First Nations Repatriation

Currently, a topic that we have been covering and something I also find quite interesting is the topic of repatriation of archaeological finds such as clothing, bones and cultural artifacts. We had a guest speaker last week on the topic of repatriation, specifically, repatriation of First Nations bones. The issue of returning the heritage and belongings of one culture back to the cultural birthplace is one that I feel quite strongly towards. Being a cultural anthropology student, I see much more gain in returning bones and cultural items back to the society in which they came than keeping them for future research, or the possibility of being able to learn things from them from future research techniques. I feel the society and community would benefit much more greatly from having those items returned rather than archaeologists gaining more knowledge from further examining the materials. In my mind, one greatly outweighs the other.
Back when I attended VIU, I remember watching a documentary called "Stolen Spirits of Haida Gwaii" in an anthropology 200 class about a group of Haida Gwaii community members travelling to Chicago to repatriate ancestral remains. The group numbered around 20 all travelling and supporting each other on the journey to bring the last of their ancestral heritage back to the cultural homeland. The amount of joy and solidarity this group had once the remains were finally on home soil again had brought the community so close together. In a celebration which included the entire community, a giant potluck and story telling was organized. Being an outsider to this community and watching the sense of belonging that emerged as the last of the ancestral remains were finally retured to the community leaders, it made me think about how much of a void that has been filled within the hearts of those members.
Again, being mainly focuses on cultural anthropology, I always will see a greater need for repatriation of ancestral remains back to the homeland community than to archaeologists wanting to learn more information by keeping remains within museums and within storage. It is definitely an hot and debatable issue regarding the proper placement of remains; back to the culture, or adding to the study and knowledge of human remains? It would be interesting to see the different opinions within my 397 classmates and to see where my opinion stands in amongst the others..

Resurrection of Neanderthals

The latest question on The National Geographic website is the question of ethics in possibly resurrecting or recreating Neanderthals using DNA traces.

Clones have been created ever since "Dolly" the sheep in 1996. The first clone of an extinct species was when scientists in Spain cloned a Bucado -a type of wild mountain goat- that had been extinct, back in 2003. The goat only lived a few minutes, but it shows what is possible with science.

Considering that there are no fully intact Neanderthal cells how would this be done? Scientists predict that not so far in the future we will be able to take a cell of a closely related species, tweak and alter the cell to resemble with some scientific engineering to match the genetic code of Neanderthals.

So what if this clone was to survive? It would have to be placed in a surrogate, with which the extremely high failure rate of cloning, would have significant challenges with the well-being of the surrogate. If this Neanderthal baby were to be born successfully and live, what would be the ethical issues surrounding its upbringing? It almost seems cruel to bring a living and thinking being into the world and being the only species in existence. Would human rights apply to a Neanderthal?  So many ethical questions related to the cost of bringing back the extinct. It's almost like raising the dead.

At the end of the article the moral questions of raising a full living and breathing Neanderthal is somewhat ruled out. What isn't ruled out is the possible great advancements and knowledge that could be learned from using the cells individually to look at genetic diseases. Advancements such as looking at muscle wasting or osteoporosis are main issues that experiments that could help modern humans considering the robustness of Neanderthals.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/03/130306-neanderthal-genome-extinction-cloning-hominid-science/

Preservation

After cruising an archaeology website, I found an interesting article about a preserved human head. It described the head being from Europe's Dark Ages having been dissected from approximately 1200-1280 A.D. The article goes on to explain that maybe Europe's "Dark Ages" not having been so dark after all. They explain that the head had an extremely advanced preservation methods. The methods used had consisted of filling the veins and arteries full of a mixture of beeswax, lime and cinnabar mercury to help preservation. What I find so interesting about preservation is the reasons behind it.

It always amazes me how much scientific experimentation that was happening, and how it was usually more advanced than we give them credit for.


http://www.archaeology.org/news/624-130305-middle-ages-medicine-dissection

Mystical and mysterious ochre

Today, a discussion that came up was the topic of Neanderthal burials. From other classes, I'd been lead to believe that Neanderthals possibly had complex burial rituals, evidenced by burying their dead, ochre use and possible flowers left on grave. To start, society's main notion of Neanderthals is the big dumb brute they'd been made out to be. When I now hear this stereotype, it sends me in a maddened frenzy. Lately, what has been peaked on my interest scale was the idea of an afterlife.
 If you bury your dead, doesn't that mean you have some sort of notion that there is a 'proper' and 'improper' way to dispose of the dead? This brings me to the topic of ochre in Neanderthal burials. Traces have been found on walls of caves and on flint pieces near burial sites.  This article explains (somewhat difficultly because of all the jargon) about the findings at the burial sites.
http://www.pnas.org/content/109/6/1889.full

Ochre has always had somewhat of a mystical connotation for me. It is basically a dye or paint which can be used on walls or skin. So what exactly did the Neanderthals using this substance believe it had symbolized by it?  We may never know, but what we can infer is that it had a meaning and possibly a whole spiritual belief linked to it. I've always found the idea of body painting or modification fascinating, especially with such an ancient group of individuals.

Something somewhat disappointing that I'd learned recently was about the pollen found on Neanderthal bones. I had always played with the idea that flowers and ochre had some supreme meaning to burials. Turns out, the flower pollen found could have just been left by rodents. This unfulfilling new find has left me to think about Neanderthal burials in a new light. However dampened my fantasy of Neanderthals participating in an almost pagan burial ceremony with lots of flowers and ochre may be, it still is a subject that I wish we had more direct evidence that the ceremony had some sort spiritual meaning. Maybe one day!

Corn or beef?

The idea of agriculture being one of the worst human developments along with the car isn't something I'd ever thought about before starting university. One thing I find interesting is that once the shift from a nomadic or hunter gatherer to sedentary lifestyle began, we began to find traces of this in the bones of remains. What we begin to find is evidence of malnutrition from the low protein high carbohydrate diet focusing mainly on grains. If I remember correctly from my early archaeological classes, agriculture, or crop growing began around 10,000 years ago.
While cruising an archeological website, I came across a really short article stating that early Andeans ate corn 5,000 years ago. Within the short article, which is about a paragraph and a half long, it states that Andeans ate corn for survival and possibly for ceremonial purposes. The evidence was found in pollen samples in teeth and tool analysis. Originally, it was thought that people of the Peruvian Andes depended on marine life for survival but now it is fair to assume that those people were also farming corn. I suppose the point I am trying to reach with this article is that I don't like the way they portray corn as being a "survival food" when ocean resources are available. I just find it interesting how human food culture shifted from a relatively high protein and fibrous diet (mind you, difficult to find/catch/kill) to a diet that we have become to rely on such as crops and fields of wheat, grains and corn. I often think about whether or not humans would turn back time 10,000 years and never change the foraging patterns or keep them how they happened to develop. The skeletons found during times of severe agriculture reliance are evidence that maybe it isn't the best thing to be "surviving" off of and maybe we should look back to our roots and see where we took a wrong turn.


http://www.archaeology.org/news/603-130226-peru-andes-corn

Stuffed Stephanie

Yesterday I was cruising my favorite website in some of my spare time, and stumbled across an article about taxidermy. The article profiles a young female taxidermist who considers herself a 'recycler' of dead animals into art. She basically goes around finding roadkill or dead animals and recycling them into artistic poses or functional pieces. She seems completely fine with skinning and stuffing animals, but the whole idea of de-fleshing a carcass of an animal completely grosses me out but fascinates me at the same time. If I had a stronger stomach I might even consider watching a youtube video of how the process is done. Anyway, what brings me to write about this article I read was one of the last comments in the interview. The interviewer asks the woman whether or not she would ever consider doing taxidermy on a human! She says that if it was legal, she wouldn't shy away from the idea. This idea actually links into the blog prompt for this week quite nicely. If we had other options other than cremation or graves, how would you like to be 'disposed of' (for lack of a better word). I'm not sure I'd want to be a full life sized feature of someones home (that might bring about a bit more anxiety than love of seeing a stuffed human hanging out on your couch in the living room). However, if there were other options, I think I would be fully on board with doing something creative with my body after death. I think I would have my body compressed into some sort of jewellery that my family could wear and take with them. I think that would be a good way of remembering versus stuffing me and having me chilling in the house. I can only imagine how frightening it would be if someone decided to play a joke and start hiding stuffed Stephanie around the house. ... in the closet, behind the coats, behind the shower curtain....... Only someone with as terrible a sense of humour as I have would even consider doing that.


Here is the article I was reading if you'd like to take a look. It's pretty neat!
http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/if-its-dead-nicola-jayne-hebson-will-stuff-it


Cheers!

Cemetery moral debate

I'm going to use this week's blog prompt, and change it slightly to a topic that had interested me in terms of moral and ethical use of the dead's information, names and family heritage. Cemetery's have always been a place in which ethical morals or issues have been difficult to avoid. The use of cemetery data has always been questionable for me in terms of how we the living may use the data of the dead. I'm not sure if I had passed, if I would still want information about my life, religion or history to be used in areas such as data bases or research. It is difficult, if not impossible to say whether the information we have been using in my own archaeology course has been using deceased individual's information who have much the same view about my own privacy after death. I think the main question is, 'how can the give consent'? Well, they can't which is something I've been thinking about all week...