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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Linguistic Anthropology

University of Wisconsin Milwaukee

2021

Mortuary archaeology

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Waking The Dead, Speaking To The Living: The Display Of Human Remains In Museums, Emily R. Stanton Jun 2021

Waking The Dead, Speaking To The Living: The Display Of Human Remains In Museums, Emily R. Stanton

Field Notes: A Journal of Collegiate Anthropology

Artifacts are immensely powerful aids in telling stories from the past, yet it is the dead persons of past eras who accrued a host of ethical and legal issues. This article discusses several perspectives on and problems with the practice of displaying human remains in museums and includes a number of case studies from select museums in the USA and Europe. As a precaution to the reader, this article also features a few images of human bodies on display in museums.