There seems only one honest answer to the project manager's question: "Are you friggin' kidding me? These are human remains you're talking about. Can you seriously think that it would, under any circumstances, be acceptable to intentionally incorporate paving over human remains in an engineering plan?" Not that the answer should be given to the project manager with exactly those words or exactly the tone of voice that I "hear" when I write them here. "No sir, I can't refer you to such a study and I can't imagine there is a study of how much pressure can be applied to buried human remains before they go to dust." Still too tacky?
I have encountered situations in which folks tried to figure out how to get around proper mitigative procedures by intentionally covering sites with various road materials. I can't think of one that actually happened simply because of the potential impacts to the sites while trying not to impact the sites, but I'm sure it's happened somewhere, maybe many somewheres.
BUT, these are human remains. The level of disrespect apparently represented by the question would be astounding if it didn't reflect the long-standing approach of bunching human remains with artifacts as simply more things found at archaeological sites. We've brought this sort of disrespect with us over time and, while we like to think we're moving away from it (some of the stakeholder folks with whom we have to consult don't agree, as we all know), we have not finished cleaning the depths of its permeation (pun not intended) related to what we do and why we do it.
That said, cultural standards can play heck with both our older approaches of bones-are-artifacts and our newer approaches of humans-are-not-artifacts. A few years back I had a revelatory experience during a conversation with a tribal consultant about an excavated site that included human burials (it's important to state that, my lesson notwithstanding, the tribe was very cooperative with our work). The position of the tribe, I was informed, was that it would have been better for the site and the burials to have been destroyed by land-disturbing construction than for it to have been excavated prior to disturbance, with all the artifacts and the bodies removed from the location to which they belonged. There were no legal ways for that to happen and the tribe knew that. The point was that human-caused construction disturbance, while not desirable (the tribe would have preferred that the site be left alone but that wasn't going to happen), could be seen as a kind of natural process, one of the many that had already happened to the site. Natural processes are expected and understood as parts of the life cycles of pots, houses, and people--from the earth back to the earth. Since the elders were buried there and were still there, the site has never been abandoned. Our excavations actually disturbed and halted those processes and their expected outcomes, and took the elders from their home. Reburial nearby was not really acceptable but approved--at least the elders would be close to home--but their stuff, the things with which they lived, the structures in which they lived, were taken away and the elders and their things could not return to their earth together. I had never thought of our work like that but once I heard it, many things told to me by other Native people began to make sense. I realized, more clearly than before, that respect for human remains is deeply, culturally identified. I'm not suggesting that legal standards be changed to allow destruction of human remains (re-read my first paragraph), only that respect for them is not necessarily a simple matter.
Jeff
Jeffrey L. Boyer, RPA
Supervisory Archaeologist/Project Director
Office of Archaeological Studies, Museum of New Mexico
* The Center for New Mexico Archaeology
* 7 Old Cochiti Road
* Santa Fe, New Mexico 87507
* tel: 505.476.4426
* e-mail: [log in to unmask]
"There comes a time in every rightly-constructed boy's life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure." -- Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
________________________________________
From: HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of scarlett [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, March 06, 2013 2:44 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Pressure on Human Burials Question
I'd like to concur with Bob Skiles on his assessment of the variables and depositional questions. While it would be ethically possible to use bone material from bodies donated to science to develop tables that illustrate these factors, the results would be so pedantic as to be meaningless. No stakeholder community (-ies) would find the distinction meaningful, distinguishing between the stresses that would damage the skull plates of an infant vs. those that would damage the cortical bone in an adult's femur.
John Mark- my advice to the project manager would be to point out that there have been repeated examples, over and over, of projects where a construction authority tried to skirt the consultation process involving a known burial site. Beyond the long list of Native American examples, consider the African Burying Ground in New York (African American communities), the Mountain Meadows Massacre site in Utah (Anglo/white American communities), and so on. This goes beyond skin color or specific legal systems. The situation never, ever goes well. In the case of the African Burying Ground in New York, the US Congress ultimately heard testimony about the site and the project managers sat in the hot seat, and that was outside of any NAGPRA rules.
The agency/company is much better off gong through the consultation process, avoiding the area if at all possible, or mitigating the effects with a sensitive archaeological recovery project.
If you want to point her/him to the 1994 documentary "Archaeology: Unearthing the Slave Trade," the project manager can even video of the fallout in both state and federal congressional testimony filmed in the midst of passionate social protest. The outcomes weren't good for people's careers, I expect.
http://www.worldcat.org/title/unearthing-the-slave-trade/oclc/37802807
http://archive.archaeology.org/online/features/afrburial/
These things just never work out well. Even when the agency or company completes their project, the bad political fallout often catches up with them and then somebody is forced to take the fall for the organization. Will it be the company owner/CEO/Agency director? I doubt it. "Project Manager" sounds like an expendable individual that can be sacrificially fed to the political animal.
My two cents,
Tim Scarlett
On Mar 6, 2013, at 3:31 PM, Bob Skiles wrote:
> Richard,
>
> Indeed, this is true, and another of the numerous variables that would have to be controlled to ever achieve a meaningful answer/prediction. Three other major variables (among others) that I didn't mention earlier are: the depth below surface, the length of time since interment and the method of backfilling.
>
> Even if, through experimentation (or experience), one was ever able to develop a reasonably accurate "formula," one would not likely be able to know (control) the values of enough of the major variables (depth, age, health, interment mode, backfilling method, container) without excavation and some level of analysis. So, in such (most ? all ?) cases, the need to answer the question would be obviated.
>
> As you aver, the question has no meaningful answer (and to address the highway manager's original question directly, I don't know of any archaeological or engineering studies that have examined or determined "maximum pressures" a human burial can survive).
>
> Regards,
> Bob Skiles
>
>
> On 3/6/2013 1:53 PM, Richard Wright wrote:
>> Bob Skiles,
>>
>> I agree that this is a question that has no meaningful answer.
>>
>> If skeletonised, I would add the critical variable of the amount of collagen left in the bones - somewhat flexible with collagen remaining, but crumbly if only bone minerals left.
>>
>> Richard Wright
>>
>> On 7/03/2013 03:41, Bob Skiles wrote:
>>> John Mark,
>>>
>>> This is a question that has no single (mathematical) answer, nor one that could ever be useful for highway engineers in arguing that running heavy machinery over graves would do no damage to them. The amount of compressive/shear/vibratory/etc forces that a human interment is able to sustain ranges widely from near zero to "very high," depending upon several factors, not the least of importance being the physical and chemical characteristics of the matrix in which they are contained, the type of inclosure the remains may have been placed within, and the age and health of the individual at the time of burial (among others).
>>>
>>> I don't believe an engineering table can be worked-up to provide such answers, nor should such be attempted (the only valid results would derive from experimentation on a wide-range of human burials in differing matrices under a wide variety of environmental conditions. Performing such experimentation would be highly unethical and morally bankrupt in the first place, as well as unlikely to produce any useful results.
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>> Bob Skiles
>>>
>>> PS - Your highway manager may likely benefit from a perusal of the Dallas "Freedmens' Cemetery" issue and reports of a couple decades ago (which involved a highway manager deciding to disregard and pave over a black freedmen cemetery, ultimately costing the state and contractors several million dollars more than what it would have cost to properly investigate and mitigate the cemetery in the first place).
>>>
>>> On 3/6/2013 7:51 AM, John Mark Joseph wrote:
>>>> To All,
>>>> Today, I was asked the following question by a project manager on a
>>>> highway project: “Can you please refer me to a study that… “ “would be
>>>> appropriate for determining the maximum pressure or force that a human burial can
>>>> withstand without damage?” Would anyone care to weigh-in? If so please write
>>>> me at my email address below as my library is back in Virginia. I tried
>>>> to explain the variables but I had to post the question.
>>>> Si Yu'os Ma'åse',
>>>> John Mark Joseph
>>>> State Archaeologist, Guam
>>>> 490 Chalan Palasyo
>>>> Agana Heights, GU 96910
>>>> (671)-475-6339
>>>> [log in to unmask] (mailto:[log in to unmask])
>>>>
>>>
>>
>>
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