To think it’s no more acceptable to dig up ancient graves than it would be to dig up recent ones?

[AngeloMysterioso]

I follow a few historical Instagram accounts and one has just posted about a c. 1000 year old mummified body that has just been unearthed from an underground tomb in Peru.

It looks as though this poor person died in a fairly horrific way and now it’s remains are on display in a glass box with people taking pictures a few feet away.

AIBU to think these people should be left well alone to rest in peace with the same respect and dignity that we afford to people who died last week?

I agree. I think it's disrespectful.

I agree 100%.

I always wonder what the limit is between grave desecration/robbing and archeology

I agree. I don’t think people should be unearthed and put on show. Leave them to rest in peace.

Hard disagree. They are only remains, the person has long long gone and their relatives ditto. Fwiw archaeologists do give extra care to human remains.

I'll be giving my body to medical science once I'm dead. My mother, like most, was cremated. How is burning better?

I mean bodies are quite often dug up and moved and re examined out of the millions of people Buried. The museum bit can be a bit meh. But then again I’d love to donate my body to a cadaver farm so I’m not the best person to ask.

Whilst I think their remains should remain undisturbed, I think it's crass to compare a 1000-year-old mummy with someone who died last week.

My parents have signed all the papers to donate their bodies to the University for medical science and I still haven’t come to terms with it.

I disagree. It's important to learn about our past. These people have been dead for literally hundreds of years and every single person with any remote connection to them the same.

You'll consent to being used for medical science. These people have never consented to being displayed .

Bodies frequently have to be moved for many reasons, a big one being developments for infrastructure (e.g. HS2) or new housing. Running out of room in graveyards is another.

It's either move them or destroy them and chuck them on the spoil heap.

Completely agree. I never understand why this is viewed as okay. It feels particularly wrong when it is, for example, a mother and child who suffered a tragic death and were buried together. Leave them to rest in peace, as intended. I think they have a right to that. Who are we to dig them up and put them in a museum/photograph their bones for everyone to gawp at.

I agree, I can barely look at mummies. I don't find them terrifying, I just find it so disrespectful. They need peace, whether they are 5 minutes dead or 5000years dead. It always makes me wince when the Egyptians declare they've found a mummy... In a tomb... In a pyramid. Well of course you were going to find a mummy for goodness sake, it's a burial site!

I think once a body is buried it should stay buried.

Archaeologist here. I think YABU because you maybe don't understand the purpose or reason why people are dug up.

90% of archaeology is done under the planning laws which means the developer's choice is either to destroy the remains by letting diggers rip them to pieces before we do building work (illegal), or we dig them up and re-site them somewhere, usually cataloguing them and recording all aspects of them first.

If you don't want archaeology to be done to these people, what is your proposed alternative when some big company wants to build a housing estate, shopping centre or road? Should we just smash it all up? Or build nothing, ever? Because usually we don't know there are remains until we start surveying, after the developer has bought the land and already been granted planning permission.

And what do we do when we run out of land for the billions of dead people, generation after generation for tens of thousands of years of human history? The sheer scale of the problem makes this impossible. Where do the living live if the dead have every inch of land around the world? Where do the rainforests grow? Where do the animals go?

Graveyards and burials are for those living. To grieve and keep the memory.

Old graves tell story of old times and once the long enough time passed so no-one remembers, why not.

From very old times we have only bare bones or mummified bodies of those who wanted to survive ages, so I don't see an issue with giving them after life fame.

I hate the wayTV presenters get all excited about looking at these remains. I find it really distasteful. And find it heartbreaking if it’s a child or a baby. I switch off now.

I was talking about the past-people already buried . I think nowadays cremations are the way to go anyway, no danger of being dug up.

I agree with @Archaeolollipop re the validity of what archaeologists do.

However, I'm not sure that human remains should be displayed to the general public.

Mixed views on this. I've been to see Egyptian exhibitions where there were mummies on display and I found it totally fascinating. There was a class of kids there that day too and they were all taking notes and it seemed like they were having an important educational experience.

I personally think it's ok when several generations have passed but I think that museums and exhibits could probably do more to remind people that at one point this was a living human and it's good to be respectful and not treat them as some kind of non-human artefact. There's ways to do this with signs and lighting and maybe discouraging photography.

My people have very specific rituals around death and burial, however we have had centuries of our ancestors being dug up as though they are nothing, as well as having mass executions and being dumped in unmarked mass graves, many of which are only being discovered now.

There is simply no reason to dig someone up and have the general public gawping at their remains, none at all.

There is actually legislation and a very strict code regarding whether to lift historic human remains or leave them in situ - archeologists don't just dig people up for fun.

Sometimes it can be a rescue situation, remains are found where modern development is planned for example. In situations like this vast amounts of money is spent disinterring all remains and reburying them.

If there is a specific research question that further study of the remains can answer remains may also be lifted. Before that it has to be shown that there is a good scientific reason for this, funds are in place to care for and store the remains in a respectful manner during the study period and there is a plan for what to do with the remains once the investigations have been done.

Any stakeholders such as the local community, religious or cultural groups and any possible living relatives should also be consulted over any plans.

The vast majority of human remains discovered are left in situ and reburied.

We can learn huge amounts from skeletal remains that we cannot find out any other way. Bones can tell us about peoples diet, the type of jobs they did, migration patterns and their society and culture.

So no, I don't believe that there should be a blanket policy of leaving all remains in situ.

I have an archaeology degree. I would not have been comfortable excavating an ancient cemetery personally, and luckily I didn't have to. I think that what can he learned about the past from burial excavation is really valuable and fascinating - for instance, the evidence gathered from an excavation of a mass grave in Dorset told archaeologists loads about the St Brice's Day massacres.

I do however find the idea of exhuming more recent bodies absolutely disgusting - when I saw the TV programme where they excavated a Georgian graveyard for the HS2 project I nearly threw up and was totally creeped out. The very idea of flesh or hair still being present... 🤢🤯 We know enough about these periods without needing to excavate graveyards.

I don't really want to gawp at human remains in glass cabinets.