ASK THE ARCHAEOLOGIST:

The answers to the most frequently asked questions about archaeology

Dave Weldrake
Education ad Outreach Coordinator

Question 6: Have you ever found any dead bodies?

Children are fascinated by dead bodies. I'm not surprised really. Even for a professional archaeologist, there is still a sense of excitement about finding human remains. I can still remember the first one I found nearly fifty years ago.

There are two important things to make the children understand:

Although it can be exciting to find human remains, skeletons are still part of our evidence base just like pottery glass and other artefacts. Children focus on the excitement of the discovery. They will need guidance to see that we can learn about such factors as age of death, gender and whether they were born locally or not.
There are several cultural traditions which do not permit the analysis of human remains, Jews or Native American peoples for example. Even in the UK archaeologists do not normally work in modern cemeteries. Usually we find the remains of people who were buried hundreds if not thousands of years ago. In some cases they may be so old that people have forgotten that they were there at all. Such remains are only investigated when they are in danger of being destroyed by some form of development - perhaps a road being built or a building being constructed. After being examined by specialists, human remains dating to the Christian period, are usually re-buried in modern cemeteries where they won't be disturbed again.

Activity
Everyone involved in archaeology and education knows a variant of the Skeleton Game. This is a very good exercise you can carry out to get your children to think about skeletons as evidence. All you need is a volunteer dead body!

Ask a child to lie down and pretend to be dead. Talk about how things decay over time and then ask the children to identify those elements of your 'dead body's' clothing and personal effects which would survive if we dug them up in two thousand years time. They will find that it's only a few things - spectacles, money or ear-rings perhaps. A similar thing applies to bodies buried a long time ago. It's why the evidence we recover from the past can always only be partial.

Useful web link

PAS skeleton
After you've discussed the subject over a 'real' dead body, you might want to check how much the children have understood with this worksheet from the Portable Antiquities Scheme.