To Bury or Not To Bury?

This blog is quite serious (for a change), and discusses the reburial of human remains.

Pretty much what it says on the tin: Human remains are almost always bones, but as far as I’m aware the law also covers bog bodies and similar exceptional finds.  It is unclear whether the current law would cover non-burial finds, such as a small bone scatter across a site. Obviously, they were once people, and so should be afforded more respect than animal bone or broken pottery.

However, there have been a lot of people who lived on this island at one time or another, and (leaving aside the Bronze and Iron Ages, where there simply aren’t enough bodies), there’s a corresponding large amount of human remains. They’re everywhere, and they crop up in all kinds of archaeological work, from the smallest watching brief- where an archaeologist watches the diggers on a building site, looking for anything unusual or noteworthy- to the largest open site academic excavation. Clearly, there needs to be some kind of protocol, but what?

What’s the current law?

The 1857 Burial Act was designed to protect the Victorian public from exposure to recent corpses, grave-robbing and clearance of recent graves, during the expansion of the cities, but it also covered archaeology. The law was never updated when developer-funded archaeology came along, and covered all archaeological excavations. This led to all kinds of contradictions: uncovered burials on sites had to be screened off, but could be broadcast by things like Time Team. You can watch a skeleton being excavated on TV, but not in real life. 

Until 2008, an archaeological unit could apply to the home office for a licence to archaeologically excavate human remains. Curation in museums for items of scientific interest (including human bones) was considered an acceptable option. For the most part, this system worked quite well. Bones of interest were retained unless a particular ethnic interest group (like the Aborigines, or Native Americans, though obviously not these examples in the UK) could be identified and asked for reburial. 

However, in 2008, jurisdiction moved to the Ministry of Justice, who began issuing licences with the requirement of reburial within two years. Curation was no longer acceptable. 

In 2009, the MoJ admitted that the law needed to be revised, but before they could get around to it, a General Election intervened. It now looks set to stay.

So what’s the problem? And who cares?

The two major interest groups are archaeologists and druids. We haven’t really mentioned the druids yet, so I’ll say a few words about them.

As far as I can tell, they consider themselves to be the spiritual (though not always physical) descendants of the people who built Stonehenge and other, similar monuments like Avebury. Some also consider their rites and beliefs to be the continuation of the beliefs of those monument builders. Ancestor veneration is very important to the Druids, so they take the issue of human remains very seriously indeed. To read the official statement of the Council of British Druid Orders on human remains, click here. For an article by a Druid priest on the subject, click here. 

Archaeologists, obviously, study the past by digging it up (among other things), and that includes human bones. For an opinion by a leading archaeologist, click here.

Druids and archaeologists often get on, and most modern Druids are interested in what archaeological research can tell them about their spiritual ancestors. 

Unfortunately, we and they often don’t see eye to eye on the subject of human remains. Everyone thinks we should be ‘showing respect’ to them, but we can’t seem to agree on what that respect should entail. Druids would like the bones to be reburied, as the people who actually buried them wanted that to happen. They’re often quite distressed by the idea of ‘hundreds of bodies being kept in cardboard boxes beneath museums, never being looked at’. To them, this is disrespectful.  However, many archaeologists would contend that these need to be kept for research at a later time, as new tests are developed, which could tell us more about the people we were studying. We need a sample, and as much of our work requires population data, it needs to be a big sample. Many archaeologists do not view this retention of bones as disrespectful, though some considerations are taken. Site numbers are not inscribed on human bone, though they are on animal bone.

(Of course, there are other interest groups, but I have decided to leave them for now. It's something that everyone is entitled to a say on, and if I listed everyone, we'd be here for a really long time)

What are the problems with the current system?

The real problem is that there is no system. No-one is regulating whether the bodies are reburied or not. Even archaeologists who favour reburial think that two years is nowhere near enough time to complete their research. The wheels of archaeology grind slowly. 

In my opinion, reburial could be an option in some situations, as where we have a large number of bodies from a site, and have completed the relevant tests, and there are many other available sample bodies from that time period. This may solve problems of storage space, and may go some way to appeasing druids and other reburial advocates. However, I think a blanket policy of reburial is short-sighted, likely to stunt archaeological work and frankly stupid. Assessment on a case-by-case basis might work for remains dug up from now on, but there would be conflict surrounding any criteria that were chosen, and going back through the archives would be unbelievably time-consuming and expensive.  

But more importantly: what do you think?

I’m planning on using responses from this particular blog post in an essay discussion of this topic, so please keep it clean, and to the point. I’d prefer it if you leave your ideas here, rather than on the link comments section on Facebook, as they’d be much easier to archive that way.

Stonehenge

We've all seen Stonehenge, if not in real life, then in pictures. It's a symbol of Britain, and a symbol of Prehistory.  I went for the first time ever last week, which is pretty poor, given that I'm an archaeology student within an hour's drive, but I digress.

Stonehenge, showing one of the 'gallows-like' structures

Stonehenge has been the subject of hundreds of books and papers, thousands of hours of arguments and even some legal cases have been about it. So what's going on here? And why do people care so much?


What's in a name?

Why is Stonehenge called 'Stonehenge'? Like almost everything else about it, Stonehenge's name is a little ambiguous. Almost all of the etymologies suggest it derives from the Old English stan meaning 'stone'. The 'henge' may come from hencg meaning 'hinge', or hencen meaning 'gallows' or 'hanging place'. It is not clear if they were actually using the stones to hang people from, or whether they simply thought that the stones resembled a gallows.

Archaeology took the word 'henge', and used it to define a monument that is circular or ovular, with a ditch and bank structure, and the ditch on the inside, the opposite of a defencive structure. All well and good; we needed a word to describe those pesky circles. Except... Stonehenge doesn't have an internal ditch, and it's bank is pretty pathetic: only about 1m high. So actually, it's not a henge.

Avebury, which has an actual henge surrounding the stone circles.

It's also, and this is the mind blowing part, not made of stone.

Okay, it is actually stone, but it almost certainly symbolically represents wood, rather than stone. It doesn't look like any other stone circle. Normal stone circles do not have connecting stones on top of the uprights, but this is thought to have been very common in timber circles.  Below is a picture of the Stones of Stenness, a 'more typical' stone circle, and a reconstruction of a timber circle.

 

 Which one looks more like Stonehenge?

The way the lintel (top) stones are attached is also by a method far more suited to woodworking than stone building. Above is a close up of one of the standing stones. See the little bump on the top? That's to attach the lintel stone, which would have a corresponding hole gouged into it. This is still used in Ikea furniture.

Archaeologists have started to think about Stonehenge in the context of timber, rather than stone circles. A good place to start, if you're interested, is Stonehenge and other Timber Circles by Alex Gibson.

Who built Stonehenge?

A wizard did it. No, really. Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 12th Century wrote an account of the building of Stonehenge. By Merlin.

Not that Merlin. The proper one. Here's a picture of him directing some giants to help him build Stonehenge.

This is the oldest known depiction of Stonehenge. 

A bit later on, in the 1600s, a man called William Stukeley had some other ideas about Stonehenge. Stukeley was one of the most important fore-runners to modern archaeology, who drew some brilliant pictures of the monuments, and did quite a bit of 'excavating'. This was closer to Time Team's methods than a real archaeological enquiry, but pioneering for the time. He was also one of the first biographers of Newton, who was a personal friend. Stukeley suggested that it might have been built by the Druids. This isn't as mad as it first sounds: he identified the building as ritualistic in nature, and then looked for a corresponding 'Priestly-caste' in the ancient sources for a people who had lived here before the Romans. The priests he found were the Druids. Druids became quite popular at one time as folk heroes: those Celtic people who had fought the Romans. This was important, because most of the folk heroes of the individual countries of Great Britain were heroes for killing the others. Usually the English.

More recently, thanks to various dating methods, it has become clear that Stonehenge is much, much older than the Druids.* They existed about 2000 years ago, all across Western Europe. By AD86 they had been herded across Europe by the Romans. Agricola, the governor of Britain cornered the last of them on Anglesy and had them all killed.

However, Stonehenge had been built long before that, from about 3100BC - 1600BC, in a series of very distinct phases. Clearly the place was important, but it's meaning would almost certainly have changed over that time. Since we think the average life expectancy was about 30,  that's 3 generations a century, or 45 generations in total. That's more than the generations between our time and the time of Jesus.




What does  it mean?

No one knows. Is it, as Mike Parker Pearson has suggested, a place that represents death? Would people have processed from Woodhenge (a timber circle), the symbolic place of life to Stonehenge, the symbolic counterpart?  Or does it represent life, as a timber circle, immortalised forever as durable stone? Is it a landing place for aliens, an inter dimensional portal, a prehistoric computer?

Jaquetta Hawkes said that 'Every generation gets the Stonehenge it deserves', by which she meant that each new group of archaeologists has a new take on the meaning of the monument, usually at least in part driven by their own ideas about the world.

What Stonehenge meant to the people who built it is likely to be something archaeologists argue about forever, and probably something we will never really know. However, Stonehenge is more than just a dead monument; it has meaning to people in the here and now. In that case, Stonehenge can mean anything you want it to; Stonehenge can be all things to all people, as long as they don't extrapolate that back onto those in the past.

*Note: the Neo-Druids contest this; they continue to believe that Stonehenge was built by Druids.