis draws on ethnographic data and textual analysis of newspaper articles concerning tombaroli or ‘tomb robbers’. I focus on marginalized cultural production, a key dimension that is missing from most accounts of looters.

Appropriating the Bard

The playwrights under scrutiny in Shakespeare's Surrogates, the author informs us, “frequently worked metaphorical violence on corpses that represent the literary corpus.” In selected works by Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, Heiner Müller, Samuel Beckett, Eugene O'Neill, and Tom Stoppard, “adaptation has appeared as grave robbery, skinning, cannibalism, haunting, and even disembodiment.” In effect, “the body of the Bard is broken, sacrificed, consumed.”Rest easy, dear reader: Shakespeare's Surrogates is not as grand guignol as all that, although it does keep to the (sometimes) gruesome theoretical path outlined above. In this very brief study (133 pages without introduction, afterword, notes, and index), Shaw and Brecht tie for first place, with 31 pages each, followed by Müller with 22, Beckett 16, O'Neill 13, and Stoppard 12. All of these playwrights, according to author Sonya Freeman Loftis, have challenged, rewritten, replaced, sought to destroy, tried to forget, or attempted to become William Shakespeare.Brecht, as student and imitator of Shaw—both men “conceived of the act of adaptation as one of violent desecration”—rewrites Coriolanus and Hamlet. Müller, in adapting Macbeth, Titus Andronicus, and especially Hamlet, struggles to “destroy and yet to preserve the [Shakespearean] corpse/corpus of the past”; Loftis examines “cannibalism as a symbol of literary adaptation” in the “highly acclaimed and influential” Hamletmachine. In Beckett, she perceives a movement “from embodiment to disembodiment,” a “desire to forget or erase Shakespeare rather than to remember him.” She sees Long Day's Journey into Night as being “haunted by the memory of O'Neill's father,” a Shakespearean actor, and finds that the character James Tyrone “often stands in for” Shakespeare himself. And as for Stoppard, his Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is his “comic take on performing death and replacing Shakespeare.”Back to the Shaw chapter, whose title is inspired by his essay, “Blaming the Bard,” published in the Saturday Review on 26 September 1896 (and reprinted in Bernard F. Dukore's The Drama Observed [1993], 2:660–66). In this much-expanded version of a similarly titled article published in SHAW 29 (2009), which focused exclusively on Heartbreak House, Loftus widens her net to illustrate, in a handful of works, Shaw's “lifelong struggle to present himself as a cultural surrogate for Shakespeare.” His “attempts to rewrite Shakespeare's canon” include Heartbreak House, Caesar and Cleopatra, Cymbeline Refinished, and Shakes versus Shav. What we have in these works is, in a word, surrogation: “the act of destroying Shakespeare and replacing him with Shaw.”“Under the thin veneer of provocative hyperbole, undeniable egoism, and outrageous metaphor,” writes Loftis, Shaw “attacks what he saw as the primary problems of Shakespeare's canon: aestheticism, fixed morality, romantic ideals, and the passivity that Shaw equated with pessimism.” In support, she quotes from a 1909 letter from Shaw to Lady Gregory, in which he denounces “the old cry of despair—Shakespeare's ‘As flies to wanton boys so are we to the gods: they kill us for their sport’—the most frightful blasphemy every uttered, and the one from which it is my mission to deliver the world.” For Shaw, “Shakespeare was always an icon of the past, a symbol of the old canon that prevented creative and artistic evolution, a force that bound a passive society to conventional morality.” Shakespeare's heroes, therefore, are but mere “victims of pessimism and fixed morality.”All of this is exemplified by a number of examples of Shaw's engagement with the Bard. In Heartbreak House, Ellie is lulled into “metaphorical passivity” by reading Shakespeare, “the artistic and cultural father.” In Caesar and Cleopatra, Caesar's rejection of Cleopatra “is the rejection of aestheticism.” In Cymbeline Refinished, “Shaw continues his attack on passivity, romantic ideals and ready-made morality.” And the Shakespeare of Shakes versus Shav is “a symbol of a stagnant past that inhibits the future.” I will let curious readers find out more for themselves.Despite the book's original thesis—that Shaw's Shakespeare embodies “the passive force that hinders creative (and artistic) growth”—a caveat is in order: Shakespeare's Surrogates eschews dates and context. As a result, the reader is plunged in medias text, learning, for example, that Hamletmachine was published in 1977 and staged in 1979 only by turning to the endnotes at the back of the book. Aside from this drawback—perhaps an editorial rather than an authorial decision—this short study offers some arresting and provocative ideas that reassess Shaw's perennial battles with the Bard.

How the West Was Lost: Reflections on Death and the Settling and Unsettling of Oregon

as an applied anthropologist working for a federally recognized Oregon tribe (Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation), my view of the history and culture of Oregon has nearly always been informed by a tribal perspective, in so far as the Tribes’ historical and cultural information as well as its multiplicity of voices reside at the forefront of my work. Having attended and presented at the symposium from which this issue was created and read the pre-publication content, it has been refreshing to see how this collection presupposes a historical narrative that does not place the Native information as secondary or marginalized. Rather, that knowledge is placed here as paramount to the discussion. This is not to imply that there is a single tribal perspective at work here, but simply to say that the history and culture of all the various indigenous bands who lived and traveled in what is presently known as the state of Oregon, at the time of contact with non-Native peoples, are critically and integrally linked, in various ways, to the settling and unsettling of that place. Death rises from the proverbial ashes as a trope that swings between metaphor and reality. As readers take it all in, death itself takes on many forms. David Lewis equates death of a culture with the misinformation about and misinterpretation of his people that took precedent in the historical record, while on a larger scale, salvage anthropology furthered the notion of the vanishing Indian. Removal and loss of land followed, and through this disconnection, another form of death took place for those so closely tied to the land and its natural and cultural resources. One might see this tie, however, as having a continuance today, when reservations, which represent portions of the larger homelands, serve to maintain a connection to a rich, land-based identity. Without that connection, an ongoing loss could be felt deeply. Wendi Lindquist speaks to an issue close to all Pacific Northwest tribes, that of grave robbing and artifact looting, but sheds new light on the population of Hudson’s Bay Company employees who often engaged in the practices. Phrenology was the emerging science of the day, and this region proved to be a rich source of data gathering. Her article reads convincingly, like a morbid thriller as she recounts actual events, yet it also serves as a painful reminder that colonialist practices were rampant in the region as was the racialized thinking that accompanied them. Thankfully, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation

A Century of Body Snatching: A History of Cadaver‐ Acquisition in Kingston, Ontario from 1820–1920

Practical anatomy has always required bodies for dissection, and, when legal avenues failed to supply cadavers, more illicit practices developed. Scholarly and popular works on body snatching have addressed grave robbing in the United Kingdom and North America. The rise of American medical schools and their reliance on grave robbing have been well‐documented through substantial works by Suzanne Shultz and Michael Sappol, while the Canadian landscape has yet to be researched as thoroughly. This work begins to fill the gap by focussing on grave robbing in late nineteenth‐century Eastern Ontario. Lying between Toronto, and Montreal, and in close proximity to the American border, the area surrounds Kingston's medical school, founded in 1854. Sources include newspapers, pertinent legislation, and archival records of the Medical Faculty and hospital. They identify dozens of local body‐snatching cases with an uneven distribution through time, and they trace the public and medical reactions to grave robbing for anatomical study. Factors included the shortcomings of legal avenues of cadaver‐acquisition, unclaimed remains in the Kingston Penitentiary, and the city's cemetery practices. A more complete view emerges of early Canadian medical life and a reconsideration of the previously‐suggested grave‐robbing landscape in Canada with its North American implications.

Lincoln's Grave Robbers (review)

Reviewed by: Lincoln's Grave Robbers Elizabeth Bush Sheinkin, Steve . Lincoln's Grave Robbers. Scholastic, 2013. [224p]. illus. with photographs ISBN 978-0-545-40572-0 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 6-10. It's not too much of a stretch to surmise that an audacious 1876 plot to steal the mortal remains of President Abraham Lincoln would have its roots in the Civil War, but the connection is far from intuitive—fortunately, Sheinkin lays it all out for the reader in this lively true-crime story. The Civil War necessitated the issuance of paper money in lieu of gold, making the work of counterfeiting more difficult but also more lucrative. Larcenous master engravers were suddenly much in demand, and forger Ben Boyd's arrest and incarceration sent the earnings of high-stakes scammers such as Joe Kennally into a tailspin. Joe hatches a plan to steal Lincoln's corpse (vulnerable in its crumbling, lightly guarded Springfield, Illinois mausoleum) and demand a ransom of $200,000 and the release of Ben Boyd. The plan's first iteration fails due to the loose lips of a drunken conspirator, and the second plan, in which Lincoln's coffin is actually pried partly out of its sarcophagus, goes awry due to the bungled attempt by the Secret Service to catch the culprits red-handed. While not exactly presenting the crime as a comedy of errors, Sheinkin nonetheless revels in its absurdities and delights in employing the jargon of the nineteenth-century criminal class (glossary provided). The result is a flamboyantly fun read, spun with gusto and supplemented with an introductory cast of characters to help sort the good guys from bad guys at a glance. An illustration or two is included in each short chapter, and an index and source notes are forthcoming in the final volume. This will be a first choice for all Lincoln enthusiasts and required reading for school groups and tourists making their pilgrimage to Lincoln's tomb. Copyright © 2012 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois