Write to your MP

Please write to your MP and to Kenneth Clarke, Secretary of State for Justice to complain about the 2008 reburial legislation. Here is a sample letter - please add your own thoughts:

I am writing in support of the letter from forty professors of archaeology regarding the 2008 reburial legislation in The Guardian on 4 February 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/feb/04/reburial-requirement-impedes-archaeology?intcmp=239

I am a member of an organisation called Pagans for Archaeology. We're Pagans who love archaeology and believe that it has contributed hugely to our knowledge of our ancestors and the religions of the past. Without archaeology, people would have little or no understanding of the peoples of the past. Pagans for Archaeology has more members than any other group purporting to represent Pagans on the issue of human remains (we currently have 3855 members).

We are opposed to the reburial of ancient human remains, and want them to be preserved so that the memory of the ancestors can be perpetuated and rescued from oblivion, and the remains can be studied scientifically for the benefit of everyone. We want human remains to be treated with respect, but respect does not automatically mean reburial. Respect should mean memory, which involves recovering the stories of past people. The British Association for Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology has a code of practice for handling and storing human remains, which is very respectful.

I would support a return to the simple, well-tried system practised up to 2008 which permitted the retention, study, curation and display of excavated remains as appropriate.

Yours sincerely
[Your name]
Member of Pagans for Archaeology

You can find contact details for your MP and Kenneth Clarke at WriteToThem.com (don't paste an identical copy of my sample letter into Write To Them, as they block identical emails).

Update
ASDS Archaeologists and the 1857 Burial Act
This website provides a background document, a letter to archaeologists and a template and instructions that can be used to send a letter to Ken Clarke. Please send your support for the campaign against the two-year reburial legislation to the government. Please also cc or forward your email to BurialLaw@uclan.ac.uk as ASDS are attempting to document the whole thing.

Interview with Mike Parker-Pearson

Mike Parker-Pearson is co-director of the Riverside Project. He is is a Professor of Archaeology. He is an internationally renowned expert in the archaeology of death and also specialises in the later prehistory of Britain and Northern Europe and the archaeology of Madagascar and the western Indian Ocean. He has published 14 books and over 100 academic papers, on topics that range from architecture, food and warfare to ethnoarchaeology, archaeological theory and heritage management. He has worked on archaeological excavations in Britain, Denmark, Easter Island, Germany, Greece, Madagascar, Syria and the United States, and currently directs field projects in the Outer Hebrides, Madagascar and the Stonehenge World Heritage Site.

Mike was voted 'Archaeologist of the Year' for 2010. His Stonehenge Riverside Project also received the award of  'Archaeological Research Project of the Year' for 2010, after his team discovered 'Bluestonehenge', the remains of a second stone circle close to Stonehenge in 2009.

He is currently seeking an extension of the period allowed for the study of the cremated remains found in the Aubrey Holes, which were first excavated in the 1920s.

PfA: What is your role in the Riverside Project? 

MPP:  I'm a co-director with five others. I basically started us off and persuaded the others to join in, and
I'm in overall charge of all the admin (I carry the can for the grants, the permissions, etc etc) but I don't dictate the research results, obviously! We spend a lot of time discussing and arguing about interpretations and the next step. It's been really useful doing it this way because it's easier to see which interpretations fit the evidence best and avoid going down blind alleys; it stops any one of us following their pet theory without looking at all angles. Lots of other archaeologists thought we were mad to try and work in such a big team - they predicted we'd fight and fall out - but it's been a fantastic way of running a big project.

PfA: What got you interested in archaeology?

MPP: Looking for fossils and other finds in the gravel on my dad's drive when I was four years old. When I was six, I got out a library book called Fun With Archaeology - it's been my aim in life ever since.

PfA: Do you feel a kinship for the people of the past?

MPP: Most of the time "no", because they were so different to us in many ways, really quite strange. But some things transcend time and place, and give a sense of connection, like finger-prints on a pot or the face of a bog body, or the death of the Iceman.

PfA: What can human remains tell us about the people of the past?

MPP: The answer to this question changes virtually by the year. When I was younger, advances were being made in osteological identification of age, sex, trauma and disease. Now we're finding out about diet, mobility, migration, and DNA - these are all techniques that were unimaginable even 20 years ago.

PfA: What is the scientific and/or social value of retaining human remains for study?

MPP: Because our scientific capabilities are changing so fast, there is no point at which anyone can say "that's done, the research on those remains is finished". For example, with the Aubrey Hole cremated remains we have just found that there is a brand-new technique of sex identification from the size and shape of
ear-holes (the petrous bone) which has been developed just in time for us to use. No-one ever knows what the future will bring - think of the antiquarian barrow-diggers who didn't keep the Bronze Age skeletons because they couldn't imagine any reason to do so.

PfA: Why is it important that the remains from the Aubrey Holes are studied? What can we learn?

MPP: Who are these people who were buried at Stonehenge? What more interesting question could there be? It's an extraordinary place and we want to find out as much as we can about it, its builders and its users. By studying the remains of the people buried there, we try to find out as much as we can about their lives and the society they lived in. This was the period between the long barrows and the round barrows and we have very few remains at all dating to this period (3000-2500 BC). What happened to most of the dead and why were these people special?

PfA: Why do you need the time allowed to study them to be extended?

Because working with fragments of cremated bone just takes ages. There are over 50,000 pieces of bone and they are all mixed up - we don't know which individual is which out of the 60 deposits of bones that were found by Col. Hawley in the 1920s. It is the most complicated jigsaw puzzle you could imagine. These people of Stonehenge are worth our spending time with them. I can't bear the idea of this being rushed. I'm not sure people realise just how long the post-excavation phase of any project takes. It's normal for it to take years to get all the specialist analyses queued up and completed. For example, the Amesbury Archer was excavated in 2002 and the report is still not published. Money and time are always hard to find.

PfA: What can the Aubrey Holes remains and the Riverside Project tell us about the wider Stonehenge landscape and the uses to which the complex of monuments were put?

This is a huge question! Until we started, it was thought that Stonehenge's period of use as a cemetery was only a very short-lived part of the monument's life. The project's preliminary results indicate dates for cremation burial as early as its construction (3000 BC) and possibly as late as 2300 BC. What we really need to know from the radiocarbon dates is what that full span of use as a cremation cemetery was and how the numbers of individuals being buried varied through time - was Stonehenge the burial place for an increasing number of people, or were most of the people found here buried when the monument was
first built? The contrast with Durrington Walls is stark - there we have found only three loose human bones amongst 80,000 animal bones. Durrington Walls was a place for the living, Stonehenge is full of the dead. National Geographic, who funded some of the excavations, sent a children's book author to write
about the project - his book is called If Stones Could Speak (by Marc Aronson) and funnily enough, it's currently the only up-to-date book on Stonehenge, its chronology and landscape. Quite cheap on Amazon.

PfA: What can the remains tell us about the lives of the individuals who were cremated and placed in the Aubrey Holes?

By the end of the research, we are hoping to know the distribution by sex (how many men, how many women) and age (adults and children). That in itself is going to reveal something about how this society worked. Preliminary findings indicate that most of the people buried here were men, with few women or
children. These preliminary identifications from pieces of skull and pelvis, though, will need to be checked against the new method using the petrous bone. We can find out about trauma and disease. So far, there are few signs of ill-health other than some osteoarthritis, and one person had a benign tumour. This work is much more difficult when the osteologist is working on fragments of cremated bone rather than with a complete skeleton. DNA and strontium isotope analysis (which reveals where people lived) are not possible using
current methods - but who knows what future researchers may be able to do.

PfA: What do you think about the way human remains are displayed in museums?

I haven't got a problem with this. It's part of my culture. Obviously, all curators treat human remains with respect - that's part of the culture, too. The public at large are fascinated by human remains - we all want to know about death, as it's about the only thing we all have in common, pharaohs, bog bodies, you and me. It's the big mystery and I think it helps to come face to face with it sometimes, particularly as our cultural practices are now so coy surrounding death and dead bodies. We seem to pretend the bodies of the dead today are an unmentionable problem, and should be swept away out of sight by 'professionals'. I don't think that's healthy. Because one understands one's personal connection to the remains of another human being, I think human
remains really make people aware of the depth of time of human history.

PfA: Do you think there is a role for Pagans in archaeology? For instance, in describing the dynamics of ritual and how Pagans engage with sites.

Yes. The more people who show an interest in our past and archaeology, the better. Pagans and the way they engage with the prehistoric past could be a real eye-opener for people of other beliefs (or none), as it's one of the ways of showing how much these places matter to our society.

PfA: Do you think the heritage sector should engage with Pagans?

Difficult, because some Pagans seem to me to be very antagonistic to other people's point of view. Some of them even seem to think that they have a more powerful claim to 'ownership' of the past and our ancestors than the rest of us.

But I think that's a problem with all religious belief systems - the danger of thinking only you are right, and everyone else is totally wrong (People's Front of Judea and all that!).

PfA: Many thanks for a fascinating insight into the state of current osteoarchaeology, and the research findings of the Riverside Project. We believe that only a small minority of Pagans think they have a claim to 'ownership' of the past and our ancestors. Indeed, the vast majority of Pagans are very tolerant of other belief-systems, including atheism, secular humanism, etc. The huge numbers of fans and members of Pagans for Archaeology attests to the numbers of Pagans who don't believe they have a special claim on human remains, and who are interested in science and archaeology.

Data from cremated bone

I was wondering how you extracted data from cremated bone, or indeed whether you could get the same kind of information from cremated bone that you can get from whole skeletons. It turns out that you can find out a surprising amount. The fact that you can determine the whole diet of the cremated individual ate means that you can find out a lot about the environment where they lived.

Here is some information on radiocarbon dating, prepared by English Heritage's radiocarbon advisor.

About 10 years ago, a new method for the radiocarbon dating of cremated bone was proposed by a research group at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (Lanting et al 2001). This followed some work on dating the carbonate fraction of unburnt bone from the Sahara by a group based in Lyon (Saliège et al 1998). This method works by dating the structural carbonate fraction of bone. The carbon in this fraction derives from the whole diet of the dated individual (not just the protein component that dominates the carbon in the collagen fraction), and so is much less susceptable to dietary offsets than dates on collagen. Also structural carbonate often survives in situations (such as in cremations) where collagen diagenesis makes this fraction unsuitable for radiocarbon dating.

Unfortunately, early attempts to date the carbonate fraction of unburnt bone (largely in the 1960s) gave dates that were anomalously young because the bone carbonate exchanges with humic acids in the burial environment. Consequently only in special, very dry environments, such as in the Sahara did bone carbonate give accurate radiocarbon ages. The major advance of the new method was to isolate the part of the structural carbonate in cremated bone that has had its crystalline structure altered by the cremation process in such a way as it is no longer contaminated by the burial environment (van Strydonck et al 2005). So, when dating cremated bone we are dating the time when the individual died, but the sample becomes datable because of the cremation process itself. This is why we need a 2-4g from a single piece of white, calcined bone. The crystalline structure in less calcined material has been insufficiently altered for accurate dating. Because this method was new, and was dating a sample type which had previously proved extremely problematic, it underwent extensive testing in the early 2000s in radiocarbon laboratories in many countries (eg De Mulder et al 2004; Naysmith et al 2007). It has been shown to produce accurate radiocarbon dates routinely and has now been adopted as a standard technique worldwide.

Lanting, J N, Aerts-Bijma, A T, and van der Plicht, J, 2001 Dating of cremated bones, Radiocarbon, 43, 249-54

Naysmith, P, Scott, E M, Cook, G T, Heinemeier, J, van der Plicht, J, Van Strydonck, M, Bronk Ramsey, C, Grootes, P M, and Freeman, S P H T, 2007 A cremated bone inter-comparison study, Radiocarbon, 49, 403-8

Saliège, J-F, Person, A, and Paris, F, 1998 Datation du carbonate-hydroxylapatite d'ossements Holocènes du Sahel (Mali, Mauritanie, Niger), Pré-actes du 3ème Congrès International 14C et Archéologie, Lyon 1998, 172-3

van Strydonck, M, Boudin, M, Hoefens, M, and de Mulder, G, 2005 14C-dating of cremated bones-why does it work?, Lunula, 13, 3-10

De Mulder, G, van Strydonck, M, and Boudin, M, 2004 14C-dateringen op gecremeerde menselijk botten uit de urnenvelden te Velzeke (O.-Vl.), Lunula, 12, 51-58

Guest post by Bo: Let the dead bury the dead

I lay awake recently turning the recent victory for archaeological research at Avebury over in my mind. It seems to me that the background hum, as it were, to the development of the 'reburial controversy' is the unexpected growth of an anti-intellectual streak amongst modern UK Pagans, particularly among druids. This, I think, essentially constitutes a delayed outbreak of recidivist footstamping at Ronald Hutton's flinging back the grubby curtains of fakelore to let the light into the dank caravan of pseudohistory. I'm not sure that this reactionary backsliding is necessarily conscious, and Hutton himself as always has done a splendid job of remaining on cordial terms with all sides. But I detect a general sense from some parts of the British Pagan spectrum that something has obscurely been taken from them, an undertow of anger at the perceived whittling-away of whatever mystique they felt they once possessed. Thus, the controversy about the excavation and retention of ancient human remains is a kind of flashpoint for a much more inchoate sense of aggrieved belittlement amongst a small section of self-identified Pagans.

This sense of disgruntlement has dovetailed unfortunately with the disturbing New Labour fondness for desecularising public discourse in the UK, persuading policy-makers, as Blair might have said, to 'do God.' Today's constant, nauseating invocation of 'Faith' is in part a misguided response to Muslim sensitivities (often more perceived than actual), which have been the dynamo for such legal precedents as have come to pass. In my opinion, the correct response to a developing multifaith society should be an absolute insistence on the secularism of the public realm, as in France. But the British, alas, have always preferred the incremental, well-meaning fudge to the crisp articulation of unbending principle. As a result, we have allowed a situation to develop in which the state forks out money for Papal visits, allows female Muslim medical staff to wear disposable sleeves instead of washing their forearms like everyone else, and in which, I might add, a tiny bunch of druids can waste thousands of pounds of public money.

The reburial controversy is interesting, I think, because it presents us with the peculiar spectacle of a number of self-proclaimed druids taking a leaf out of the Muslims' book, so to speak, exploiting a political climate of nervous deference to 'Faith' groups. Again, note the recentness of this: if Paul Davies' notorious reburial demand had been received by English Heritage twenty years ago, one suspects that everyone in the EH office would have had a good laugh and then it would have been promptly scrunched up and thrown in the bin. No longer. Rather, we now have a situation in which a religious body---representing a tiny number of people---are able to cause a serious and expensive inconvenience by invoking their outraged religious sensibilities.

Pagan complaints about the excavation and display of pre-Christian human remains in the UK are a very recent phenomenon, arising since the turn of the millennium. For the first fifty years of the British Pagan revival it simply doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone to get worked up about them. As suggested above, the publication of Hutton's pseudohistory-puncturing The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles in 1991 and The Triumph of the Moon in 1999 may well have something to do the emergence of the idea, which seems to me to have more to do, in most cases, with the development of divisive identity politics than with genuine religious feeling. If nothing else, the desire to have prehistoric bones reburied (or 'returned', whatever that might mean), reverencing them as tribal ancestors, is a way of impressing upon others one's visceral connection to the ancient past---the very thing to which Hutton had conclusively demonstrated modern Pagans have no substantive claim.

The first person to raise the issue of ancient human remains appears to have been Emma Restall Orr, a.k.a. 'Bobcat'. At the turn of the millennium Restall Orr was probably the most famous druid in all of history. She had, amongst other things, published one evocative and hugely influential memoir, Druid Priestess, and by 2002 she had both set up and appointed herself head of of The Druid Network, a large and influential organisation in Pagan terms. As this grew, and as she published further material (a second memoir, a guide to ritual, a book on Pagan ethics), she emerged as the centre of something of a cult of personality among druids, a phenomenon over which she may, to be fair to her, have had little personal control.

Restall Orr's attitude to Pagan ethics and polytheology, as articulated in her books and talks, became a powerful mixture of the sensuous evocation of the natural world and a slightly morbid Goth sensibility, much like an Alice Oswald poem sung by Diamanda Galas. Restall Orr's writing also inculcates a powerful distrust of knowledge and objectivity, preferring instead to evoke, very skillfully, the oceanic rush of submersive, boiling emotion. For this reader, this tends to make her style feel overheated: despite walk-on parts for blackbirds, oak trees, vixens &c, and for other druids both living and long dead, Restall Orr's writing is largely about Restall Orr. This is an observation, not a criticism. However, her huge influence led to her personal characteristics---even her favourite words, 'exquisite' and 'inspiring'---being widely affected by the UK druid community during the first few years of the new century. And, among those characteristics, two stand out: an understandable preoccupation with death and dying, and an austere seriousness of purpose which the unkind might mistake for the lack of a sense of humour.

It was Restall Orr, then, who began to raise questions about the retention of archaeologically-excavated pre-Christian human remains in UK museums, inspired in part by the politics of the repatriation of ancestral bones to native peoples around the world. She is, I think, not to be suspected of self-conscious bad faith; her strong feelings on the matter are quite genuine, and rooted in her perception of herself as a 'native person' and as an alleged psychic, for whom the spirits of the ancient dead are apparently as real, if not realer, than the living inhabitants of her home near a well-to-do Cotswolds market-town. It is clearly an issue which is close to her heart. However, and this is my key point in this article, I find it very hard to believe that this is true to the same extent for the majority of other druids and Pagans who have followed Restall Orr's lead in campaigning for reburial or for a more nebulous 'respect' for ancient remains. I fear the phenomenon of 'imitative emotion' is at play here: that is, the tendency of groups to learn to desire and feel certain things because they see others whom they would like to emulate desiring and feeling them. (We are all vulnerable to this phenomenon; after all, upon this psychological rock is built the great church of Marketing.) In my experience, the resulting induced emotions either display a certain unconvincing tinniness, or betray an instantly recognisable note of hysterical groupthink. Thus, whilst I am not accusing Restall Orr of cynical manipulation, it is a fact that she is one of the most admired and imitated of British Pagan leaders, and thus those who respect her deeply were all too ready to take up her tune.

To this end, she set up Honouring the Ancient Dead, a Pagan advocacy group lobbying for the 'dignified' treatment of ancient human remains excavated in the UK. Restall Orr is a smooth political operator, and one suspects that she has been aware from the start that her organisation must be seen to be adopting an attitude more dove-like than hawkish. She has avoided the easily-disprovable claims which the less adroit partisans of reburial have blundered into making, noting carefully that modern druids have no continuity of identity, practice, or language with the ancient druids, or indeed with any ancient pagans at all, and that neolithic bones, for example, are the remains of people who are the genetic ancestors of 95% of the UK population, not just Pagans. Paganism, after all, is currently a religion that one elects to follow, rather than being born into---at least for the most part.

HAD went on to have some notable early successes, including the temporary 'repatriation' of the Iron Age bog body Lindow Man to Cheshire. ('Why is this Cheshire man in London?' asked Restall Orr.) The exhibition of the body in Manchester Museum caused ructions, as the display referred extensively to the 'controversy' about the display of ancient remains and said very little about the archaeological reconstruction of Lindow Man's life and unpleasant death---an omission which prompted an annoyed article in British Archaeology. Restall Orr was prominently featured in the 'polyphonic' exhibition talking about what Lindow Man means to her; many felt the inclusion of a modern Pagan at the expense of more informative archaeological content was inappropriate. Another widely-derided 'voice' included in the exhibition was a piece by a local woman who had been a small child at the time of Lindow Man's discovery, complete with the sentimental impedimenta of her recollections of 1984---including a prominently displayed Care Bear.

For all this, Restall Orr was displeased by the display of the body. So distressed is Restall Orr by the alleged 'lack of respect' shown by the exhibition that she writes:

'leaving the gallery, I felt as if I’d just witnessed an assault, a cat killed by a passing car lying dead on the empty road, a child slapped into stinging silence by an incapable parent.'

This (rhetorical?) disinclination to distinguish between the past and the present, the imaginary and the actual, and the dead and the living, is very characteristic of Restall Orr's writing. The lack of proportion in this piece is almost eerie; after reading it, I had to have a look at Jane Clarke's heartbreaking account of adopting an orphaned baby girl from India, just to remind myself of what emotion felt for living people by other living people looks like, as a kind of experimental control. Set next to Jane Clarke's piece, Restall Orr's evocation of her own undifferentiated affect reads very oddly; the squalling tone of the piece ('What flooded through me here was a rage drenched in grief') makes it, I think, the first instance I've seen of something looking like genuine religious mania in a modern British Pagan. What's so odd about its emotional content is the fact that Restall Orr's sympathies have nothing to do with the actual death of Lindow Man, who, like the vast majority of human beings who have ever lived, came to a sticky end. Her rage-drenched grief is for the fate of the corpse of someone who died nearly two thousand years before she was born. More brutally, one wonders if her powerful and apparently compulsive identification with the cadavers of ages past does not represent, on some level, a kind of grief for herself. Of course we should be able to put ourselves in the shoes of the people whose ancient remains we view; I think it's quite appropriate, for example, to find something very poignant indeed in the casts of the bodies of people smothered by ash at Pompeii and Herculaneum:



The viewer who cannot make that link of imaginative sympathy with these long-dead people who suffered horribly as they died might rightly be charged with being emotionally deficient somewhere. But the tenor of Restall Orr's writing about the display of human remains shows her, in my opinion, to be in the grip of some more idiosyncratic emotion.

After the apparent success with Lindow Man, responses were marshalled by those who failed to find HAD's arguments convincing. It was led, with satisfying symmetry, by another woman: the redoubtable Yewtree of Pagans for Archaeology. By nature and inclination more concerned than Restall Orr with the living, as well as being fearsomely articulate, Yewtree has made a concerted effort over the last four years to question the assumptions of the reburial partisans from a Pagan perspective, acting on the quite correct suspicion that most British Pagans do not, in fact, sympathise one jot with the aims of HAD or its satellites. PfA's basic statement can be read here; note that as a body it explicitly opposes reburial.

One wonders if Restall Orr expected her sacerdotal intuitions and assumptions to be questioned, used as she is to camouflaging a certain personal autocracy with emollient gestures towards consensus. The public rhetoric of HAD itself tends towards the articulation of emotional pain, which reflects a clever triangulation on Restall Orr's part, herself in favour of universal reburial. But by raising the issue of pre-Christian remains, Restall Orr, alas, galvanised the lunatic fringe of the druid community into beginning active and confrontational campaigns for reburial---those imitative emotions once again. This fringe consists of 'CoBDO', that is, 'The Council of British Druid Orders', their splinter-group 'CoBDO West', and the 'Loyal Arthurian Warband'.

Once museums up and down the land found themselves faced with charged emails and letters of protest, not to mention people turning up in robes, a strikingly beautiful Latin American ex-model in a wheelchair and black velvet must suddenly have seemed like the voice of sweet reason. It was slyly done, and yet again I ask you, especially if you are not British, to remember the uncertain atmosphere of deference to religious sensitivities and worry about causing offence which came to obtain in the UK public sector in the early noughties. It could well be that the chance to 'show sensitivity to Faith-based groups' was welcomed by museum managers with targets to meet and boxes to tick. This skillful act of triangulation allowed HAD, in all its glory, to oyster-knife its way firmly into British archaeological discourse and debate.

It may have surprised Restall Orr to find, thanks to Pagans for Archaeology, that a lot of druids and Pagans actually had quite different feelings on the matter of ancient human remains, and were prepared to say so, loudly. Numbers are difficult to ascertain as HAD does not release its membership or volunteer figures; nevertheless, from inside knowledge, it is likely that PfA's membership of several hundred is quite a few times larger than that of HAD. At any rate PfA's support---with a large conference last year fielding speakers including Ronald Hutton---shows that a considerable proportion of British Pagans disagree with the aims of the reburiers and their use of what they see as emotive and misleading language.

Opposition to HAD and its ilk has advanced on a number of fronts. The first has been a lacerating analysis of Restall Orr's oddly limited discourse of 'respect', according to which only very limited periods of scientific study followed by prompt reburial can possibly comprise a 'dignified' and 'honourable' way in which to treat ancient human remains. Restall Orr is good at putting an articulate spin on this, but it is at heart an untenable view. Ultimately it represents a kind of argument from 'common human decency' (CoBDO have actually been foolish enough to use this phrase in this context), a notoriously variable and culture-specific value. Yewtree and others have articulated an alternative and more considered discourse of respect: respect as the rediscovery and perpetuation of memory, respect as learning about the lives of people who lived in the past, respect as evocation of historical realities. Furthermore, archaeologists have pointed out that at least in the neolithic, bones placed in long barrows were frequently exhumed and ritually interacted with by the community, by their descendants; the idea that our concept of 'decency' regarding the dead can be mapped onto the pre-Christian inhabitants of Britain is simply an anachronism.

The second prong of the campaign against HAD and its hangers-on hinges on disputing the claim that contemporary Pagans should have some kind of special say in the fate of excavated pre-Christian human remains. Restall Orr, who is nobody's fool, knows that any claim of continuity with the pre-Christian people of 1500+ years ago is inviting ridicule in a post-Hutton world, and has argued in interviews that Pagans are not entitled to a special say, but are entitled to have their special interest in the matter acknowledged. (This argument was put forward in June 2007 in a religion discussion show called Heaven and Earth.) Again, slickly done; but I am not at all clear what the practical difference is supposed to be. Down at the woolly end, other heads have been hotter. Take Paul Davies, of the splinter-group whose campaign to have the neolithic child's skeleton from Avebury museum reburied finally failed last week. His original demand for the bones cast himself in the role of, say, an aboriginal elder coming to repatriate the remains of a tribal ancestor stolen from his resting-place by wicked colonial imperialists in the 19th century. Both CoBDO West and the original CoBDO tried to claim some kind of continuity of religious identity, although the logical thrust of their argument is frankly rather hard to follow. From the CoBDO website:

The fact that the little girl (?) whose remains lie in the Alexander Keiller Museum was found in the ditch at Windmill Hill, a major satellite of the Avebury sanctuary complex, clearly signifies association, on behalf of herself and/or her parents, with the ancient native pagan belief structure which the Avebury sanctuary complex itself represents, as this was unlikely to have been a random burial.
Although it might be stated that we have no clear idea which specific native religion she or her parents adhered to, as we do not know the names of the various faiths practiced at that time, nevertheless the term pagan is the best umbrella designation we have for those of pre-christian religious persuasion.
As the modern incarnation of these several belief structures and pagan pre-historic cultural pursuits, druids and pagans who likewise revere the sanctity of the Avebury complex, in this day and age, are descendants in belief of that same belief structure that not only led the megalithic builders to construct Avebury, but has also led countless generations subsequently to revere the Avebury complex and the sanctity it represents.

Whilst is may be true that 'pagan' is 'the best umbrella designation we have for those of pre-christian religious persuasion', 'pagan' and 'Pagan' are not the same. What on earth does it mean to say that you are the 'modern incarnation' of such 'pre-historic cultural pursuits'? Isn't there an obvious difference between 'pagan' in the everyday sense of 'to do with pre-Christian religions', and 'Pagan' meaning Wicca, Druidry, and other movements of recent origin---a familiar difference which is being crudely elided here?

Of course, Restall Orr's invocation of 'special interest' is a colossal own-goal, because anyone who visits a museum and involves themselves may be said to have a special interest. It's nothing to do with Paganism or one's religion. In the absence of any privileged genetic connection to the ancient bones (above and beyond that of the rest of the UK population), and in the further absence of any provable continuities of religious belief and practice, the 'interest' of Restall Orr is no more and no less 'special' than that of the local schoolgirl who comes to sketch the bones for GCSE Art, or of the amateur archaeologist interested in the neolithic. In a fair society, no one's 'special interest' trumps anyone else's: and more specifically, why should the views of Davies or Restall Orr qua Pagans be privileged above the views of other Pagans which are diametrically opposed to theirs?

Thus the debate has had one positive outcome, which is to make it very clear that HAD does not speak for the Pagan community as a whole, a distinction which inevitably was not clear to the mainstream media reporting on the Avebury fracas. Many Pagans were seriously displeased at being associated in the press with a tiny group whom they perceived as courting public attention, when, for the majority of Pagans, their view on ancient human remains is congruent with the pervasive secular one.

Finally, Restall Orr should be thanked for opening up the area to moral debate. The ethical issues are, in my view, in a sense both complex and simple. I am still not sure how it is really possible to disrespect the long-dead. We walk on them everyday; a proportion of our bodies is made of the recycled molecules of ancient corpses. Human remains are not people; they were people, and they are now, if you like, 'ex-persons'. I doubt that any modern British Pagan seriously, theologically, believes that the exhumed dead are at present actually suffering, despite the claims of Paul Davies, who mentioned 'Charlie's' 'plight' in an newspaper interview. This is part of what reads so oddly in the emotional splurge of Restall Orr's Manchester piece: cui bono? Who is supposed to benefit from all this? Is it the late, lamented corpse? Or its ghostly shade?

The heart of the moral issue seems to me to be that the living, who can change their destinies, grow, and suffer, are simply more important than the dead. The genuine needs of the living---for education, for a sense of their own history and that of their country, even for space to be buried themselves---must always trump such needs as the dead may be said to have, because the dead as persons do not suffer or change. They can be damaged, but not harmed. Any moral individual would consent to the bones of a beloved relative being dug up if it would somehow save the life of a child. With the long dead, whom no one living has remembered for millennia, and in the absence of genuine cultural continuity with those currently living, my own feeling is that beyond a basic respectful acknowledgement of our once-shared humanity, the needs of the living are paramount. By way of 'respectful acknowledgement', I would see something like a small notecard appended to every display of ancient remains, reminding the viewer that these dry bones once lived as they do, as more than adequate. (This is precisely what the Boscastle Witchcraft Museum has in the case of a skull dipped in tar which it has on display.) The needs of the living, on the other hand, include the needs of osteo-archaeologists to have access to well-stored and catalogued remains preserved from deterioration, in anticipation of the new scientific techniques which will undoubtably be developed. It also encompasses the needs of the public to learn about how people lived in the deep past---people who are, after all, every bit as much their ancestors are they are those of a tiny number of druids, who seems to have a lot invested in their cultural enfranchisement and offical recognition of their importance. This moral imperative extends to time and money; in my view, the smallest injustice or cause of suffering in the world of the living has a greater claim over the time and energies of the 'spiritual' person than the reburial of the most poignant of ancient skeletons. If you have donated five pounds to a charity that works with abused children or the elderly, or campaigns for the protection of the enviroment, if you have ever planted a tree or rescued a cat or done someone a single act of kindness, then, in my opinion, you have performed an act the ethical content of which outweighs everything that HAD has ever achieved or ever will. Indeed, when the 'pagan' dimension is taken away, HAD seems to lose interest, for all its vaunted ethics; there have been no noises from HAD on the sad fact that 72 infants were buried in a mass grave in Southwark last year, including one which was dug up and dragged away by a fox. Perhaps they are not old enough, and druids can only wax sentimental about infant corpses after a few thousand years have passed; or perhaps actually caring about people---and poor people at that---is less rewarding than communing with the tortured spirit of the ancient bones.

On that note, it may interest the reader to know that I have written to the relevant bodies, as it happens, to see if I can discover the precise cost to the taxpayer of the Avebury Consultation under the Freedom of Information Act. It would be very tempting indeed to take that information and present it to HAD, CoBDO and the Druid Network, asking if their members would like to match the amount in donations to a charity----the wonderful Camilla Batmanghelidjh's Kids Company or the NSPCC, perhaps---which works to help living children, rather than those who died millennia ago.

Avebury remains to stay in museum

AVEBURY REBURIAL REQUEST: THE HUMAN REMAINS WILL STAY IN AVEBURY MUSEUM

After consideration of evidence and extensive consultation, English Heritage have decided that the prehistoric human remains in the Alexander Keiller Museum, Avebury, should be kept in the museum for the benefit of public access and understanding.

These Neolithic human remains were excavated in the Avebury area by Alexander Keiller between 1929 and 1935. In 2006, Paul Davies of the Council of British Druid Orders requested their reburial. English Heritage and the National Trust followed the recently-published DCMS process in considering this request, and went out to public consultation in 2009 on a draft report which set out the evidence and different options.

English Heritage and the National Trust have now published a report on the results of this consultation, and a second report on the results of a public opinion survey. Our summary report concludes that the request should be refused for four main reasons:

• the benefit to future understanding likely to result from not reburying the remains far outweighs the harm likely to result from not reburying them;
• it does not meet the criteria set out by the DCMS for considering such requests;
• not reburying the remains is the more reversible option;
• the public generally support the retention of prehistoric human remains in museums, and their inclusion in museum displays to increase understanding.

This is excellent news, and a victory for common sense. Many thanks and well done to all the members of Pagans for Archaeology who responded to the consultation. And congratulations to the National Trust and English Heritage for not bowing to pressure from a tiny minority of Pagans, who represent an even smaller minority of the general public.

Keeping remains in museums is not "disrespectful" - it is a way of making the real story of the individual and their community known and honoured in the present.

Newsnight report on HAD

Just seen this posted on Facebook:
BBC Newsnight: Pagans call for reburial of ancient human remains (video)

Somewhat patronising comments about Paganism from the BBC. "Pagans aren't used to being taken seriously." Hello, BBC, Pagans pay their licence fee just as much as the next person, and do expect to be taken seriously, actually. How about starting with doing some research and finding out that not all Pagans want these remains reburied? Pagans for Archaeology now has 1,344 fans on Facebook, and the group has 330 members. The case for retaining human remains for study is clear and reasonable.

It's interesting that museum professionals have become increasingly receptive to reburial claims. Why is it now deemed disrespectful to keep remains in museums? There is no inherent disrespect in doing this. It's not like those weird ossuaries where bones are turned into decorative displays.

And why aren't Pagans making as much noise protesting about climate change and species extinction, demanding same-sex marriage, campaigning for Pagan handfastings to be legally recognised, and other pressing issues of the day?

Aubrey Holes update

I received an email from Mike Parker-Pearson with an update on what is happening with the remains recovered from the Aubrey Holes.

We've now had a chance to assess what more needs doing with analysis of the cremations. There is so much material that the researcher is going to have to write a whole PhD on the assemblage.

That means that we will need a 2-year extension to the MoJ licence (to commence from August 2010).

I will keep you all informed about the progress of work. So far, we have identified the remains as being predominantly adult men with two women and probably two children (though these numbers may well change). Generally they were reasonably healthy in life. A few had osteoarthritis, and one had a benign soft tissue tumour behind the knee.

Please bear in mind with this apparently lengthy work schedule that the bone fragments are very small and it is very painstaking work to properly analyse them. It can't (and shouldn't) be rushed.

The remains will continue to be looked after in Sheffield.

It is my considered opinion that two years (the statutory length of time for studying bones under the new legislation) is not long enough.

Human remains at Stonehenge

The government has issued a response to an e-petition requesting the reburial of remains from the Aubrey Holes at Stonehenge.

Apparently the Ministry of Justice licence for exhuming the bones stipulated that they must be reburied after two years anyway.

Is two years actually long enough for studying human remains? How will the remains be protected from decay once they are returned to the ground? What if better techniques are devised for studying them in the future?

The case for retaining human remains

The case for studying remains

• Osteoarchaeology can tell us a great deal about past people, both populations and individuals: what they ate, what diseases they had, where they lived, how far they travelled, what they worked at, where they were born. Putting all this information together for a large number of people gives us a picture of a whole society and the lives of individuals within it.
• Associated grave goods can also give us a picture of what mattered to the individual who was buried there. Grave goods should remain with the skeleton where possible, as they are an integral part of the assemblage, and may have been intended to accompany them into the afterlife.
• The more knowledge we gain about people of the past, the more it perpetuates their memory. People of the past wanted to be remembered, that's why they built monuments in the landscape. Also, ancient texts such as the Hávamál talk about a person's name living on after they die (another indication that people in the past wanted to be remembered).
• There was a lot of ethnic and cultural diversity in the past, and because human remains can tell us where people came from, this prevents fascists from claiming that Britain was ever inhabited solely by one particular ethnic group.

The case for displaying them in museums

• Neolithic long-barrows were not private; people interacted ritually with the remains after they had been placed in the mound.
• It helps to perpetuate the memory of the dead person.
• Museums are Pagan shrines; the name means "temple of the Muses" (okay so the proprietors of the museums may not see it that way, but we can choose to do so).
• It helps us to understand their culture and connect with them.
• It might help us to come to terms with death.

The case for not reburying

• In many cases, the original burial context may have been lost or destroyed. The Zuni (or A:shiwi as they refer to themselves in their own language) people of New Mexico see no point in reburying remains, because disinterring them destroys the sacred context of the original burial
• Looters might steal the grave-goods or the bones
• We don't know what ritual the dead person might have preferred (though HAD have composed a useful ritual for instances where museums want to rebury ancient pagan remains)
• The remains should be stored for future study (analytical techniques are improving all the time)
• Reburial means that we will no longer have access to the knowledge and memory of the person, and will quickly forget them
• It is difficult to know which group of contemporary Pagans should receive remains for reburial, since we do not have cultural continuity with pagans of the past (who may well have had very different beliefs from us about the soul and the afterlife, and definitely had different practices from us).

Any common ground?

There's an excellent article by Dr Corinne Duhig, an osteoarchaeologist and a Pagan, in the latest issue (Summer 2009, number 72) of The Archaeologist, the official organ of the Institute for Archaeologists, in which she cogently makes the case for the diversity of burial practice and afterlife beliefs among both ancient pagans and contemporary Pagans. She too wants to honour the ancestors by telling their stories, which is what osteoarchaeology can do so well.

Oddly, however, whilst the article cites Pagans for Archaeology's interview with Emma Restall Orr, it makes no mention of the fact that Pagans for Archaeology is opposed to reburial (though hopefully our name would give readers of The Archaeologist a big clue).

But it is still an excellent article, and I hope it will contribute to making archaeologists aware that not all Pagans want reburial.

PFA conference success

The Pagans and Archaeology conference at the University of Bristol was a roaring success.

• The first paper was delivered by Ronald Hutton, and explored the way in which one generation's archaeological orthodoxy was the next generation's fringe archaeology. Ley-lines were once all the rage with the up-and-coming generation of archaeologists.
• Next, Josh Pollard explored the common origins of Paganism and archaeology in the Enlightenment and their shared interest in the past, and asked how better dialogue could be had.
• Andy Letcher explored where the concept of Paganism as a fertility religion had come from (a trope that is rapidly losing ground amongst scholars of Pagan Studies, but is still current with some archaeologists).
• Will Rathouse surveyed the field of relations between archaeologists and Pagans, from collaboration to conflict.
• Graham Harvey explained the animist view of ancestors (which can include other-than-human people as well as human people).
• Yvonne Aburrow gave a paper on the different discourses employed by those who want to retain human remains in museums, and those who want to rebury them. There are many discourses involved, but the most striking difference between the two groups was that those who are opposed to reburial are interested in the individual stories of the past and want them to be remembered, whereas those who want reburial are more concerned with a holistic view of the landscape and a timeless past.
• Tiffany Jenkins explored how a crisis in the Enlightenment project that underpins the role of museums had opened the door to claims for repatriation and reburial.
• Martin Smith explored the ethical issues around human remains, explained some of the fascinating things that can be discovered by scientific analysis of them, and pointed out the highly ethical treatment of bones by osteoarchaeologists.
• Jenny Blain and Robert Wallis gave an overview of their Sacred Sites, Contested Rights / Rites project, and explained their response to the Avebury Consultation on human remains.

Afterwards lots of us went to the pub, and then some of us went for a curry.

Last chance to air your views

The Avebury reburial consultation closes this week, so if you haven't already responded, now is the time to do so.  Go to the English Heritage site and fill in the questionnaire.  The closing date is 31 January.

Not all Pagans want reburial

An article has appeared in the Swindon Advertiser about the reburial consultation.

Not all Pagans want reburial. The large membership of this group (currently 171, and that's with no advertising) is evidence of that. I have put forward the specifically Pagan arguments for not reburying before:

Respect as remembering - the 'memory' discourse

• Funerary monuments
• Elegies
• Hávamál
• Popol Vuh
• Memory as part of identity, knowing where you have come from
• Ancestors as individuals with stories
• The sense of archaeology and history as contributing to identity

Reburial involves a permanent loss of access to the bones for study. As archaeologist Mike Parker-Pearson says in his letter to English Heritage (pdf):

The study of human remains is central to our growing knowledge of human evolution and to our understanding of human lifeways (diet, mobility, health etc.) as well as the diversity and development of funerary rites and rituals.

Prehistoric remains are of special significance for investigating Britain’s past because it is now apparent that the vast majority of prehistoric people were disposed of in ways that have left no archaeological traces. This means that those human remains that have survived from these unrecorded times are all the more significant as rare and irreplaceable testimony of past lives. In the absence of written texts, our knowledge of prehistory is entirely reliant on archaeological material, of which human remains represent one of the most important sources. When it comes to learning about the people themselves, their remains are of paramount importance for finding out about how they led their lives.

I can only conclude that the people who want these remains reburied are not actually interested in learning about the life-ways of past people.

And you can't say, "well rebury the remains after they have been studied", because techniques for study are constantly improving, and we can learn more from the remains in the future; Prof Parker-Pearson continues:

There have been considerable advances in the scientific study of human remains over the last 20 years, and the rate of innovation in applicable methods and techniques is continuing. Within the short span of my own academic career since 1990, I have seen hitherto undreamed-of developments in the ability to recover ancient DNA from skeletons, the measurement of isotopes to reconstruct ancient diet and mobility, the study of diet from microscopic study of wear traces on teeth, the radiocarbon dating of apatite crystals within cremated bone, and the ability to identify evidence for mummification in skeletons from post-mortem alterations to bone tissue, amongst many other techniques.

Those innovations continue. Archaeological scientists are currently developing new techniques to extract information on starches locked up in the calculus that forms around teeth. The narrow range of elements used in isotopic studies is being widened to address more questions about past lifestyles, as in the case of the Alpine iceman. Dating techniques are likely to be refined and improved. Better understanding of morphometric and non-metric traits will improve our understanding of past population affinities. It is patently clear that there will be new and improved analytical methods and techniques in ten years’ time and beyond.

The research project (see the report appended to the letter) looking into these particular remains is very valuable in discovering more about how the Beaker People lived and whether they were invaders from somewhere else, and relies heavily on studying the actual human remains.

Interview with a member of BABAO

BABAO is the British Association for Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology. You can see BABAO's view of human remains in the various statements they have made. I was very impressed by the speaker from BABAO at the Respect Conference in Manchester in 2006, so I approached Martin Smith, an archaeologist specialising in human remains, who is a member of BABAO's managing committee.

Here's BABAO's statement of principles from their homepage:

BABAO promotes the study of human bioarchaeology and osteoarchaeology for the purpose of understanding humanity from the past to the present. BABAO also provides a forum for the exchange of ideas and information on these topics and strives to improve standards in all aspects of the study of the biological remains of past and present peoples.
BABAO is fully committed to promulgating the highest ethical standards in the treatment and care of human skeletal remains and does not condone actions or statements that violate these principles.

One of the arguments for the retention of human remains that most impressed me was that cultural interpretations and scientific understandings change over time. For example, the bones of the people of Wharram Percy (a deserted medieval village) are stored in carefully-controlled conditions in an Anglo-Saxon church. When they were first excavated, their right forearms were measured to gain an idea of skeletal growth. It was a couple of decades before anyone thought to measure their left forearms as well. It was then that it was discovered that a good twenty percent of them were left-handed (the current percentage of left-handers in the population is 10%). Most of them would have been illiterate, so this finding seems to bear out the hypothesis of psychologists that the bias towards right-handedness occurs because of literacy and language being primarily located in the left hemisphere of the brain, which is "wired" to the right-hand side of the body. From a social history point of view, this finding is also surprising, because one would have thought that medieval people would have a superstitious prejudice against the use of the "sinister" left hand.

So, on with the interview:

PfA: What is your role in BABAO?

MS: I am a member of BABAO’s managing committee (Publicity Secretary)

PfA: What got you interested in archaeology?

MS: I’m not sure really - I’ve always been interested in the past and the fact that archaeology gives us opportunities to find out about aspects of the lives of past people is really quite exciting – particularly in the case of people who lived before there were any written records.

PfA: Do you feel a kinship for the people of the past?

MS: I would say that I do in so far as the past populations of Britain and Europe are the collective ancestors of all modern British people of European origin. For example genetic analysis of the Iceman (the 5000 year old mummified body found in the Alps in 1991) has shown that he is related to a very large proportion of the modern population of Northern Europe. On a wider scale, populations all over the world are related and so we all have a degree of kinship with past peoples wherever they are from.

PfA: What can human remains tell us about the people of the past?

MS: We can learn a great deal from studying human remains; in addition to 'obvious' things like age and sex we can also obtain information on health and diseases, activity and lifestyle, diet and subsistence, levels of mobility and social organization (for example were people nomadic or did they live in one place?) as well as the overall level of biological stress people were subjected to by their lifestyles and environments. In addition, burial archaeology can allow us to gain some sense of the way people perceived the world and perhaps the afterlife. Human remains are the most direct link we have to the peoples that lived before us and they offer the chance to find out information that simply cannot be obtained from any other kind of archaeological remains.

PfA: What is the scientific and/or social value of retaining human remains for study?

MS: Firstly palaeopathology (the study of past health and illness) is beginning to make important progress in shedding light on the development of a number of major diseases in the past. Studying human remains also offers a chance to investigate the effects of various extreme economic and social circumstances on health and physical development which no longer exist in the modern world. Archaeological remains also provide the opportunity to take a really long view of the nature and development of human societies. For example we can ask questions like when did warfare / organised conflict first appear? Is war a type of behaviour that is ‘hard-wired’ into human beings or is it more of a cultural phenomenon? The remains of past people offer a ‘time depth’ when making such inquiries that is simply not available to modern researchers working in other areas of social science.

As a proportion of the total number of people that lived in the past the number of burials that survive to be discovered in modern times is tiny. When ancient human remains are reburied they are gone forever. This not only makes no sense in relation to what we can tell now, but also in that new techniques are constantly being developed that can shed new light on remains that were initially studied decades ago. Reburial is destruction and deprives future generations of the chance to learn more about our shared human past. We should look after these remains very carefully as we have a responsibility to the generations that will come after us that is just as great as our responsibility to those that lived in the past.

PfA: What do you think about the way human remains are displayed in museums?

MS: I think it’s perfectly acceptable to display human remains in museums – in fact there is overwhelming public support for it, providing it is done sensitively and respectfully. Human remains are special and are not the same as other classes of archaeological material such as pottery or metalwork. It is important that museum displays acknowledge this fact and try to tell the stories of individuals as much as possible. Human remains form a kind of record of the memories and events an individual experienced during their lifetime – it’s important for such aspects of the study of human remains to be made apparent in museum displays.

PfA: Do you think there is a role for Pagans in archaeology? Do you think the heritage sector should engage with Pagans?

MS: I think everyone has an equal right to express an opinion and conversely that the heritage sector should engage with everyone on an equal footing. Perhaps one way for Pagans to engage with archaeology is to publicise the importance of caring for the remains of our ancestors and perhaps also in thinking about what sorts of questions should be asked to try and gain a better understanding of the past. It seems clear that many Pagans care deeply about the past. We live in a society where there are a lot of people who don’t appear to care about the past at all. In this regard archaeologists and Pagans could be said to be very much on the same 'side'. There is no reason to see archaeological research and respect as being contradictory. It’s very encouraging to see the formation of a group like Pagans for Archaeology and I'd like to wish the group every success in its endeavours.