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Comment by sircastor | Hacker News Reader

My wife and I have had conversations about exhuming human remains in pursuit of science a number of times, and I haven't quite been able to settle on when or why it is or is not appropriate. In a personal context - it seems a violation of one's own choices (granted that those choices might not be one's own). But the scientific community doesn't seem overly concerned with that - and the learning opportunities are significant to me.

Does anyone else have these ambiguous uncertainties about this kind of stuff?

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Some ways one could approach it:

Religious: the body is connected to a spirit and should be protected.

Familial: the body is scared to individuals who knew the person.

Cultural:; the body represents a current people, and to exhume it makes them feel dehumanized.

Legal: the body is property and property rights are to be respected.

Seems like with ancient Egyptian mummies none of those are relevant. The modern Egyptians have moved on from the old faiths, none trace their lineage to those mummies, culturally they are proud of them, legally there has been too much churn for the old claims to be relevant.

A more-general question is whether archaeology should be done at all. Some have argued that future imaging technologies will render it completely unnecessary to dig and displace artifacts, and that future archaeologists and anthropologists will curse us for trashing untold volumes of evidence because we couldn't stand to wait.

I don't really buy that, especially in the absence of any clues regarding what these magical 'future imaging technologies' might turn out to be, but it's an interesting argument to consider. It would certainly have applied many decades ago, and if we say it doesn't apply now, then where was the cutoff?

It might be that thousands of years is enough time that your body and everything about you has fully passed beyond any claim you ever had on it and now belongs to the world at large.

hey at least people aren't eating them anymore...

https://www.chefsresource.com/why-did-victorians-eat-mummies...

Speak for yourself

"When there's a literal curse protecting the body" might be a good start.

I think you might be talking about a "body farm"

There are many organizations and universities that perform similar research. I.e forensic anthropology

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