Today, especially at salvage excavations carried out in Israel, a nonacademic religious organization—Atra Kadisha—is routinely called in to excavate and remove human remains for reburial in a common grave without proper bio-anthropological documentation.b Although cursory examination of skeletal remains on site is sometimes permitted, this is totally unsatisfactory given the need to clean, reconstruct and analyze human remains in a specialized laboratory setting. In such facilities, we not only measure, photograph and take radiographs, we also analyze the skeletons using a vast array of modern tools. These include CT scans, scanning electron microscopes, as well as DNA and isotope analyses, all of which enable us to reconstruct in great detail the life history of past individuals and populations.My own view is that proper respect for the ancient dead demands that we allow the biological anthropologists to run the full gamut of analyses on their remains. This is the only voice these ancients have left in which to tell us their story. It's fine to rebury the remains after the analysis, but ideally they should go into sealed containers in recorded locations in case some new wonderful new technique allows us to gain substantially more information by revisiting them.
While cemeteries and isolated tombs are still occasionally excavated in Israel, we are largely unable to obtain scientific information about the human individuals for whom these tombs were constructed. Had the Ashkelon skeleton been excavated after 1995, it is unlikely that we would have been able to examine her in as much detail. This means that today, we are in the absurd situation of carrying out research into past societies exclusively through the study of their material culture without access to the most direct and conclusive data set, namely the evidence obtained from their skeletal remains.
And yes, to answer the question someone always asks at this point, I would be perfectly happy to have my remains or those of my family members studied in this way by future archaeologists. In fact I think it would be kind of cool.
In any case, this is a temporary problem. In what I suspect will be the surprisingly near future, nanotechnology should allow us to do full-scale, non-destructive scans of buried ancient human remains without disturbing where they rest. Faster please.
Tangentially related reflections here and links. [UPDATE (30 July): Also here.]
UPDATE: Then again, maybe I'll reserve my remains for other purposes. But in that case those future archaeologists and historians would learn a lot more by seeing to it that I'm reanimated.
