archaeology students can’t cope with ‘scary bones’

[Gary Vines]

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/09/archeology-students-cant-cope-scary-bones-really-doomed/

[Steve Corsini]

How many archaeologists do actually get to work on skeletal remains at all?

 

Stephen Corsini

 

 

 

 

From: oza...@googlegroups.com [mailto:oza...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Gary Vines
Sent: Wednesday, 28 September 2016 8:06 AM
To: OzArch
Subject: {OzArch} archaeology students can’t cope with ‘scary bones’

 

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/09/archeology-students-cant-cope-scary-bones-really-doomed/

 

 

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[Gary Vines]

The article is from Britain - so a few of them get to dig up bones

 

[Richard Wright]

I imagine not many archaeologists get to work on them, at least in Australia.

Nevertheless I think field archaeologists should be able to recognise human skeletal remains, even though they may not actually work on them.

Because of the legal implications of finding human bones, field archaeologists should be able to recognise them.

They can turn up unexpectedly on any excavation. Alternatively, time is wasted on an excavation if bones are found and no archaeologist on the spot can immediately recognise them as from a human or from another animal.

In my experience, the general public, the contractor, and the police expect archaeologists to be able to recognise human bones.

On the psychological matters that worried UCL, I have spoken with archaeological and anthropological colleagues who say that the original training they had while handling human bones was itself an important 'memento mori' - a threshold that helped to mitigate stress if they went on in their career to handle soft tissue at a forensic scene.

Richard

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[Steve Corsini]

In high school there was a human skeleton in the biology classroom but I don’t recall having any training in human remains as part of my degree.

Certainly never handled any until I was a heritage officer with the Department of Aboriginal Sites.

(I’ve since had training from a professor of human anatomy and a couple of forensic pathologists)

 

Definitely agree it’s a good thing to be able to tell what is or isn’t human.

 

sjc

[Angus Crawford]

Oddly, I have worked on probably just over 1000 burials in a 12 year period. At one point my excavation experience consited of several large enclosure ditches, around 400 burials and one post-hole...

[colin....@ozemail.com.au]

Just another example of the chasm between biological anthropology and archaeology...

We are in a strange position in Australia, where skeletal biology would appear to have died, yet there is always considerable interest among Aboriginal people. This might be mixed in with other concerns. Skeletal remains form a smaller part of the archaeological record, but are routinely, if infrequently, encountered. 

Most years I work on remains from developments or on unprovenanced remains being returned. The former will probably continue in places like the Adelaide Plains and Murray River corridor when larger developments take place. Single burials remain low probability/ high risk chances there and on the east coast, and through the Murray Darling Basin. 

The provenancing is less in the archaeological scene, is dependent on returns from overseas, and the wishes of a variety of Aboriginal groups, and is an analytical procedure I've worked on for quite a while now.

All the best,

Colin Pardoe

Sent from my iPad

[Susan Piddock]

 

Dr. Susan Piddock

 

Research Associate (Research Academic Level A) 

Department of Archaeology

Flinders University

South Australia

[zoharesque]

Gabe Moshenska is getting hate mail now!

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