Encountering Human Remains: Heritage Issues and Ethical Considerations

Encounters with human remains captivate the human psyche in a myriad of unique ways. While archaeologists usually approach human remains as a source of scientific data that illuminates how ancient people lived and died, others attribute tremendous cultural, spiritual, and political significance to them. Owing to these complex meanings and the unique symbolic power they embody, human remains often receive a prominent spotlight and public attention in various spaces. For example, museums around the world often display human remains for their educational and scientific value, whereas in attention-grabbing travelling exhibitions, anatomical human remains can be transformed into objects of morbid curiosity. Various forms of media including mainstream news media and social media further amplify this fascination and foster an increasing focus on death resulting in death-related aesthetics, literary movements, and even fashion trends.  

The spiritual, cultural, or personal desire to encounter the dead can mobilise masses of people to visit historic sites of conflict,  violence, and death as sites of tourism or as sacred sites where they can reflect on the magnitude of the loss of life and honour the dead. At the same time, mass graves as heritage sites encounter problems with visitors who do not respect the dead as the event in question recedes from memory. But what sort of behaviour is appropriate and should it be policed? Those who approach the dead from different epistemologies can place the dead closer to the realm of the living, maintaining their status as peoples and spirits and rejecting their relegation to mere curiosities. 

In recent decades, a growing body of literature on human remains has examined how unique and complex the approaches to and encounters with the remains of the dead may be for various communities and within different heritage contexts. This conference sought to explore these diverse perspectives through papers that interrogating different forms of encounters with human remains and deathscapes under an ethical heritage lens.  

Listen to the keynote Lecture Recording here