Can you dig it?

摘要

The first-world-war battlefields of Belgium and France are dangerous places where, even today, unexploded shells lurk, making excavation a potentially lethal activity. But as archaeologists pick up their trowels, they must consider more than their personal safety. For the trenches, dugouts and tunnels―many containing human remains and personal belongings-are ethical minefields too. In a paper in this month's Antiquity, Nicholas Saunders, an anthropologist at University College, London, says that archaeologists on these battlefields face a concentration of all the issues that have concerned archaeology in the past ten to 15 years. These ethical concerns fall into three broad areas. First, there is the question of how to treat human remains. Over the past few years, archaeologists have often come into conflict with indigenous peoples over the custody and handling of excavated human remains. In Belgium and France the situation is particularly complex because the allied armies included soldiers from a variety of faiths and ethnicities, including Africans, Indians, Australians and Native Americans, all of whose traditions may prefer to treat remains differently.