Poll: Should museums and archeologists be forced to return/rebury excavated bodies?

[Masterthief]

I found this article on the New Scientist website:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20928030.100-removing-bodies-from-display-is-nonsense.html
It raises an interesting question: do we have a moral obligation to return unclaimed bodies to their graves? Is it possible to respect the dead without having to risk missing out on possible scientific advances?
Your thoughts, ladies and gentlemen?

 

[SilentCom]

This is something I think about occasionally because I would like my career to involve museum work or archaeology. Frankly it sort of depends. I'm using Egypt as an example but it is by no means confined to just Egypt. Tombs are sometimes looted by grave robbers and the bodies are desecrated or sometimes outright destroyed. To dig up a body and place it in a museum is not meant to disrespect the dead but protect the body and honor the dead. The same goes with any artifacts buried with the dead.

 

[Carlston]

When you find a archeological treasure... the people who complain are the people who want it so they can make a buck showing it off, even if they never found it.

Countless mummies were removed from tombs by the Egyptian government, and used as FUEL to burn trash piles. Seriously. Only later when they got the idea of a museum and they can charge money for tourists did they want them all back. Sadly, if others never took them they'd be burned when they were first found anyway.

I could see someones grandma no more than 2 months dead being untombed and having a outrage.
But when a body is 1500 years old, sorry it is more than a corpse. It is history, evidence of how people lived, mummies showed us culture of people thousands of years ago knowing how to preform brain surgery, bone settings, if anything the preservation of the bodies.

It's situational, but I wouldn't return any mummy to Egypt so they can bolster the tourist trade, after they sold it to another country and since the alternative would have just been to destroy it anyway cause it was not gold or gems...

 

[BENZOOKA]

No. Especially if they just happen to find out it's their great-great-great-great-grandfather. I think it's more of an honor to be of use, even when not really existing.

 

[Plurralbles]

no because one you excavate it it's no longer safe from graverobbers(if it was safe to begin with) and they'll rob it. Guaranteed. Never mind culture and scientific study and stuff like that.

 

[DuctTapeJedi]

When a person dies, the soul[footnote]Or consciousness, for those of you of the atheist persuasion.[/footnote] is gone. It's not a person anymore, it's a mass of bone and tissue.

We don't have moral obligations to objects.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

Once a person is dead their body becomes property. If there is no one to claim the property then it is free for the taking.

I wouldn't worry about "respecting the dead." If the afterlife exists I'm pretty sure the dead won't care what happens to their earthly forms since they won't be using them again, and if there is no afterlife then people don't have souls and the bodies are meaningless anyway and those who are dead won't care since they no longer exist.

 

[Faladorian]

Once somebody is dead, they're not alive anymore. Not sure if that's excluded from the definition of "dead."

But yeah, no. A dead body is a mass of rotting flesh, it's not a person. Do whatever you want with it.

 

[Hero in a half shell]

Well, There is a mummy in our local museum, and its great to have it from a purely educational standpoint. I think if a dead body is going to be shown it should be done as reverently as possible, out of respect that they were once a human being, and one day we will all be corpses.

Another issue is should treasures be returned to their countries of origin? After all the London museum of Natural History probably has more ancient Egyptian artifacts and mummies than Egypt does, I'll bet it has more and better quality finds than any Egyptian museum.
Here in Belfast a proper Titanic museum is finally being built,(That ship that's famous for sinking) beside the dock that the Titanic itself was made, but the problem is that a lot of the artifacts taken from the Titanic are now in America, as they already have a Titanic Museum. I'm not saying we should be given them back but its strange that another country can be profiting off of your history. Imagine if the best American Civil War Museum was in Spain.

Would it be right for a country to demand that it's historical artifacts be returned? and would another country be right to refuse them; We found it we're keeping it?

 

[Jabberwock xeno]

Honestly, why not build a museesum AROUND the orginal locations?

Literally, as in right next to or inside.