Grave Robbing
According to the BBC, Druid Chris Warwick has started a new organization called “Dead to Rights”. Its purpose? To have ancient burial grounds in the UK considered sacred sites in the same manner that modern graveyards are, and to stop scientific “grave-robbing”.
“A retired engineer from Swansea is campaigning for ancient burial sites to be considered sacred ground. Chris Warwick, who is now a druid, said places like Paviland cave on Gower should be treated the same way as modern graveyards…”We have formed a little group called Dead to Rights, to work for the return of remains to the sites they were buried in and hopefully have them reburied there with due ceremony. The sites would be regarded as sacred thereafter”…Mr Warwick said he was happy for archaeologists to photograph and examine burial sites.”
While Warwick seems a bit “off” in the article, he brings up some serious issues. Is it proper for ancient burial sites to be unearthed and the bodies kept forever for scientific study and display? Shouldn’t we honor the sacred grounds of pre-Christian society as we do for the sacred grounds of Christians? How do we strike a proper balance between learning more about our past and respecting cultures older than our own?
4 responses so far
I think the Egyptians might have the balanced solution: have a very good reason to open grave sites to begin with, study as much as possible without destroying anything, return things to their resting places as soon as possible. I think our ancestors would have wanted us to learn from them – they left enough in the way of carvings and paintings, intended to last for future generations, that I think this is a reasonable assumption. At the same time, respecting our ancestors is of paramount importance – that they are dead does not make them less human – and scientists should bear in mind that objects found in graves and tombs belong to the dead. We have the technology to make very accurate reproductions of anything we might find in a grave, so we do not need to deprive the dead of their last possessions for very long at all. One justification I can think of to the contrary would be if permanently removing the dead and their belongings is the only way to protect them from other forms of human intrusion…in which case I would propose the creation of a new site in which to eventually return the dead to their rest.
To answer the question regarding the sacredness of an ancient burial site, I believe they would be no more or less sacred than modern burial sites.
I tend to think the graves should be returned to their original state as soon as possible. The problem is, I don’t see how that can be done in such a way as to provide protection from potential vandals and grave robbers, who might consider the artifacts valuable, as a good many of them doubtless are.
Much of what makes up the information that modern pagans use to udnerstand ancient pagans would never have been known if people didn’t dig up graves.
The real problem here, as I see it, is the double standard. Perhaps there should be a statute of limitation on burials…
I’ve excavated Crusader graves…etc, the politics of digging up the dead are extremely complex, but I’d suggest a reasonable amount of time for the generations who can legitimately trace their genealogy to the person, and can make it known to be sacrosanct as far as the burial. Hell, I hope someone digs me up and learns a lot from me someday, it would be good to think my dry bones are more useful to them than to me.
–PEter
This weekend, I went to the fine arts museum and toured its extensive Egyptian antiquities department, which features several mummies. At least one of them, as far as I know, still has a body in it.
It was fascinating, the exhibit is respectful, informative . . . but Boston is not exactly Egypt. Should these things be returned? Should all the remains and artifacts from museums be returned and reburied, entombed? What if the locations where the remains where retrieved are no longer suitable for burial? Given the thousands of years between many of the internments and now, is this something that we can even do, feasibly? I guess it depends on surviving descendents — are today’s pagans, wiccans, and others really to be considered “descendents” of these people? Sure, we may consider the ancients our spiritual ancestors, but we certainly do not necessarily have a genetic or ethnic claim.
I’m not proposing a definitive answer to this question, but it seems that science may have a more plausible claim. Someone else here wrote that if scientists did not dig up graves, we wouldn’t have most of our information on the ancient world from which we develop/reconstruct the very religions we are trying to respect.