Digging up the Dead

Digging up human skeletons is one of the highlights of being an archaeologist. But the opportunity is rare. I had been doing the job commercially for two years before I found my first adult burial. The moment I peeled back the earth and exposed that first, tiny fragment of the skull I knew I had something different. There is some instinctive way it is possible to recognise human bones without having to think about it.

At first I was elated. I thought he was Roman so I dubbed the body Gaius. Gaius Baltar (there were a few Battle Star Galactica fans on site). Unfortunately I had found the body at precisely the wrong time. The archaeologists were due to hand the site over to builders in a matter of minutes and this discovery had the potential to set the redevelopers schedule back by a great deal. So I was under orders to dig him up as quickly as possible. But there is only so fast you can excavate a human body and the job took me a day and a half.

I had dealt with human bodies before Gaius. I once dug a Roman neo-natal cemetery. I also catalogued the bones of about two-hundred people when a cathedral needed to clear its graveyard. Given this, I was not expecting to have any kind of emotional response when I dug up Gaius. However, babies bones are so under developed that they barely look human, and cataloguing means I only saw each of the cathedral bodies for a few minutes. Painstakingly exposing each and every bone of Gaius with a wooden spatula gave me a much more intimate encounter with death.

It is somewhat of a cliché in archaeology to say that behind the bones are real people. But that was the very definite sense that I got with Gaius. Every bone told me something about the life of the man. He was a spindly old chap of just under average height. He had once broken his elbow, but had never got medical attention as it had reset very badly. He must have been in considerable pain from an ulcer that had dislodged one of his teeth. He probably had not been very mobile towards the end of his life as his spine was a slight 's' shape and several of the vertebrae had been compressed.

It suddenly struck me that this man would be very annoyed with me. Not for digging him up, but for changing his name. It would annoy me immensely if in a few hundred years my remains were found and everybody came to know me as 'Barry' or 'Edwin.' I might insist I am buried with a stone plaque with 'Jon' engraved upon it. Perhaps the official designation of 'skeleton 1065' was much more fitting for Gaius. It meant we could not pretend we knew him or his wishes.

That night I had the most horrible dream. My skin was like wet clay and people were stabbing me and cutting me open with wooden spatulas, then ripping out my bones. It left me with a hollow, nauseating feeling.

But I never questioned whether we should be digging up the body. The alternative to digging him up was to let the builders drive over the grave and smash his body to pieces with a JCB.

I do not know what happened to Gaius after excavation. An expert will have examined his bones and he may well have found his way into a museum collection to be preserved forever. But it is more likely that he was reburied and that within a few decades the fresh acidic soil will turn his bones to dust.

Whenever we dig human remains we are required to screen them from public view. Despite our best efforts with Gaius, people still tried to take pictures of his body. I have never understood whether the screens are to protect the public from a remainder of their own mortality, or the body from people's morbid curiosity. Neither seems like a particularly good reason to me. If my experience with Gaius has taught me anything it is that in death we are all anonymous and that we should do the best we can to make an impact on other people in the brief span of life we are allotted. I think we could all do with a remainder of that as often as possible.