Citational precedents

Although the elite of Europe were occasionally eviscerated and excarnated in practices dating back to the end of the first millennium B.C. (Ariès Reference Ariès1981, 261–62; Weiss-Krejci Reference Weiss-Krejci, Rakitra, Buikstra, Beck and Williams2005), dissection did not become common, and commonly feared, in Britain until the 18th century, concomitant with the rapid growth in the numbers of medical schools and the increasing use of dissection as a teaching aid. Since the early 16th century the bodies of a small number of hanged felons had been made available for dissection by anatomists in Scotland and England (Richardson Reference Richardson1987, 32), and by the 17th century post-mortem surgery had become more frequent (Forbes Reference Forbes1985; Richardson Reference Richardson1987). The demand for corpses to dissect led to increasingly bold attempts to appropriate the corpses of executed criminals for sale to anatomy schools, with ensuing violence and unrest at the gallows as relatives and rival schools and hospitals struggled to acquire the corpse (Linebaugh Reference Linebaugh, Hay, Linebaugh, Rule, Thompson and Winslow1977, 70–72). Partly in response to the disorder and violence prompted by these actions, the Murder Act was passed in 1752, simultaneously increasing the number of corpses for legal dissection while more effectively regulating access to the corpses of criminals, making attempts to keep them out of the hands of the surgeons a criminal act (ibid., 102).

The Act also formalized an already present fear of dissection by explicitly stating that it was part of the penalty for murder. This punishment of the dead body drew upon previously existing traditions of punishment of the criminal corpse as evinced by the treatment of Cromwell's body after death (McMains Reference McMains1999; Tarlow Reference Tarlow, Robb and Boric2008), reworking them pragmatically to benefit the state and medical science alike. Phillipe Ariès (Reference Ariès1981, 353–56) identified two attitudes to the body in the 17th century, one of which recognized a degree of life and power existing in the corpse after death and the other, more orthodox Christian belief prevalent among the social elite, which denied the survival of life or sensibility in the cadaver, viewing death as the moment when the soul was separated from the body. The punishment of the corpse through post-mortem dissection therefore articulated two very different views of the body after death, and although, as Ariès observes, medical science (and archaeological practice) came to rely predominantly on the latter belief about the corpse's status, the former has never entirely dropped out of view. The suppressed recognition of personhood as persisting in the corpse becomes visible through the differential treatment of bodies after death, and through their different location in relation to funerary ritual.

The dearth of legally obtainable bodies created a black market in human remains, and corpses were increasingly sought from burial grounds and morgues (Richardson Reference Richardson1987, 54–66). The knowledge that anatomists were in search of corpses, and the linking of dissection with punishment and infamy, led to a widespread fear of post-mortem exhumation and dissection, particularly among those who were less able to protect their dead (Richardson Reference Richardson1987). Towards the end of the 1820s, parliamentary exploration of possibilities for reform led to the passage of the 1832 Anatomy Act. This eschewed the punitive aspect of dissection and instead located the practice firmly within the rational world of medical research and education. Instead of donating the corpses of criminals for anatomical study, the ‘unclaimed’ bodies of those who had died indigent and in hospital would be allocated.

The dissection of the unclaimed dead seems to have been associated with changes in the constitution of identity in relation to the parish and its church. For hundreds of years the expected place of burial had been the churchyard of the parish to which one belonged, unless one had forfeited the right through suicide or other criminal activity (Harding Reference Harding and Cox1998; Laqueur Reference Laqueur, Garnett and Matthew1993; MacDonald and Murphy Reference MacDonald and Murphy1990). Strangers too had no right of burial in the parish churchyard and archaeological evidence shows that they can be distinguished in death by their burial outside the consecrated ground of the church (e.g. Freeman Reference Freeman1985; McCullagh and McCormick Reference McCullagh and McCormick1991). Bodies like these, located outside the parish community, were more available for dissection. Katherine Park observes that in 15th-century Italy foreign bodies were preferentially selected for anatomizing (1994, 12). ‘Foreign’ did not necessarily mean from another country. The statutes of Bologna University at this date required cadavers to be obtained from a minimum distance of 30 miles outside the city, showing that the bodies were chosen not for their perceived exoticism, but because, as the anatomist Benedetti wrote in 1497, they could be obtained ‘without injury to neighbors and relatives’ (quoted in Park Reference Park1994, 12). The absence of friends and relatives was a recurring justification for dissection. Laderman notes of a 1799 suicide in America that he was dissected because he was ‘a stranger, entirely unknown, and had no friends nor relatives whose feelings could be hurt by his dissection’ (Reference Laderman1996, 20).

In Britain this differential treatment of strangers in death was maintained in the new configurations of the 1832 Anatomy Act, which allowed dissection of the unclaimed dead. Ruth Richardson has shown how, in offering up the bodies of the unclaimed for dissection, the writers of the Act demonstrated an ostensible concern with the feelings of the living community while masking the economic reality, which defined ‘unclaimed’ as those bodies buried at the parish's expense, regardless of whether friends and relatives accompanied them (1987, 126–27). The shift to define the impoverished as estranged from the parish community was embedded in broader changes that were taking place in burial practices in Britain. From the 17th century the traditional spatial patterns of burial had started to break down, first as dissenting religious groups established their own burial grounds (e.g. Bashford and Pollard Reference Bashford, Pollard and Cox1998; Stock Reference Stock and Cox1998) and then later as cemetery companies were formed to create commercial places of burial (Laqueur Reference Laqueur, Garnett and Matthew1993; Tarlow Reference Tarlow2000). Outsiders could increasingly be buried in churchyards and burial grounds far from the parishes of their birth and baptism, if they had the wealth to pay for a plot (Harding Reference Harding and Cox1998).

Vanessa Harding (Reference Harding and Cox1998, 54–57) argues that the reconfiguration of rights to burial acted to fragment the community that had previously been affirmed spatially through burial practices, leading to new forms of social discrimination based not on birth and upbringing within the parish but on wealth and ability to pay for a grave plot. In this context the very poorest members of society were displaced to the social margins, their lack of wealth acting to estrange them from the parish community, and anatomical practice cutting them away from the relationships that defined them (Richardson Reference Richardson1987, 121–29). The Act was not accepted without resistance (e.g. ibid., 241, 219–23). Indeed the positioning of paupers as ‘unclaimed’ worked against the change in focus documented for the 19th century by Ariès (Reference Ariès1981) towards the death of others rather than self. The grave was an important site for the assertion of continuing affective relationships with the dead in the 19th century, as Tarlow (Reference Tarlow, Hamilakis, Pluciennik and Tarlow2002) has explored, and the incomplete success of the reconfiguring of the impoverished as without friends or kin can be seen in the differing degrees of attention paid to re-membering and burying the dissected corpse.

Dissecting paupers' bodies

The bodies of the poor were targeted for dissection because they were less well protected after death, whether by physical barriers before the 1832 Act, or by law after its passage (Richardson Reference Richardson1987, 60–63).Footnote ³ There is remarkably little excavated evidence from churchyards of full-scale dissection, suggesting that those whose bodies were anatomized (whether legally or illegally) did not undergo regular funerary ritual afterwards.Footnote ⁴ William Roberts, a London surgeon (and campaigner against the dissection of the poor) noted that little was left to be buried after dissection as ‘three fourths or two thirds of the body [has] been wasted, or consigned to troughs, pits and night-carts’ (quoted in Richardson Reference Richardson1987, 248). At Old St Pancras cemetery, London, deposits of human bone bearing evidence of post-mortem surgery were found dumped in graves and coffins (Bill White, personal communication 2006), but for the most part the clearest evidence of anatomical dissection is in graveyards associated with hospitals and anatomy schools, and also in the grounds of the teaching institutions themselves (Cherryson, Crossland and Tarlow, forthcoming). This evidence reveals the different ways in which anatomized cadavers were brought into or excluded from funerary ritual.

Excavation in the grounds of medical schools and universities has shown that anatomical teaching collections were often discarded outside consecrated ground, buried close to the facilities where they had been used. These dumps of human and animal remains show little if any attention to the integrity of the body or to burial according to Christian precepts. Human remains showing evidence of dissection and bones that have clearly come from articulated and suspended teaching skeletons have been found on the grounds of the former Nottingham General Hospital (Chapman Reference Chapman1997), the first Ashmolean Museum (Hull Reference Hull2003), Surgeon's Square, Edinburgh (Henderson, Collard and Johnstone Reference Henderson, Collard and Johnstone1996) and Trinity College Dublin (Excavations Bulletin (Ireland),Footnote ⁵ site 231), as well as similar sites in the USA (e.g. Blakely and Harrington Reference Blakely and Harrington1997). Their manner of disposal indicates that churchyard burial was not thought necessary or suitable for reference collections and dissected human remains. Before the 1832 Anatomy Act, the sourcing of cadavers from the gallows and the view of dissection as punishment meant that proper burial was explicitly proscribed for anatomized bodies. Yet even after the passage of the Act, human remains continued to be buried outside consecrated ground. The dumps of disarticulated bone from a private anatomy school at Surgeon's Square were probably deposited in the 1850s after the 1832 Act had been in operation for some years (Henderson, Collard and Johnstone Reference Henderson, Collard and Johnstone1996, 940–41). These dead were not being punished; rather the dumping of these human remains suggests a shift to a secular and scientific view of the body consistent with the use of ‘unclaimed’ bodies rather than criminal corpses.

This treatment seems to emerge from the coincidence of scholastic Christian traditions that viewed the cadaver as an empty vessel abandoned by the soul, and a more secular view of the body as mere material. Yet these practices can be contrasted with the disposal of other anatomized remains, which were not dumped but were placed in special paupers’ burial grounds. These were sometimes attached to the hospital, as at Newcastle Infirmary (Boulter, Robertson and Start Reference Boulter, Robertson and Start1998) or St Bartholomew's Hospital, Islington, where the dead were interred in large common graves (Ponsford Reference Ponsford2002, 200), or part of a nearby churchyard would be set aside for the anatomized dead, as at Lady Yester's Kirkyard, associated with the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary (Henderson, Collard and Johnstone Reference Henderson, Collard and Johnstone1996). Burial of the dissected in these locations acted to delineate paupers’ excluded social status spatially in addition to their corporeal marking through post-mortem incision. The archaeological evidence at these sites indicates the complexities of the dissection and burial of the supposedly ‘unclaimed’ dead. Bodies buried in these locations tend to display more care in their disposal and disposition when compared with dumped teaching collections. The burial of the dissected poor in special graveyards took place within the broader context of changes in the role of the funeral, which was increasingly understood as a mark of a person's social position, a reflection of their life and worth (Laqueur Reference Laqueur1983). At Newcastle Infirmary (in use from 1753 until 1845) burial patterns suggest a shift in dissecting practices over time, as fewer skeletal remains showing evidence of dissection were found in the later parts of the burial ground (Boulter, Robertson and Start Reference Boulter, Robertson and Start1998; Chamberlain Reference Chamberlain1999). As the excavators suggest, this distribution probably reflects a reduction in the number of operations carried out, presumably as opposition to post-mortem examination increased. Are these differences in the treatment of the dissected dead merely reflective of the different degrees of control and influence that relatives and others had over their deposition? In order to situate these buried human remains more precisely, I would like to turn now to other contemporary post-mortem interventions.

Autopsy

The impoverished and ‘unclaimed’ dead were not the only bodies to undergo post-mortem surgery. Although the post-mortem incisions made into the bodies of the poor acted to reinforce their estrangement from the community of the living and the dead, it is clear that in some contexts bodies could be opened up after death without evoking alarm or social stigma. Archaeological excavations in graveyards and church crypts often show evidence of post-mortem surgery on a number of bodies, particularly those dating to the 18th and 19th centuries. While the percentage of individuals who have undergone post-mortem surgical procedures is usually small, the same procedures occur with some regularity and, rather than being confined to the poor, are found amongst all social groups (e.g. Boyle Reference Boyle2002; Boyle, Boston and Witkin Reference Boyle, Boston and Witkin2005, 251–52; Brickley, Miles and Stainer Reference Brickley, Miles and Stainer1999; Powers and Walker Reference Powers and Walker2005; see Cherryson, Crossland and Tarlow, forthcoming, for a complete overview of the evidence). In some cases associations can be established between the probable cause of death and the procedures carried out, suggesting that these interventions would be classified today as autopsies. The crypt of St Luke's, Islington, provides two examples, both dating to the mid-19th century. In one case a 53-year-old man showed osteological evidence of having suffered from cancer, which had attacked his left eye. He had undergone a post-mortem craniotomy presumably in an attempt to establish cause of death. Another individual, a 51-year-old male, had undergone a craniotomy, and showed evidence of thoracic surgery, which was accompanied by lesions on the ribs indicating a probable respiratory infection (Boyle, Boston and Witkin Reference Boyle, Boston and Witkin2005, 251–52). It is clear that these procedures were more targeted and less destructive of the body, and that these post-mortem incisions were framed within a very different context. Indeed, in establishing class and status, certain modes of post-mortem incision were not only deemed appropriate for different bodies, but were actively sought by some as part of a performance of embodied identity after death. By the 18th century it was not uncommon for members of the European elite to request a post-mortem examination in order to better understand causes of death: ‘I wish that my body . . . be opened in two places . . . to reveal for the general benefit the causes of this congestion, which amounted to a disease, and these strange fits of breathlessness from which I have always suffered’ (excerpt from the duc de Saint-Simon's will, dated 1754, quoted in Ariès Reference Ariès1981, 363).

Michael Sappol finds (Reference Sappol2002, 103) that in North America, autopsy was also actively sought by members of the upper classes during the 19th century, and that it lacked the devastating and punitive resonances of dissection. In contrast to dissection, autopsy framed the investigation in relation to the individual's biography, focusing on determining the cause of death. As such it developed as an extension of clinical care (Harley Reference Harley1994, 27).Footnote ⁶ The first records of post-mortem anatomical examination in England appear early in the 17th century, and indicate that it took place at the request of royalty (Forbes Reference Forbes1985, 45; Harley Reference Harley1994, 7). It was not until towards the end of the century that the practice was drawn upon in homicide trials (Forbes Reference Forbes1985, 46–47). These anatomical examinations operated within an elite tradition of post-mortem intervention in order to preserve the corpse. Long-established preservation techniques included removing the organs, which would be stored in jars with the body or buried at the site of death (Gittings Reference Gittings1984, 167–68; Litten Reference Litten1991, 35–37).Footnote ⁷ As embalming became less common from the 17th century onwards (Gittings Reference Gittings1984, 190), post-mortem interventions were reconfigured within the frame of emerging scientific and anatomical practice (Ariès Reference Ariès1981, 361–66).Footnote ⁸

In a context of increasing anxiety about burial alive, post-mortem incisions also served to demonstrate the definitive transition of the examined individual from life to death. In confirming that the soul had left behind a lifeless body, the anatomical performance asserted a particular ontology and eschatology, while still recognizing the special nature of the deceased. Although outside scientific circles it was popularly believed that some degree of personhood remained in the corpse after death, this belief was denied by 19th-century anatomists, whose very practice seemed to disprove the possibility (see e.g. Urry Reference Urry1989, 11). Yet, as Michael Sappol has explored in a North American context, medical men accrued much of their authority and status from the demonstration of their powerful ability to violate the corpse without repercussions (2002, 96; see also Lawrence Reference Lawrence1996). That there was nevertheless some anxiety about these violations is illustrated by the joking and sometimes horseplay associated with student anatomical training (Sappol Reference Sappol2002, 80–88; in a modern context see Smith and Kleinman Reference Smith and Kleinman1989, 63–64). This sort of activity was taboo in the more restricted context of post-mortem autopsy, where the ritual surrounding the corpse's examination was cautiously orchestrated. If the autopsy was not carried out at the request of the family (e.g. McMahon Reference McMahon2006), then permission was usually sought, and the body would be dissected in private, often at home and before a small invited audience (Harley Reference Harley1994; Ariès Reference Ariès1981, 364–65). These post-mortem investigations took place over a short period of time in order to allow proper funerary ritual to be conducted afterwards (Lawrence Reference Lawrence and Weir1998, 125). This too ensured that the ghosts of the deceased would not haunt those responsible for their disfigurement.

The important differences in the form and manner of post-mortem surgery were recognized by the public and by those doing the anatomizing (Harley Reference Harley1994, 5–10). Richardson quotes the surgeon and anatomist Guthrie, writing in 1829: ‘I personally . . . have no objection to be opened and examined as to the cause of death, but I do not intend to be dissected, if I can avoid it’ (Richardson Reference Richardson1987, 128, emphasis Richardson's). Here we can detect a fracture in the otherwise unyielding scientific gaze, and a hint of recognition that another ontology is in operation, besides that which identified the body as mere material, no more than a vessel for the soul (ibid.). Thomas Laqueur has outlined (1989, 182) the humanitarian narrative within which autopsy was situated in the 19th century as one that attempted to make misfortune intelligible by tying inquiry to a sense of sympathy and compassion for the afflicted (ibid., 190–91). Autopsy therefore acted to mediate between life and death, showing care for the deceased while also demonstrating and producing the shift in their status from living to dead. Yet the framing of autopsy as a continuation of care indicates a submerged and unacknowledged recognition of the continuing presence of the deceased among his or her relatives. At the same time, any suggestion that folk eschatology was recognized in the care taken in autopsy could be easily denied and explained through concern for the feelings of relatives. The difference between post-mortem autopsy and dissection was therefore articulated through issues of consent, public display and the degree of disfigurement of the body (Harley Reference Harley1994, 5; Park Reference Park1994, 6–8; cf. Jones Reference Jones1994). These concerns allowed medical men to position themselves as tending to the autopsied corpse, but mastering the dissected. Both practices developed alongside a greater reluctance to disturb the bodies of the dead (of whatever class) from the 17th century onward, together with a shifting commemorative orientation that turned increasingly towards the individual. This was tied to a heightened concern with the integrity of the body and its preservation in situ. In an 1880 court case concerning a disused burial ground, a builder was accused of ‘opening divers graves and taking out parts of whole skeletons, so that they ceased to be whole skeletons, and separating the bones and mixing them up with the mould, so as to destroy the identity of the skeleton’ (quoted in Matthews Reference Matthews1983, 207). Here one can see how a communal identity in death, constructed in relation to the parish, had receded, to be replaced by a more individualized sense of self in which bodily integrity was privileged.Footnote ⁹

Archaeological evidence shows how ‘anatomical examination’ was differentiated corporeally from dissection. Although many autopsies may be invisible archaeologically as the focus was primarily on soft tissues rather than on stripping and disarticulation of the skeletal elements of the body (Harley Reference Harley1994, 5), the difference emerges in the contrast between the more radical disruption of dissected bodies, and the more restricted and repetitive suite of procedures that tend to be found in cases of probable autopsy. In particular, craniotomies predominate among churchyard cases of post-mortem surgical intervention. Excavations at St Bride's Church, London, found that in seventeen out of eighteen apparently autopsied skeletons the cranium had been sectioned to allow removal. Two others showed evidence of thoracic surgery after death (Brickley, Miles and Stainer Reference Brickley, Miles and Stainer1999, 46). The procedures found in graveyards are therefore relatively restrained in contrast to those associated with hospitals and medical schools, and show some concern with maintaining the body's form and integrity, as illustrated by the duc de Saint-Simon's will.

However, drawing the distinction between autopsy and dissection too forcefully hides the ways in which autopsy could extend to incorporate practices that might otherwise be understood as dissection. The framers of the 1832 Anatomy Act drew on these parallel histories in an attempt to shift the negative feelings associated with the anatomizing of the ‘unclaimed’. Endeavoring to reposition dissecting practices as more autopsy-like, they specified, for example, that dissected remains should be given proper burial. This shift was also echoed in the changing terminology of the early 19th century, which increasingly shied away from the term ‘dissection’, instead preferring to use ‘anatomical examination’ (Richardson Reference Richardson1987, 128–29). Human remains excavated at Lady Yester's Kirkyard, used as a burial ground for the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and dating to the second half of the 18th century, indicate that this strategy was in place in some contexts before it was formalized in the language of the Anatomy Act. The anatomized remains there show a restricted number of procedures and some care to prepare the body for proper burial. Bodies were oriented with their heads to the west and wrapped in shrouds, with some individuals found within cheap coffins (Henderson, Collard and Johnstone Reference Henderson, Collard and Johnstone1996).Footnote ¹⁰ The excavators of the site note that dissection for teaching purposes was formally proscribed at this institution, with post-mortem examination allowed only to establish cause of death. Indeed, permission had to be obtained from hospital managers for post-mortem autopsy of the unclaimed, revealing how important consent was to the definition of autopsy (Henderson, Collard and Johnstone Reference Henderson, Collard and Johnstone1996).Footnote ¹¹ The need for consent acted to assert a particular view of the body after death, in which the concern was primarily for the living. Yet consent also spoke to an ongoing relationship between the dead and the living, affirming the continuing presence within the community of the autopsied dead, in contrast to the estranged bodies of the dissected.

If autopsy or ‘examination’ could stretch to incorporate the dissected and ‘unclaimed’ dead, their differentiated status remained visible and was expressed corporeally. This can be seen in the contrast between the treatment of bodies buried in parish churchyards, crypts and burial grounds and that of more marginal subjects. In carrying out autopsies, attention was paid to maintaining the body's form (cf. Park Reference Park1994, 6), and differing degrees of care can be seen to some extent archaeologically in the relative amount of effort made to repair the body after surgery. A late 18th-century burial from St Peter's Church, Barton-upon-Humber, was found with the thoracic skeletal structure removed and a wooden stake substituted. A craniotomy had also been carried out and the skull flap glued back in place. The excavators suggest that the body had probably been padded and sewn up and that the wooden stake would have provided some rigidity (Rodwell and Rodwell Reference Rodwell and Rodwell1982, 306). This can be contrasted with the body of a young woman dating to the late 18th or early 19th century, probably an executed criminal, found buried in the area of a women's prison at York. In common with the male body from Barton-upon-Humber, her chest had been opened and a craniotomy carried out, but, in contrast, little effort had been made to disguise the surgery, with the ribs apparently left lying on top of the arms when she was placed in a coffin and buried (Evans Reference Evans1999; YAT 1998). At the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, where teaching dissections were prohibited, skeletal remains show the more restricted suite of procedures that would be expected from autopsy. The excavated human remains also show evidence of attempts to repair or disguise the surgical damage in some cases. However, these attempts were more perfunctory, with the skin simply being pinned back in place rather than sewn (Henderson, Collard and Johnstone Reference Henderson, Collard and Johnstone1996, 937). Efforts to restore the body before burial therefore marked the very different social location of autopsied bodies in relation to those that were dissected, while also reinforcing gradations of social status among the poor and the marginalized who could escape neither autopsy nor dissection. While the impetus to repair the incisions made to the body could be prompted in part by the fear of discovery and controversy (Richardson Reference Richardson1987, 243–44), the repairs also demonstrate the way in which autopsy expressed both a continuing concern for the individual even after death, and disquiet about the body's destruction and fragmentation. Turning now to archaeology's anatomical entanglements, it is apparent that these conceptions also underwrote the deportment of antiquarians towards the dead that they examined.

Antiquarian bodies

While some corpses were being examined by doctors and surgeons, others were being exhumed for antiquarian study. As Nancy Siraisi has recently demonstrated (Reference Siraisi2007), the histories of medicine and antiquarianism are intimately linked. Certainly, the orienting analytical metaphors of modernism – of depth and surface, of coming-to-light and of discovery – are held in common by archaeology and anatomy (Crossland Reference Crossland2009; Jordanova Reference Jordanova1989, 56–7; Thomas Reference Thomas2004, 149–170). It is well known that curiosity cabinets and early museums were filled with medical specimens alongside antiquities (see e.g. Cole Reference Cole1944, 443–63; Lawrence Reference Lawrence and Weir1998, 125–27), but perhaps less attention is paid to the medical training of antiquarians such as Thomas Browne and William Stukeley. By the 19th century, an interest in anatomy went hand in hand with the study of the past, and it was common for medical men such as Robert Knox, Joseph Barnard Davies and Samuel George Morton to collect and analyse ancient human crania alongside modern. In these inquiries it was not only prehistoric burials that attracted attention. Church crypts were also investigated and lead coffins opened, an activity that peaked at the same time as the increase in anatomizing practices towards the end of the 18th century and into the early 19th (Celoria Reference Celoria1966).

Although coffin opening had a long history (particularly in order to assess the sanctity of holy bodies through their degree of bodily preservation), from the 17th century onwards it was drawn into newer practices of scientific investigation of the past and of human bodies. An early example was the exhumation in 1680 of the body of John Colet (d. 1519), dean of St Pauls, which was examined, and the liquor which surrounded the body tasted. The same happened a hundred years later, in 1779, when a late medieval body in an anthropoid coffin was exhumed (Litten Reference Litten1991, 52). Although tasting the liquid within coffins seems grossly transgressive now, it was consistent with the experimental demeanor of 17th- and 18th-century inquirers, who often incorporated taste into their repertoire of analytical techniques (Arnold Reference Arnold2006, 219–20). The coffins of nobility were preferentially chosen for opening, which may seem paradoxical in view of their relative wealth and location within well-remembered social genealogies that might have been thought to protect them from the curious. However, the lead coffins of the wealthy had a tendency to preserve the bodies contained within them, simultaneously arousing antiquarian interest while also gesturing towards the sanctity and inviolability of these special bodies.

Given the long history in Europe of dissection and partition of the bodies of the saints and of elite members of society, surgical incisions made into bodies need not have been viewed negatively, as Park has argued (1994), and yet the bodies exhumed by antiquarians and others from the vaults of the wealthy were not removed from their coffins or disarticulated. This was despite contemporary onlookers’ enthusiasm to assess the state of preservation in as direct and experiential a way as possible. Instead, once curiosity had been satisfied the coffins were usually closed and the remains returned to their resting place. In making an ‘extremely delicate’ application to inspect the corpse of Edward I, interred at the collegiate church of St Peter at Westminster, Sir Joseph Ayloffe made assurances to the authorities that no injury would be done to the tomb or the body of the king. The body was measured with a rod, and with an anatomist's eye, but Ayloffe reported that

This differential treatment cannot be ascribed only to the better state of preservation of noble burials, although the mimetic power of the preserved corpse to presence the powerful and remembered dead must have contributed to the reluctance to cut into them. Clearly, they were protected by their powerful social location and the reluctance of descendants and church authorities to ‘injure’ their dead. The reluctance of antiquarians (who often had some medical training) to interfere with the well-preserved bodies of kings and nobles was consistent with the minimal disturbance of corpses through autopsy, expressing the same concern with questions of consent, controlled access to the corpse, and the maintenance of bodily integrity. The exhumation of bodies recognized a hierarchy of intrusion, one which minimized invasive procedures on those who were perceived as within the community of the known, neither cast out as criminal nor apparently abandoned or estranged. These were the named dead that Laqueur (Reference Laqueur, Sweeney and Hodder2002) has discussed in relation to commemorative activity up to the 19th century, those who were thought worthy of memorializing. These coffin openings acknowledged another ontology, one in which the respected dead should not be interfered with unless permission had been granted and the interference could be justified as part of the dead body's care. To do otherwise was to ‘disturb’ the dead, with all the resonances that this entailed.

This respect for the appearance and integrity of the noble body may be contrasted with the exhumatory practices associated with ancient bodies excavated from prehistoric monuments, which were taken apart, catalogued and dispersed within private collections and museums. While some ambivalence was expressed over this ‘violat[ion of] the sacred ashes of the dead . . . which human nature must feel reluctant to undertake’, as another physician–antiquarian would reflect (Douglas Reference Douglas1793, vi), it was justified in the name of the pursuit of knowledge, and underwritten by a sense of temporal distance. By the time of the 1880 court case mentioned earlier, it was argued that to ‘disturb remains of Druids who had been buried on Salisbury Plain . . . would not be indictable. This must always be a question of degree’ (Matthews Reference Matthews1983, 203). The ‘relics’ of the ancient dead were positioned (for the most part) outside the living community, and as such could be disinterred without fear of reprisal.

Moreover, the recently buried bodies of native peoples were often exhumed, disarticulated and displayed (Markus Reference Markus1990; Thomas Reference Thomas2000, 52–63), part of what Helen MacDonald (Reference MacDonald2005) has called a ‘mania’ for the collection of human remains in the 19th century. Here there was little reluctance displayed in the efforts made to collect specimens for museums and private collections (e.g. MacDonald Reference MacDonald2007; Turnbull Reference Turnbull1991). Like the ‘unclaimed’ poor dissected by anatomists, bodily disaggregation in archaeological and ethnological contexts (rarely seen as separate fields at this date) took place predominantly where there was little or no sense of relatedness felt between the estranged dead and those who undertook their study. Indeed, Randall McGuire has argued (Reference McGuire and Layton1989) that because of the way in which antiquarians situated native peoples in the past, this acted to deepen and redouble their social distance.

The scientific treatment of the dead in the 17th and 18th centuries reveals the divergent attitudes to the dead body that Ariès has described, showing that while the performances of anatomists and antiquarians demonstrated a belief in the body as empty vessel, there was also a suppressed recognition of the potency of the corpse and the effect of post-mortem interventions upon the dead. While the dead of the community were cared for through post-mortem incisions, the anatomist–antiquarian also demonstrated his power to subdue the corpses of the estranged. The relative lack of care required for those defined as outside the field of the living community (whether because of geographical, temporal or social distance) acted to assert the authority of the professional, and his ability to define the corpse as truly lifeless.

Archaeological estrangement

What is the relevance of these histories of exhumation and dissection to archaeological understandings of the corpse and excavated human remains today? In what ways does archaeological practice draw upon these precedents in its treatment of the dead body? Turning to present-day debates over repatriation we can see how some of the unspoken beliefs and attitudes towards the dead that were articulated through anatomical practice also informed the development of archaeology and have continued to underwrite present-day practice. The notorious case of the treatment of Ishi's remains illustrates the effortless movement between practices differentiated as autopsy and dissection and shows how that movement acted to disguise the different beliefs about the body that were drawn upon and remade in these engagements. Ishi was an American Indian found destitute and alone in northern California in 1911. He was taken to the University of California Anthropology Museum at San Francisco, where he lived and worked for the next few years (Kroeber Reference Kroeber1961) He died, probably of tuberculosis, in 1916, after which he was cremated and his remains stored in a cinerary urn in a California cemetery (Weaver Reference Weaver, Kroeber and Kroeber2003, 45; Vizenor Reference Vizenor, Kroeber and Kroeber2003, 368–69). However, after death, and against his wishes, Ishi had been subjected to post-mortem analysis, his brain removed and subsequently sent to the Smithsonian, where it was stored for decades (Starn Reference Starn2004). After a repatriation request was submitted to the Smithsonian (Speaker Reference Speaker, Kroeber and Kroeber2003), Ishi's remains were finally reunited in August 2000, when a second funeral ceremony was performed and his brain was buried with the rest of his body (Starn Reference Starn2004, 264). Ishi was by no means the only native person to be anatomized. This was common practice throughout the 19th century and into the 20th. However, the circumstances around his death and post-mortem examination are significant in what they reveal of the beliefs that underwrote this treatment.

The slippage between different anatomical practices could act to disguise the objectification of a body as an act of humanitarian care, repositioning a dissection as an autopsy. Equally an autopsy could easily slip into practices that were viewed as more problematic. Seen retrospectively, the betrayal of Ishi in the act of post-mortem surgery seems to have been part of his production in death as an object of scientific curiosity, and as an abjected person of no social value. Much of the distaste expressed for these actions comes both from the overriding of Ishi's wishes and the apparent betrayal of friendship by Kroeber and his colleagues (e.g. Brandes Reference Brandes, Kroeber and Kroeber2003). The framing of the post-mortem as a dissection acts to contradict claims that he had been embraced by the museum community. Instead, the post-mortem operation places him in the world of strangers and the unclaimed, suitable to be produced as scientific object. Consistent with this framing is the frequently reiterated description of him as a ‘wild man’, the ‘last Yahi’ or ‘the last of his tribe’ – as someone with no relation, estranged from land and lineage. Yet, on hearing that Ishi was gravely ill, in March 1916 Kroeber wrote to Edward Gifford (associate curator at the university's museum of anthropology in San Francisco) making a clear distinction between autopsy (which he thought might be acceptable) and dissection (which he viewed as out of the question).

In this letter Kroeber asserted Ishi's status as a member of the community. The shift from the first person to the third person (‘We propose to stand by our friends’) enfolded Ishi's body into the community of the known and the named, making a stronger claim than one of simple personal friendship between two individuals. As a member of the community, Ishi's remains could be cared for through autopsy but not dissected and estranged in the name of science. The demand that no elements of the body be given up simultaneously reflects a concern to maintain the integrity of the body consistent with autopsy while also recognizing, if not articulating explicitly, that this was consonant with Ishi's beliefs. Indeed, implicit in the letter is a concern with eschatology that surfaces in Kroeber's outburst that a dissecting science ‘can go to hell’, in which he references the repressed but still present association between dissection and the punishment and infamy meted out to criminal bodies.

Kroeber's letter arrived too late to have any effect. Edward Gifford replied, explaining what had happened:

In this response Gifford reiterates that the post-mortem intervention was one of autopsy rather than dissection: Ishi's brain was preserved and not destroyed, and the procedure seems to have been minimally invasive. Yet there is also an acknowledgement of the different ontologies in operation as Gifford shifts to align himself with the devalued term of ‘sentiment’, not only affirming Ishi's place in the community, but also recognizing an alternative belief about the corpse that is placed in opposition to science. The rationality of science is understood to be so insuperable that it can only be contested on two grounds: on the one hand, as Kroeber does, to remain within the field of science and to deny that there is little of interest to be gained from the surgery; on the other, to shift the terms of the debate into sentimentality or romanticism and an implicit acknowledgement that other beliefs about the body exist, even as they appear to be unrecognizable by those who call themselves scientists. In the compromise enacted between science and sentiment, the faculty members who took charge of Ishi's body acted to stage the post-mortem examination as autopsy through burying his remains with some care. And yet the brain remained, undermining this staging and reminding us of how the boundaries between these different post-mortem practices could be easily transgressed as anthropologists shifted from one ontology of the body to another, seamlessly and with little clear recognition of doing so.

If the treatment of Ishi's remains was embedded in the definition of bodies as unclaimed and estranged, equally the repatriation of Ishi's brain and the legislation enacted through the National Museum of the American Indian Act (1989) and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA, 1990) demonstrate how one's definition in relation to the community of the living continues to be fundamental to treatment in death (see also Nilsson Stutz Reference Nilsson Stutz2007; Tarlow Reference Tarlow, Scarre and Scarre2006). Repatriation revolves around the making and proving of claims of connection, and as such is embedded within long-standing, if sometimes contradictory, legal traditions pertaining to post-mortem interventions. Much of the process of repatriating Ishi's brain revolved around determining which group would take responsibility for it (Speaker Reference Speaker, Kroeber and Kroeber2003). Paul Matthews observes that, in the conflicted and difficult legal issues over whether there is property in the body within Anglo-American law, there is some clarity on the proscription of ‘trespass’ on the body in the form of unauthorized autopsy. In this case, kin or representatives of the dead can claim damages (1983, 218). Equally, the ownership of the land on which a body is buried provides some legal basis for a claim on it in American law (ibid., 202). These claims are made on the basis of genetic and spatial propinquity, echoed in NAGPRA's assertion that human remains should be repatriated to those determined to be lineal descendants, or ‘the Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization on whose tribal land such . . . remains were discovered’. The Act also adds another dimension on which kinship may be demonstrated, that of cultural affiliation: remains may also be returned to the tribe with ‘the closest cultural affiliation with such remains . . . and which . . . states a claim for such remains’. In this sense the ethics of NAGPRA do not diverge a great deal from the parameters sketched out by the British Anatomy Act of 1832, although as Susan Lawrence points out (1998, 132), NAGPRA works to extend the notion of kinship to include a wider circle of concerned people.

Those human bodies that remain outside of the community of the living – ‘unaffiliated cultural remains’ – are figured as appropriate subjects for scientific research, and indeed it is the study of these temporally distant remains that has proven most controversial when living communities assert claims over them (Jones and Harris Reference Jones and Harris1998, 253–54; Watkins Reference Watkins2004; Zimmerman and Clinton Reference Zimmerman and Clinton1999). NAGPRA's operations seem not to recognize a different ontology in relation to the body after death (i.e. one that recognizes a persistence of personhood after death) so much as a claim that this is not a stranger, and so should not be treated as such. Yet in the acknowledgement that remains should be returned is a recognition of another ontology, still submerged but present. This erupts in the concern expressed for certain classes of body, including bog bodies, as Giles describes (in this issue). It emerges in assertions that the knowledge produced through archaeological work benefits all humanity. This brings us back to the humanitarian narratives that Thomas Laqueur has argued were articulated through autopsy. He observes that 19th-century humanitarianism produced narratives of suffering and redemption through the common ground of the body, in which those who made the post-mortem incisions simultaneously expressed care for the dead and the living while demonstrating their ‘epistemological sovereignty’ over them (Laqueur Reference Laqueur and Hunt1989). Arguments about the benefits that archaeological research provides for humanity act to describe the circle of the community at its broadest extent, while reinforcing the power of archaeologists to decide the manner and mode of inquiry.

It was for these complex reasons that, as Hubert and Fforde describe, 19th-century scientists could cut into the bodies of indigenous friends, simultaneously denying them funerary ritual while seeming to demonstrate compassion in the search for the greater good through the expansion of knowledge. The scientific attitude may have presented itself as one of detachment and objectivity, but this objectification was tied to traditions of estrangement on the one hand, and newly emerging narratives of human commonality and sympathy on the other. It is fashionable to frame the emergence of archaeology as a product of a somewhat unified and totalizing modernity. Yet these histories of exhumation and post-mortem analysis show how archaeological practice has been articulated in conversation with a range of conceptions of the body after death, indicating that we carry forward with us often unexamined understandings that influence the decisions made in excavating human remains. Archaeological exhumation may be better understood as a reworking and remaking of a range of traditions rather than emerging from a modernist break with the past (see also Bynum Reference Bynum1998; Hamilakis Reference Hamilakis2007). The conflict over the excavation and display of human remains illustrates the continuing differentiation among the dead in the post-mortem interventions of archaeology. The differential treatment among the dead calls for interrogation of the conditions within which different bodies are enfolded into, or excluded from, the community of the known (Butler Reference Butler2004). Equally it calls for recognition that archaeological practice incorporates more than one ontology of the body, and that the work of post-mortem intervention has always been drawn upon in the constitution of community, of self and of other. Shifting the field of inquiry to focus on the nature of the relationships between the dead and the living allows clearer sight both of the work that is done to set the dead aside as suitable for study, and of how the parameters of care are understood to operate through post-mortem intervention.