by Sue Black
Some remains will transcend any arbitrary definition of what is considered to be of forensic interest and what is archaeological, however long ago death may have occurred. There are important human considerations that make the barrier between those definitions porous – chiefly when the identity of a body that has been discovered is known or suspected, and the person’s relatives are still living. For example, irrespective of the passage of time, no children’s remains found on Saddleworth Moor, where the murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley buried their victims, will ever be viewed as anything other than of forensic relevance.
I was never destined to become an osteoarchaeologist, but that does not mean that I have not worked on archaeological skeletal material. I was first exposed to this in the fourth and final year of my undergraduate studies at Aberdeen University. After my third year – human body dissection, which I’d loved – I found myself faced with an odd mix of subjects that seemed to have been thrown together according to the interests of individual academics rather than to constitute any viable academic plan. I went from studying neuroanatomy one week to grappling with human evolution the next, then on to confocal microscopy (never understood that) and the unpleasant rhetorical musings of a rather sleazy academic who liked to talk about wetsuits and the douching effect they had on women. Bizarre.
Of more relevance was the obligation to undertake a research project in that final year. All the staff seemed to be researching in areas like lead levels in rat brain, carcinoma in the hamster pituitary or neuropathy in diabetic mice. I have a morbid fear of mice, rats and frankly anything rodentesque, dead or alive, so there was no way I was going to spend my research time with corpses of dead rodents. I pleaded and I begged with all of the academics to suggest almost anything else I might study. My future supervisor came up with the idea that I might like to consider identification from human bone for the purposes of forensic anthropology. Brilliant – no fur, tails or claws. No rapid scurrying movements, no biting, no scratching, and a natural progression from the human corpse in the dissecting room and the fresh meat of a butcher’s shop.
I looked at how we might try to establish the sex of an individual when presented only with fragments of a skeleton. The sample I was to use was a Bronze Age collection held in the museum at Marischal College. These archaeological remains were from the Beaker culture, named for their distinctive bell-shaped drinking vessels. It was their practice to bury these, sometimes along with some small stones or basic jewellery, in the cist (a stone-built box or ossuary) in which they interred their dead. In the north-east of Scotland these short cists were constructed with four upright stone side slabs and a horizontal capstone. Most had been unintentionally uncovered by farmers, usually when the edge of a plough lifted the capstone to reveal a skeleton crouched inside along with its beaker. It is thought that these people migrated from the Rhine area as traders and settled along the east coast of northern Britain. Because they were often buried in sand, the preservation of the remains was excellent and they formed a marvellous study collection for my research project.
The silent back rooms of the Marischal museum were a haven for me. Dusty, warm and smelling of wood and resin, they reminded me of my father’s carpentry workshop. They gave me many quiet hours, hidden away between the archive stacks, to ponder the lives of the Beaker people, their health and how they died. These were peaceful folk and few of the deaths were traumatic. While I found them interesting, and was fascinated by the stories written in their bones, I was aware of a sense of incompleteness and a lack of fulfilment. This had less to do with the remoteness of a culture that existed 4,000 years ago than it did with the infuriating certainty that we would never really know the truth about their lives and deaths. It was all supposition and theory rather than fact. I was to find the lives and deaths of the more recent denizens of these islands more challenging, but more rewarding, too, once I brought the skills I’d learned to identifying the dead of today’s world and answering some of the questions they pose.
As our islands have been inhabited for more than 12,000 years, it is inevitable that the working life of every forensic anthropologist will be crossed by archaeological material on a fairly frequent basis. Given the huge variation in population size over the centuries, we can only guess at how many people in total have expired on our soil but globally, it is believed that over a hundred billion people have lived and died since the appearance of Homo Sapiens about 50,000 years ago – fifteen times as many as the 7 billion or so of us alive in the world today. The living will never outnumber the dead because that would mean the global population expanding to somewhere in excess of 150 billion, which would not be sustainable.
In the twenty-first century one in every 39,000 head of population will die every day in the UK – that’s over half a million bodies a year that must be ‘managed’, generally either by burial or cremation. There are only so many things you can do with dead bodies before they quickly become unpleasant to live with. Five traditional and accepted ways of dealing with them have been used by humankind around the world across the ages. First, they can be left exposed in the open for terrestrial and airborne scavengers to remove, the method still employed in the sky burials of Tibet. Secondly, they can be deposited in rivers or into the sea, where aquatic life will fulfil the same purpose. Thirdly, we may store our dead above ground, via immurement in mausoleums and the like, which has often been the preferred option of the wealthy. The fourth solution is to bury them in the ground, where the invertebrates of the soil will take on the scavenging processes. With the appropriate permission, we can technically bury a body anywhere we like, including on private land, as long as there is no risk of contamination of water sources. Lastly, we can burn them, which is currently seen as the quickest and most hygienic choice, though it does raise concerns about air pollution.
Perhaps the most extreme solution – and one neither advocated nor deemed socially acceptable today – would be to eat the deceased. While cannibalism (anthropophagy) is a feature of many cultures, in the UK evidence of the dead being used as a food source is sparse. Gough’s Cave in Somerset, home at the end of the Ice Age to the Horse Hunters of Cheddar Gorge, is an exception. Skeletal remains found here show cuts consistent with the removal of flesh for consumption. There is more evidence in later centuries of medical cannibalism, arising from a belief among apothecaries in the mystical properties of the corpse. Preparations for ailments such as migraine, consumption and epilepsy, as well as general tonics, were made from various human parts. The rationale was that if death came upon somebody suddenly, their spirit could remain trapped within their corpse for long enough to bring vital benefits to those who chose to consume it. These ‘corpse medicines’ were often derived from ground-down bones, dried blood and rendered fat, along with many other equally unpalatable parts of the body.
A Franciscan apothecary from 1679 even gives us a recipe for human blood jam. He would first recover the fresh blood from recently dead people who exhibited a ‘warm, moist temperament’ and were preferably of ‘plump build’. The blood was left to congeal into a ‘dry, sticky mass’ before being placed on a soft-wood table and cut into thin slices, allowing any liquids to drip away. It was then stirred into a batter on the stove and dried. While still warm, it was ground in a bronze mortar to a powder, which would be forced through fine silk. Once sealed in a jar, it could be reconstituted every spring with fresh, clear water and administered as a tonic.
Interestingly, according to one British academic lawyer, cannibalism is not in itself actually illegal in the UK, though mercifully there are laws against murder and desecrating a corpse. This revelation led my youngest daughter Anna, a trainee lawyer (or baby shark, as we call her), to muse, while sucking the blood from a cut to her finger, on whether any crime would be committed if one chose to eat oneself – a practice called autosarcophagy. And would consensual cannibalism be an offence provided nobody died? It seems that in UK law cannibalism is associated with the crime of murder, or at le
ast of corpse desecration, rather than treated as a separate act. I worry about what kind of law Anna might go into.
Historically, in the UK ground burial has tended to be our favoured means of disposal. Ancient burial sites are likely to have been selected for the cultural importance or sacred significance of the land. As formalised religion took hold, burials were moved into churchyards or, if the departed was a sufficiently prominent figure, sometimes within churches themselves or directly below them in crypts.
With the mass migration to cities brought by the Industrial Revolution, we began to run out of burial space and the Victorian era saw the construction of municipal cemeteries, often in the outskirts of urban areas. Until the Burial Act of 1857, the reuse of graves had been common but as the cemeteries began to fill up, the eviction of some of their tenants rather more swiftly than was felt to be decent often led to public outrage. The legislation made it illegal for a grave to be disturbed, except when official exhumations were ordered. Interestingly, it was only opening a grave that constituted an offence. It was not against the law to actually steal a dead body – as long as it was naked.
Since the 1970s local councils have had the power to reuse longstanding graves provided that the coffin of the original inhabitant is kept intact. They have done so by deepening graves to make room for another burial on top. They would normally confine this practice to graves over a hundred years old which were untended, suggesting that they were no longer visited. In 2007, a shake-up of the Local Authorities Act in London, where the space problem is most acute, paved the way for boroughs to exhume remains and place them in smaller containers before reburying them, as long as the grave is at least seventy-five years old and there are no objections from leaseholders or relatives. This allows them to reclaim graves where there is room for more bodies not necessarily related to the original incumbent. In 2016 the Scottish Parliament enacted similar legislation.
Grave reuse remains an emotive issue and raises religious, cultural and ethical concerns. But with the shortage of burial spaces in the UK reaching crisis point – according to a 2013 BBC survey, half of all cemeteries in England will be full by 2033 – something must be done to prevent the closure of cemeteries to any new occupants or we need to find another way to dispose of our dead.
With an estimated 55 million people dying every year worldwide, the problem is of, course, not restricted to the UK. The cities most affected are those that do not have a tradition of grave recycling. Durban, South Africa and Sydney, Australia, for example, have, like London, encountered strong cultural resistance to plans to introduce new legislation.
Many cities around the world, especially in Europe, have historically taken a slightly different approach, routinely removing bones from the ground or vaults and transferring them to vast underground catacombs or ossuaries, where the artistic skills of the custodian were given free rein. The largest of these is under the streets of Paris, where nearly 6 million skeletons lie, and perhaps one of the most ornate is the Sedlec ossuary in the Czech Republic, built in 1400 to house the skeletons removed from the church’s overcrowded cemetery. In 1870 a wood-carver named Frantisek Rint was given the job of sorting out the accumulated heaps and began to transform the bones of between 40,000 and 70,000 people into outrageously elaborate decorations and furnishings for the chapel. There are chandeliers, coats of arms and fancy buttressing, all constructed from human bones. It seems that in his dedication to his art Rint allowed no sentiment to influence his choice of materials and viewing his handiwork can be an uncomfortable experience when you see how many of the bones come from very young children – including those frivolously used to create his signature.
In much of modern Europe the tradition of removing remains from cemeteries has naturally evolved into grave recycling. Germany and Belgium, for instance, provide public graves free of charge for around twenty years. After that, if families do not choose to pay to retain them, the occupants will be moved deeper into the ground or to another site, sometimes a mass grave. It is common practice in warmer climates, for example in Spain or Portugal, where bodies decompose more rapidly, for remains to be interred in the ground for a shorter period. If families then wish, the bones can be transferred to cemetery wall vaults for as long as payment is made. Ultimately, when there is no close family left, they are evicted. Some end up in museums where they can be studied and others are burned and ground down into ash. Singapore has a similar system to those used in Europe and Australia is about to adopt the UK’s ‘lift and deepen’ option.
But burial, of whatever duration and whether in the ground or within monuments, is falling out of favour. The 30 million feet of wood, 1.6 million tons of concrete, 750,000 gallons of embalming fluid and 90,000 tons of steel that are buried underground in the United States alone are a stark illustration of its polluting effects. If those committed to the preservation of the planet are concerned about underground contamination by interments, they are no happier about cremation. Every cremation uses the equivalent of about 16 gallons of fuel and increases the global emission of mercury, dioxins and furans (a toxic compound). A broad estimate suggests that if you accumulated the amount of energy expended on cremations in one year in the USA alone, you could fuel a rocket for eighty-three return trips to the moon. Yet cremation is on the rise in the States – in 1960 it was the method chosen for only 3.5 per cent of deaths; today the figure is nearer 50 per cent.
Not surprisingly, the highest percentage is found in countries where cremation is the cultural norm or traditional choice for religious reasons, chiefly those with large Hindu or Buddhist populations. Japan tops the world cremation league table with 99.97 per cent, closely followed by Nepal (90 per cent) and India (85 per cent). In numerical terms, China has the most cremations – nearly 4.5 million a year.
Cremation burns away the organic components of the body leaving only pieces composed of dry and inert minerals, predominantly the calcium phosphates of the bones. The resulting ash represents approximately 3.5 per cent of the body and will weigh on average about 4lbs. In most crematoria, the remains are removed from the furnace and put through a mechanism called a cremulator, which grinds the bone remnants into ash and sifts out any foreign pieces of metal. In traditional Japanese cremations, the family pick the bone fragments out of the ashes with chopsticks and transfer them into an urn, starting at the feet end and finishing at the head so that the deceased is never upside down.
In the UK, about three quarters of the population now choose cremation over burial, but the rapid increase seen since the 1960s has levelled off in the last decade. Modern society likes to keep pushing the boundaries and newer ‘greener’ options are starting to emerge (cremated ashes are pretty much devoid of major nutrients). One is ‘resomation’, which involves alkaline hydrolysis. The body is placed into a vat with water and lye (caustic soda or sodium hydroxide) and heated to 160°C under high pressure for about three hours. This breaks down the body tissues into a greenish-brown liquid, rich in amino acids, peptides and salts. The remaining brittle bones are reduced to powder (principally calcium hydroxyapatite) by a cremulator and can then be scattered or used as fertiliser.
Another method, ‘promession’, works by freeze-drying the body in liquid nitrogen at -196°C and then vibrating it vigorously to explode it into particles. These are then dried in a chamber and any metal remnants are separated out with a magnet before the powder is interred in the top layers of soil, where bacteria will finish off the process. The latest green alternative, ‘human composting’, is still in the design phase but the idea is that a family will bring the body of their deceased loved one, wrapped in linen, to a ‘recomposition’ centre with a three-storey tower at its core – a giant version of a garden composter. Here the body is laid on woodchips and sawdust to aid decomposition. After four to six weeks, the body breaks down into about a cubic yard of compost, which can then be used to nurture trees and shrubs. They haven’t yet figured out what to do with the bones and teeth, so perhaps human compost
ing still has some way to go.
If such modern methods become the norm, fewer of us will leave behind as many traces of our physical selves as our ancestors did. Skeletal and other remains have enriched human history by giving archaeologists and anthropologists the voyeuristic luxury and academic stimulation of being able to study the people of former cultures at an up-close and very personal level.
While historical remains have usually consisted mainly of bones and accoutrements with which the dead have been buried, as we have discussed, certain climactic conditions – hot, dry heat, sub-zero temperatures or submersion, for example – have famously conserved some bodies almost in their entirety for centuries. Otzi the Iceman, discovered in 1991 in mountains on the border between Austria and Italy over 5,000 years after his death, had been nearly fully preserved, as was the body of John Torrington, from the ill-fated Franklin expedition of 1845, who was found 129 years later buried in the frozen tundra of northernmost Canada along with two of his colleagues.
‘Bog bodies’ such as Grauballe Man, Tollund Man, Lindow Man, Stidsholt Woman and the Kayhausen Boy owe the longevity of their remains to being buried in peat. Submersion in a mildly acidic liquid with high levels of magnesium was responsible for the remarkable preservation of the 2,000-year-old Han dynasty Chinese mummy known as the Lady of Dai, who was discovered in 1971 by workers digging an air-raid shelter for a hospital near Changsa. Even her blood vessels were intact, and found to contain a small amount of type A blood.
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Although it is rare for my team to have any significant involvement in the realm of archaeology, I was, against my better judgement, once persuaded, along with three fellow scientists, to participate in a BBC2 television series called History Cold Case, first broadcast in 2010–11. The formula was that we would be given archaeological human remains to examine, from which we were asked to piece together the lives they had once represented, with the researchers drip-feeding us information where appropriate. We genuinely hadn’t a clue what we were going to be shown or what we would discover. So, while it was a little nerve-wracking, it was also quite intriguing. That said, I still moan and groan about it incessantly, mainly because performing in front of television cameras is not my thing – I have a face for radio. But all the stories we covered carried a reminder of just how far the dead, even from a very long time ago, can reach beyond their graves to touch us today.