Ritual Use of Human Remains

Course Description

Ritual Use of Human Remains explores human mortuary practices and other ritual uses of bones, bodies, and body parts across the world and through time. Utilising archaeological and ethnographic data from the New World (North America, South America, Mesoamerica, and the Caribbean), Old World (Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Near East), and Polynesia, the course introduces students to a diversity of ritual practices and outlines the theoretical concepts underlying their interpretation.

The catalog is unusually specific about the course's structure: material is presented in lecture format supplemented by in-class discussions and team-based activities, and grades are based on two non-cumulative exams, two in-class essays, one research paper, and in-class participation, with one required textbook and multiple additional readings on the course website. It is offered concurrently with ANG5191.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, ANT is the Anthropology prefix. UWF publishes this at 3 semester hours.

The comparative scope is the analytical engine here. Practices that appear shocking in isolation — curation of ancestors' bones, secondary burial, trophy taking, relic veneration — turn out to recur across unconnected societies, which means they are answering something general about how the living manage the dead. Studying them comparatively is what turns a catalogue of exotic customs into an argument about memory, kinship, power, and the boundary between person and object.

⚠ The contact-hour figure is derived — the University of West Florida publishes none

UWF's catalog publishes a credit value in semester hours, the college and department, prerequisites where they exist, and a description. It does not publish contact hours, a lecture and laboratory split, or terms of offering for any course. It does publish a material and supply fee notice on the minority of courses that carry one — and maintains a separate Material & Supply and Equipment Fees section of the catalog — so the absence of a fee notice on this entry is meaningful, while the fee amount is not published here. Every contact-hour value in a UWF guide in this repository is therefore derived. The figure here applies the standard lecture convention of 15 contact hours per credit, corroborated inside this prefix by the live ANT2000 at 3 credits and 45 hours. Confirm the meeting schedule with the department.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Describe the range of human mortuary practices cross-culturally.
• Describe ritual uses of bones, bodies, and body parts beyond burial.
• Describe theoretical frameworks for interpreting mortuary ritual.
• Describe the relationship between belief, practice, and material evidence.
• Describe primary and secondary burial practices.
• Describe curation and circulation of ancestral remains.
• Describe cremation practices and their variation.
• Describe mummification and body preservation practices.
• Describe defleshing, disarticulation, and processing of remains.
• Describe trophy taking and its interpretations.
• Describe relic veneration and its archaeology.
• Describe ancestor veneration and its material expression.
• Describe human sacrifice and evaluate the evidence for it.
• Describe cannibalism and evaluate the evidence for it critically.
• Describe body modification and its relation to identity.
• Describe mortuary practices in the New World cases studied.
• Describe mortuary practices in the Old World cases studied.
• Describe Polynesian mortuary practice.
• Compare practices across regions and identify recurring patterns.
• Distinguish archaeological from ethnographic evidence and their limits.
• Evaluate interpretations against the evidence supporting them.
• Describe the ethics of studying and displaying human remains.
• Write a research paper using archaeological and ethnographic sources.
• Participate constructively in discussion of difficult material.

Optional Outcomes

• Describe museum display of human remains and its debates.
• Describe repatriation of remains held in collections.
• Describe modern death practices in comparative perspective.
• Describe forensic contexts involving ritual practice.
• Describe the archaeology of memory and commemoration.
• Describe representation of these practices in popular media.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Range of mortuary practices
• Ritual uses beyond burial
• Interpretive frameworks
• Belief, practice, and material evidence
• Primary and secondary burial
• Curation of ancestral remains
• Cremation
• Mummification and preservation
• Defleshing and disarticulation
• Trophy taking
• Relic veneration
• Ancestor veneration
• Human sacrifice and its evidence
• Cannibalism and evaluating claims
• Body modification and identity
• New World cases
• Old World cases
• Polynesian practice
• Cross-regional comparison
• Archaeological versus ethnographic evidence
• Evaluating interpretations
• Ethics of study and display
• Research writing
• Discussion of difficult material

Optional Topics

• Museum display debates
• Repatriation from collections
• Modern death practices
• Forensic contexts
• Archaeology of memory
• Popular media representation

Resources & Tools

• American Association of Biological Anthropologists (bioanth.org) — the professional body; free statements on ethics and on race and human variation, and inexpensive student membership.
• Society for American Archaeology ethics principles (saa.org) — free, and directly applicable to work with archaeological human remains.
• NAGPRA guidance (nps.gov/subjects/nagpra) — free; the statute, the regulations, and the consultation process.
• Standards for Data Collection from Human Skeletal Remains (Buikstra and Ubelaker) — the recording standard the field works to; your programme will have it.
• A good osteology atlas and a comparative collection — identification is learned with bone in your hands, and photographs are a poor substitute.
• Your programme's collection and laboratory hours — the single most valuable resource here, and it is already paid for.

Career Pathways

• Anthropologists and archaeologists — SOC 19-3091.
• Bioarchaeology within cultural resource management — where most skeletal analysis in the United States actually happens, driven by compliance work.
• Museum collections and curation — SOC 25-4012 and 25-4013; including NAGPRA compliance and repatriation work, which is a growing specialism.
• Medicolegal death investigator — a distinct role in medical examiner offices, with its own certification.
• Forensic science technician — SOC 19-4092; crime scene and laboratory roles.
• Tribal historic preservation offices — consultation and repatriation.
• Postsecondary teaching and research — SOC 25-1061; requires a doctorate and is highly competitive.
• ⚠⚠ An honest word about forensic anthropology specifically. It is among the most popular specialisms because of television, and there are very few full-time forensic anthropologist positions in the United States. Most practitioners are academics who consult for medical examiners, and board certification requires a doctorate plus documented casework. The skills transfer well to bioarchaeology, CRM, museum work, and medicolegal investigation — plan for those, and treat forensic practice as something you may add rather than a job to apply for.

Special Information

⚠⚠ Extraordinary claims about the past need proportionate evidence — cannibalism is the test case

• Claims of cannibalism and human sacrifice have a long history of being made about other peoples on thin evidence, and of being used to justify conquest, conversion, and dispossession. That history is a reason for rigour, not for avoidance.
• ⚠ The evidentiary bar is high and it is specific. A defensible archaeological case for processing of human remains rests on a combination of indicators — cut marks in patterns matching butchery, breakage for marrow, cooking damage, and treatment of human bone identical to the faunal assemblage in the same deposit.
• ⚠⚠ Every one of those indicators has alternative explanations. Secondary burial processing, defleshing for curation, and carnivore or trampling damage can each produce marks superficially resembling butchery — and distinguishing them is exactly the technical skill this course teaches.
• Ethnohistoric accounts are evidence about the accounts as well as about the practice. Many were written by conquerors, missionaries, or rivals with an interest in the claim — which does not make them false, and does mean they require the same source criticism as any document.
• ⚠ Beware the sensational framing. These findings attract media attention out of proportion to their evidentiary weight, and an archaeologist quoted carelessly will find the qualification removed.
• Consider the descendant community. Claims of this kind are made about the ancestors of living people, and publishing one carries an obligation to consult and to state the uncertainty plainly.
• Human sacrifice is better attested in some contexts than others, and the evidence should be assessed case by case rather than by regional reputation.
• ⚠ Apply the same standard to claims you find unsurprising. Motivated reasoning runs in both directions here, and a claim being uncomfortable is not evidence that it is false.

⚠⚠ Studying and displaying human remains — the ethical debate the course sits inside

• The remains discussed in this course are held in museums and collections around the world, and the question of whether they should be is live and unresolved.
• ⚠ Many were acquired without consent — from colonised populations, from the institutionalised, from graves — and repatriation claims are being made and honoured.
• Display raises separate questions from research. A remain may be legitimately studied and inappropriately displayed, and museums have changed practice substantially, removing human remains from public display or restricting access.
• ⚠⚠ Different communities hold different views, and there is no universal answer. Some descendant communities want ancestors returned and reburied; some support continued research; the anthropological obligation is to ask rather than to assume, and to accept the answer.
• Treat images with the same care as the remains. Publishing photographs of human remains carries the same obligations, and circulating them casually is a serious professional violation.
• Write respectfully. These practices were meaningful to the people who performed them, and describing them as bizarre or barbaric is both bad anthropology and a failure of the comparative method the course is teaching.
• ⚠ Some students will find this material genuinely distressing, particularly if it touches personal loss. That is normal; tell the instructor, and counselling services are free and confidential.
• The comparative frame is the point. Modern Western death practices are one set among many, and examining them alongside the others is the exercise that makes the subject anthropological rather than voyeuristic.

⚠⚠ Working with human remains — the obligations that come before the science

• These were people. Every skeleton in a teaching or research collection was someone with a family, and the discipline's standards exist because that was forgotten for a very long time.
• ⚠⚠ The history here is genuinely bad. Remains were collected from battlefields, graves, hospitals, and colonised populations without consent, frequently to support claims about racial hierarchy — and many teaching collections still contain individuals acquired that way. Knowing the provenance of the collection you learn on is part of the training.
• NAGPRA — the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act — governs Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony, creating consultation and repatriation obligations. It is a legal correction to that history rather than an administrative inconvenience.
• ⚠ Descendant communities have legitimate authority over their ancestors, and consultation works when it begins before a research design is fixed rather than after.
• ⚠⚠ No photographs on personal devices, and nothing on social media, ever. This is absolute. Images of human remains circulated casually are a serious professional violation, they cause real distress to descendant communities, and they have ended careers.
• Handle remains as little as necessary and support them properly. Bone is fragile, and damage from handling is permanent and destroys evidence for everyone who comes after.
• Keep individuals together and keep them labelled. Commingling is one of the worst outcomes in a laboratory and it is easy to cause.
• ⚠ Speak about the individual respectfully, including in the laboratory when nobody outside is listening — the habits formed there are the ones that show in front of families and juries.
• ⚠ Florida section 872.05 makes it a felony to knowingly disturb an unmarked human burial. If remains are encountered outside a controlled context, work stops and the statutory process is followed.
• Some students find this work distressing, and that is normal. Say so to the instructor; programmes expect it, and your college's counselling services are free and confidential.

How Florida course levels affect transfer

The first digit of an SCNS number denotes the year of offering, not transferability. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 levels transfer transparently between Florida public institutions, and 3000 to 4000 is unproblematic since both are upper division. The boundary that actually matters is 2000 to 3000, where lower-division credit generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement.

ANT4025 is 3 semester hours at the University of West Florida, offered concurrently with the graduate ANG5191.

The catalog publishes the assessment structure in unusual detail — two exams, two in-class essays, a research paper, and participation, with one required textbook.