CFP - The exhumed object (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Exhumation of Civilian Victims of Conflict and Human Rights Abuses
Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Death and Burial by Liv Nilsson Stutz (ed.), Sarah Tarlow (ed.), 2013
Since World War II, there has been a growing emphasis on exhumation and the scientific examination of human remains in the investigation of human rights abuses and civilian death during terror or conflict. In addition to the capacity of exhumation to substantiate a crime, and the evidential value of the bodies and objects recovered during an investigation, it is equally important to consider the political and symbolic potency of exhumation, and the emotional significance of the recovery of the dead for their families and communities. Exhumations may elicit shock, horror, empathy, and strong imaginative associations in those who witness exposed human remains. This chapter highlights some of the ethical, political, and theoretical challenges inherent in the application of archaeological techniques to the investigation of traumatic and violent events in the recent past.
The Routledge Handbook of Medical Anthropology, 2016
New advances in science and technology are increasingly used in post-conflict countries to protect heritage, promote reconciliation, and bring justice to victims of human rights violations. The current exhumation of mass graves in Spain is one example of how everyday citizens negotiate knowledge and memory in the aftermath of conflict, and through exhumation, people seek a sense of justice and peace. But what happens when bodies are exhumed? For 17 months, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork and explored the archives related to the current exhumation of mass graves that date from the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the Francisco Franco dictatorship (1939-1975). During and after the Civil War, the institutions of Church and political regime went hand in hand: “Religion and the army,” explained Luisa of San Pedro, Spain, “were the two pillars of Francoism.” People who were suspected of resistance were arrested, interned in concentration camps, and executed; over the course of the war, 130, 000 civilians and Republican partisans were killed. Most were buried anonymously in unmarked mass graves, their deaths denied or suppressed by those who lived nearby. Because the Catholic Church had legitimized the Francoist regime, these mass graves of Republican partisans were often located in or around church cemeteries. For this reason, I spent much of my time in Spain at graveyards in churches.
This chapter is about the archaeology of mass graves. There are various types of mass grave (for example, plague pits and battlefield burials) but this chapter deals with mass graves that are excavated for forensic and evidential reasons or to identify victims and not just to satisfy a desire for knowledge about the past (for a definition of mass graves see Skinner 1987). These mass graves are likely to be of recent age due to the nature of the legal process and statutes of limitation, and their recency generates problems that are more challenging than those offered by historical mass graves. Among these enhanced problems is the unpleasantness of excavating putrefying soft tissue, coping with grieving relatives, and securing the excavation team from attack by perpetrators or supporters of the killings.
Crouching in fear: Terms of engagement for funerary remains
At present, there is no accepted standardised lexicon in English to describe burials and the position of buried human remains. Terms have tended to vary with the investigator and rely on loose, but often ill-defined systems of previous use. As a consequence, there are myriad terms used to describe the same phenomena or, as the case may be, no single well-defined term to do so. This means that new terms are continually invented – and sometimes re-invented bearing different nuances – that hinder use of published work and make comparisons across works difficult. In France for the last 40 years, Duday, his colleagues and students have published a series of papers employing a standard burial terminology that, until recently, was only available in French and in French language publications. Due to limited language competency of English-language scholars and a desire of French scholars to publish in their own (very precise) native language, these seminal works have not influenced English-language use. They clearly lead the way to the development of a standard vocabulary. What follows is a critique of previous non-standard terminological use and a series of suggestions to remedy this situation. This contribution's debt to French language scholarship is clear, but it does not reproduce a mere translation of terms. Rather, it tries to synthesise French use with English-language scholarship. Its weakest point is that it does not integrate terms from other European languages that also have a long legacy of regional and time-specific application, nor can it claim to do so in other world languages. This is work for the future. This treatment concentrates on adult remains, with archaeothantological study of infant and children's remains being at only a very anecdotal level to date. The recording example can be found at
Becoming Dead: Burial Assemblages as Vitalist Devices
Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 2020
This text comprises a critical discussion of assemblage theory and its application to burial studies. In recent research, burials have been viewed as fluid and indeterminate assemblages that 'become' in varied ways depending on different perceptions (concepts and ideas) and apparatuses (e.g. excavation tools and measuring instruments). The past and the present are thus mixed in potentially ever-new configurations which run the risk of replacing epistemological relativism with ontological fluidity. It is argued here that the hypothetical mutability of burial assemblages can be reduced significantly by addressing the varying speed and degree of the involved processes of integration and disintegration. By doing this, the main focus is shifted to the animacy of such processes and how they may have been understood and utilized in burials. Using both general and specific examples, it is argued that cremation burials can be studied as carefully compiled amalgamations that utilize the properties and animacies of different materialities to deal with death, corpses and the afterlife. This is a proof, you can find the final version here: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959774320000116 It is Open Access.
This paper argues that conservators working on human remains preserve not only the physical remnants of a once-living body, but also the traces of the narratives of a human life and its afterlife. The author examines the conservator's ethical and moral obligations to the dead and their associated artifacts, and considers the conservator's role in both dehumanizing remains into mere "objects," and in rehumanizing such "objects." These issues are explored in relation to the conservation of the remains of three specific individuals and their possessions: an ancient Egyptian female mummy now in a museum in the United States, an ancient Egyptian child excavated on an archaeological site, and a beatified Catholic nun's relics and bone fragment. The author recounts her personal interactions with these three individuals to argue that the traditionally detached, technical role of the conservator may be inappropriate or inadequate when preserving both the tangible and intangible aspects of human remains. The paper suggests that even minimal and mundane conservation practices can take on invasive qualities or new ritual significance when performed on human remains, and that respectful conservation treatments elicit an empathy for, and emotional response to, the remains themselves.