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I'm a PhD student researching the role of the archaeological dead in contemporary British society. Think of this as a scrapbook of all the interesting links, snippets of information and random bits and bobs I come across pertaining to death, dying and the dead. Enjoy?!

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    Body of ‘Ugliest Woman in the World’ returns to her birthplace in Mexico for burial more than 150 years after her death A woman branded the ‘ugliest woman in the world’ after a rare disease left her body covered in hair has finally returned to her birthplace in Mexico for a proper burial - 153 years after her death. Julia Pastrana was exploited as part of a traveling exhibition through Europe until she died from complications of childbirth in 1860. Even after her death, her body was exhibited across the world. It eventually ended up in a storage room at an Oslo research institute, and after learning of the body’s whereabouts, visual artist Laura Anderson Barbata campaigned to have it returned to Mexico. ‘I felt she deserved the right to regain her dignity and her place in history, and in the world’s memory,’ Barbata, who learned Pastrana’s story while working on a play about her life, told the New York Times. ‘I hoped to help change her position as a victim to one where she can be seen in her entirety and complexity.’ Barbata, who lives in New York but hails from Mexico City, eventually won her decade-long battle and on Tuesday, Pastrana’s body will finally be buried in Sinaloa de Leyva. Pastrana was born in Mexico in 1834 and suffered from congenital terminal hypertrichosis, which left her face and body covered in thick hair. She also suffered from gingival hyperplasia, which made her lips and gums thick. She was not diagnosed with either condition in her lifetime. In 1854, she was bought by a Mexican customs administrator and he began exhibiting her through the U.S. and Canada. While in New York, she married Theodore Lent, who became her manager. Historians believe that while she was in love with Lent, he only married her to control her earnings, the New York Times reported. Read more here.

    Body of ‘Ugliest Woman in the World’ returns to her birthplace in Mexico for burial more than 150 years after her death

    A woman branded the ‘ugliest woman in the world’ after a rare disease left her body covered in hair has finally returned to her birthplace in Mexico for a proper burial - 153 years after her death.

    Julia Pastrana was exploited as part of a traveling exhibition through Europe until she died from complications of childbirth in 1860. Even after her death, her body was exhibited across the world.

    It eventually ended up in a storage room at an Oslo research institute, and after learning of the body’s whereabouts, visual artist Laura Anderson Barbata campaigned to have it returned to Mexico.

    ‘I felt she deserved the right to regain her dignity and her place in history, and in the world’s memory,’ Barbata, who learned Pastrana’s story while working on a play about her life, told the New York Times.

    ‘I hoped to help change her position as a victim to one where she can be seen in her entirety and complexity.’

    Barbata, who lives in New York but hails from Mexico City, eventually won her decade-long battle and on Tuesday, Pastrana’s body will finally be buried in Sinaloa de Leyva.

    Pastrana was born in Mexico in 1834 and suffered from congenital terminal hypertrichosis, which left her face and body covered in thick hair.

    She also suffered from gingival hyperplasia, which made her lips and gums thick. She was not diagnosed with either condition in her lifetime.

    In 1854, she was bought by a Mexican customs administrator and he began exhibiting her through the U.S. and Canada. While in New York, she married Theodore Lent, who became her manager.

    Historians believe that while she was in love with Lent, he only married her to control her earnings, the New York Times reported.

    Read more here.

    Forensic scientists need skeletons to train – but they’re down to bare bones

    Considering scientists estimate that the number of people who have lived – and died – now comfortably exceeds 100 billion individuals, it would seem fair to assume that there was no shortage of one of the most fundamental human resources: bones.

    However, social taboos, strict laws governing human tissue use and legislation demanding the repatriation of historic remains mean that forensic science students are becoming increasingly dependent on technology, rather than the real thing, to learn their way around the human skeleton.

    Recent years have seen a massive increase in the demand for courses in forensic science, fuelled by the popularity of television programmes such as CSI. But many universities are struggling to provide the next generation of crime scene investigators with actual bones on which to practise.

    Now a British company, Anthronomics, hopes to solve the problem by working with computer game developers to create new software which scans existing skeletal collections and makes 3D digital images of them available on tablet devices such as the iPad.

    The technology is about to be trialled at sites in the UK and the US, and could be used to train students across the world to examine bone trauma in the remains of crime victims, as well as identify casualties of genocide and human rights abuses.

    Dr Tim Thompson, a reader in biological and forensic anthropology at Teesside University and founder of Anthronomics, said teaching skeletal anatomy had become incredibly difficult in recent years.

    “People are quite happy for you to use archaeological remains but when it comes to the present time they are less willing,” he said. “In the UK you can donate your body to medicine but there are very strict rules which mean that it must be used for medical education and must be in anatomy or a clinical setting,” he said.

    Dr Piers Mitchell, President of the British Association for Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology, said the majority of victims of violence – such as blast, burn or other trauma injuries – whose remains would be useful in the study of forensic science, have their bodies buried or cremated before they can be donated. 

    “Most of the places that study forensic science are the newer universities which do not have well-established archaeological collections and which may not be connected to a medical school,” he said.

    The shortage is international. Many students from the US are now choosing to move to the UK to study since the passing of the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act, which requires universities to hand over contested bone material to tribes’ representatives.

    In Britain, skeletons brought to the country during colonial times have also been returned after claims from communities in New Zealand and Australia. Many students rely on remains dating back to Anglo-Saxon times while others practise on plastic casts which are expensive and lack the subtleties of the real thing.

    3D images are still a poor substitute for the genuine article, as Dr Thompson conceded, but with supplies running short, they could be a vitally useful alternative – and do have the merit of being far cheaper to produce than the plastic casts. For many would-be crime scene investigators, Dr Thompson said: “They are the closest you can get to the real thing.”

    (Source: dead-men-talking)

    Kennewick Man bones not from Columbia Valley, scientist tells tribes

    archaeologistforhire:

    archaeologicalnews:

    ELLENSBURG — In a historic first meeting of two very different worlds, Columbia Plateau tribal leaders met privately Tuesday with the scientist who led the court battle to study Kennewick Man.

    The skeleton, more than 9,500 years old, has long been at the center of a rift between tribal…

    Well this is an interesting development

    Repatriation and returning remains

    19th Century philosopher Jeremy Bentham allowed his body to be put on public display after he passed on but would you allow your body to be displayed after you die? The following video and audio collection examines specific cases in which the issue of display and ownership are raised and explores how museums have handled this question. Experts share reasons for their beliefs regarding repatriation and refer to specific examples on the topic of whether remains should be returned to their country of origin. 

    Click here for some great podcasts from The Open University!

    Bodies of two Luftwaffe pilots that have lain in unmarked grave since 1940 to be relocated after historians finally identify them

    A campaign has been launched to move the bodies of two Luftwaffe pilots to a German war cemetery after their single, unmarked grave was discovered 72 years on.

    The airmen were buried in the same grave in a Kent churchyard after their two bombers were shot down during a raid on London in August 1940.

    Three days later another German bomber crashed in the area, resulting in the remains of four men to be buried in one coffin on top of the other two men.

    More than 20 years later the German War Graves Service had the remains of all its servicemen killed in Britain in World War Two exhumed, and interred at the Cannock Chase German Military Cemetery, in Staffordshire.

    But the two airmen - Oberleutnant Horst von der Groeben and Oberleutnant Gerhard Muller - were left behind as it was not realised their coffins lay underneath the top one.

    They have remained in the unmarked grave in Whitstable cemetery ever since.

    Two local historians have now unravelled the macabre mystery and have identified the unknown airmen through their identity disc numbers.

    After realising their names were not on the Cannock Chase Memorial, Joe Potter and Andy Saunders researched local records and archives and were able to pinpoint them to ‘War Grave Number 1’ at Whitstable.

    Now the family of Oblt von der Groeben, the two historians and the Whitstable Royal British Legion are calling on the authorities to move the bodies to Cannock Chase.

    Mr Potter said: ‘It is a rather bizarre and macabre mystery.

    Full story here.

    France returns 20 Maori heads to New Zealand in hopes of properly respecting the dead

    Preparing the biggest homecoming yet of its kind, authorities in New Zealand on Monday received 20 ancestral heads of Maori ethnic people once held in several French museums as a cultural curiosity.

    Since 2003, the South Pacific country has embarked on an ambitious program of collecting back Maori heads and skeletal remains from museums around the world. Yet the program has run into significant obstacles.

    France long resisted handing over such cultural artifacts, but a law passed in 2010 paved the way for the return of the Maori heads. They were obtained as long ago as the 19th century, and one as recently as 1999.

    Some Maori heads, with intricate tattoos, were traditionally kept as trophies from tribal warfare. But once Westerners began offering prized goods in exchange for them, men were in danger of being killed simply for their tattoos, French museum officials have said.

    The heads handed over to New Zealand were not available for public viewing on Monday. Over the years, French museums, private collectors and anthropological researchers have preserved and stored the heads.

    The idea behind getting back the body parts was that they would be returned to their home tribes throughout New Zealand, where tribal elders could mourn them and, if they chose, give them proper burials.

    “They are, after all, human remains, and in the Maori culture they should not be publicly displayed,” said Pou Temara, a university professor who chairs New Zealand’s repatriation advisory panel.

    Bridget Gee, a New Zealand embassy spokeswoman, said the heads remanded on Monday have not been displayed in public for years.

    Most of the remains aren’t readily identifiable, and only a small percentage have been returned to their home tribes — who are loath to accept any remains that aren’t their own. Heads and body parts from over 500 people now sit in storage at the national musuem, Te Papa, in Wellington.

    The practice of preserving heads was begun by Maori as a way of remembering dead ancestors. In the decades after Europeans arrived, the heads became a curiosity and sought-after trade item, prompting Maori to ramp up their production levels.

    French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand and New Zealand’s ambassador presided over a solemn ceremony at Quai Branly museum in Paris, where the heads were encased in a box — the largest single handover of Maori heads to be repatriated, New Zealand’s embassy said.

    Researchers, tribes clash over Native bones

    BERKELEY, Calif. (AP) — On a bluff overlooking a sweep of Southern California beach, scientists in 1976 unearthed what were among the oldest skeletal remains ever found in the Western Hemisphere.

    Researchers would come to herald the bones — dating back nearly 10,000 years — as a potential treasure trove for understanding the earliest human history of the continental United States. But a local tribal group called the Kumeyaay Nation claimed that the bones, representing at least two people, were their ancestors and demanded them back several years ago.

    For decades, fights like this over the provenance and treatment of human bones have played out across the nation. Yet new federal protections could mean that the vast majority of the remains of an estimated 160,000 Native Americans held by universities, museums and federal government agencies, including those sought by the Kumeyaay, may soon be transferred to tribes.

    (Source: dead-men-talking)

    Protecting Peru’s ancient past The return to Peru of the bones of 177 people taken a century ago from the Inca city of Machu Picchu has marked another important milestone in the repatriation of Peruvian antiquities. The country is the birthplace of many ancient civilisations. The most famous, the Incas, ruled the area for centuries until the arrival of the Spanish colonisers in the 1500s. Every year, more than a million visitors marvel at the site which has become synonymous with Inca culture: the ancient city of Machu Picchu. Perched high on a mountain top in the Andes, it is Peru’s most important tourist destination. But the almost 50,000 pieces found there between 1911 and 1915 had not been seen in Peru until recently. 

    Protecting Peru’s ancient past

    The return to Peru of the bones of 177 people taken a century ago from the Inca city of Machu Picchu has marked another important milestone in the repatriation of Peruvian antiquities.

    The country is the birthplace of many ancient civilisations.

    The most famous, the Incas, ruled the area for centuries until the arrival of the Spanish colonisers in the 1500s.

    Every year, more than a million visitors marvel at the site which has become synonymous with Inca culture: the ancient city of Machu Picchu.

    Perched high on a mountain top in the Andes, it is Peru’s most important tourist destination.

    But the almost 50,000 pieces found there between 1911 and 1915 had not been seen in Peru until recently. 

    Studying old bones — preservation or perversion?

    A cross-border battle is brewing over 500-year-old bones belonging to some of Ontario’s original inhabitants — a case descendents describe as academic grave robbing.

    The Huron-Wendat Nation is demanding that Louisiana State University return the “stolen” remains of about 200 people. They say researchers improperly gathered the bones from an Ontario ossuary to use for unauthorized student research.

    “It’s a feeling of loss — and I get angry a little bit too because (remains) have no business being in universities or museums,” says retired translator Heather Bastien of Wendake, Que., whose prehistoric ancestors first hunted, fished and farmed in southern Ontario 15,000 years ago.

    The unusual dispute raises questions about the best way for academics to be culturally sensitive — particularly when studying human remains — in a CSI generation that considers bones a DNA treasure trove of clues to scientific, historic, medical and, sometimes, criminal puzzles.

    Archaeological News: Inuit remains to be returned to Nunavut

    archaeologicalnews:

    The Canadian Museum of Civilization says it expects to return its cache of Inuit remains to Nunavut within a few months.

    The Gatineau, Que.-based museum has a large collection of human bones and burial objects that were dug up by archeologists in the last century.