results in the deprivation of local communities' heritage, the damage

and
destruction of archaeological sites, the loss of knowledge specifically
about context and more
generally about the past, the loss of public access to treasures in
publicly accountable museums, the
alienation of indigenous people from their cultural traditions, and the
fostering of links among
huaqueros and middlemen to organized crime.
THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY ATROCITIES
Another political arena in which archaeologists have found themselves
is that of documenting the
atrocities committed during the wars of the twentieth century. In the
face of government denials,
official cover-ups, and intimidation of local survivors, it has often been
extremely difficult to
document and verify accounts of massacres. Only in recent years were
the mass graves of victims of
German Nazis and Soviet Stalinists uncovered by archaeologists to
establish once and for all who
was responsible and who died. 52 At Serniki in the Ukraine Richard
Wright and his Australian team
excavated the remains of 550 Jewish victims of a Nazi massacre during
the Second World War.
Similar excavations have been conducted on the mass graves of those
murdered by the Soviets.
Mass graves from three sites in western Russia have been excavated by
a team led by Marek
Urbanski, yielding the remains of 25, 700 Poles killed in April and May
1940. Most of them were
Polish army officers captured at the beginning of the war; 14, 700 of the
bodies have been identified
by their uniforms and equipment. Exhumation has also begun on the
thirty thousand political victims
of Stalin's secret service, the NKVD, who were buried in hundreds of
mass graves in the Kuropaty
Woods near Minsk.
More recently archaeologists and forensic anthropologists have been
involved in recovering the
remains of victims of military human rights violations over the last thirty
years. Between 1976 and
1983 more than a thousand people 'disappeared' under the Argentinian
military regime. 53 With the
restoration of democracy in 1983 investigations began immediately. In
1984 the American forensic
anthropologist Clyde Snow began supervising the excavation and
exhumation of the victims,
providing testimony which resulted in the sentencing of five out of nine
generals and admirals on
trial. Snow also led teams in Guatemala and Mexico in 1994. 54Similar
projects to recover those
murdered by military forces have been set up in El Salvador, Haiti,
Honduras, the Philippines and
Rwanda. 55
Much of this work is carried out under the auspices of the Physicians for
Human Rights (PHR), a
Boston-based organization of scientists using forensics to investigate
and prevent violations of
international human rights and humanitarian law. In ten years it has
been involved in exhumations
and autopsies of alleged torture and non-judicial execution victims in
Brazil, Israel, the former
Czechoslovakia, Iraq, Kurdistan, Kuwait, Panama and Thailand as well as
the nations mentioned
above.
Recently PHR forensic teams have worked for the United Nations
excavating mass graves in the
former Yugoslavia at sites like Vukovar and Srebrnica, to validate the
accounts of the victims'
relatives and provide evidence that will lead to prosecutions of war
criminals. 56 In 1991 two
hundred Croatian soldiers and hospital workers disappeared near
Ovcara, while in the hands of the
Serbian Yugoslav National Army (JNA). Eleven months later Snow and
members of UNPROFOR
discovered a grave site south-east of Ovcara and identified the exposed
bones of three adult males.
Two of these surface skeletons had gunshot wounds to the head.
Snow's PHR team, including the
archaeologist Rebecca Saunders, returned to carry out a preliminary
survey. A test trench located
nine skeletons along with cartridges in a mass grave. In 1993 a PHR
team, under the auspices of the
UN War Crimes Commission, began full excavation. In 1995 the
International Criminal Tribunal for
the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) issued indictments for the killing of 260
men against three highranking
JNA officers. 57
WHO OWNS THE DEAD?
In 1998 an unusual court case in London centred around the use of
human body parts in an exhibition
of sculpture. An artist, Anthony-Noel Kelly, had obtained portions of
cadavers from the Royal
College of Surgeons' stores and had used them to make moulds from
which he had produced casts.
The trial was problematic because in Britain there is no ownership in a
corpse. 58 In a historic
ruling, the judge declared that the human remains 'having undergone a
process of skill... with the
object of preserving it for the purpose of medical or scientific
examination' did constitute property
and had thus been unlawfully removed. On appeal, the judge's verdict
was upheld. 59 Up until this
particular case, it could have been claimed that the collections of
human remains in the many
museums in Britain were not the property of those museums and that,
subsequently, they had no right
to keep them.
Yet who really 'owns' the ancient dead? Do they belong to the whole of
humanity, whose
representatives and institutions maintain their remains and learn from
the past to enlighten the
present? Or do they belong to the descendent communities who claim
them as direct ancestors to the
exclusion of everyone else? What about the remains of ancestors so
ancient that they are likely to
have passed on genes to everyone on the planet? Do they belong to any
one ethnicity or nation?
The 'reburial' issue has come a long way since the 1970s and the tide is
turning in favour of the
rights of indigenous and other minority groups to decide the fate of
ancestral remains. Closer
cooperation and mutual respect has led to compromise and to the
development of trust so that
archaeologists and other academics can represent local groups as
expert witnesses. There has also
been a growth in numbers of indigenous archaeologists in various
countries. By and large
archaeologists and developers know to ensure that there is prior
consultation with indigenous
groups before undertaking rescue and research projects. There are also
local successes in
establishing 'keeping places' where local custodians may ensure the
sanctity of the bones' resting
place while controlling access by researchers.
There seems little doubt that the 'reburial' issue has developed out of
specific historical
conditions of exploitation and unequal relationships of power, albeit in
many different parts of the
world. It is among those communities who feel most discriminated
against and under threat from the
secular authorities, and often most powerless to control their own
political and economic destinies,
that the concerns of tampering with the ancestral dead are strongest.
For indigenous groups whose
ancestors were victims of atrocities and exploitation, archaeologists and
anthropologists have
constituted a second wave of colonialism in which science, like
Christianity, has been viewed as
just another vehicle of oppression. Many live with the contradiction of
inhabiting and working the
land yet not owning it, full citizens but of second-class status. There is a
genuine desire to protect
the dead and to release them from their 'prisons' in museum stores and,
for many, this is a moral
stance linked to a different understanding of history, in which the past
lives on in the present.
At the same time, and without denying the sincerity of these concerns,
the 'reburial' issue has
been a rallying point for political activism, seeking to establish control
over bones as symbols of
power, serving to legitimize ethnicity, equality and rights over land, and
challenging the racism of
the colonial majority. Sometimes respect for the dead has been
imported through western Christian
teachings to indigenous peoples who traditionally were unconcerned by
the fate of human remains.
60 In broader political terms, indigenous peoples have not managed to
gain back the lands and
resources that were taken from them by governments and settlers but
they have won a symbolic
victory which has helped to restore pride and respect in indigenous
identity. In many cases the
general public acknowledges the histories of oppression and dislocation
suffered by indigenous
minorities and has been broadly sympathetic to their aims in restricting
the activities of
archaeologists. At the same time archaeologists have had cause to
remember that they should
always put the living first.