Kimberlee Moran is a professor of forensic archaeology at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey. She holds an undergraduate degree in Classical and Near Eastern archaeology from Bryn Mawr College and a Masters of Science in forensic archaeological science from the Institute of Archaeology at University College London. Kimberlee worked as a contract archaeologist for Hunter Research, a CRM firm based in Trenton, NJ, prior to moving to the UK. She moved back to New Jersey in 2010. Her archaeological research includes ancient fingerprints, artificial cranial deformation, the Whispering Woods site in Salem, NJ, and the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia also known as “The Arch Street Project”.
In this episode we talk about:
- Working with human remains raises ethical questions around consent, cultural perspectives, and scientific study versus dignity.
- Her experience working at a construction site in Philadelphia, which led to the excavation of approximately 500 individuals from an historical cemetery and working with the legal and ethics implications of that experience.
- How factors like the MOVE bombing in Philadelphia highlighted issues with the treatment and repatriation of human remains.
- Ethical frameworks from moral philosophy and how they can provide rationales for decision-making around human remains.
- How attitudes in the use of human remains can vary from using remains in classroom teaching to complete removal from classrooms and museums.
- How anthropologists may consider differing cultural and disciplinary perspectives on working with remains.
- How ethical dilemmas have no easy answers. They requiring thoughtful consideration of issues from multiple viewpoints.
You can find more information about Kimberlee Moran on her webpage here: https://kimberleemoran.camden.rutgers.edu/
You can find more information about:
- the MOVE group here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOVE_(Philadelphia_organization)
- Mount Moriah Cemetery here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Moriah_Cemetery_(Philadelphia)
- The Arch Street Project here: https://www.archstbones.org/
Kimberlee references the following books:
Ethics and Professionalism in Forensic Anthropology
by Nicholas V. Passalacqua & Marin A. Pilloud
A 21st Century Ethical Toolbox by Anthony Weston
If you’re interested in ethics in archaeology, you can check out the following:
Society for American Archaeology: https://www.saa.org/career-practice/ethics-in-professional-archaeology
Notes from the start:
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Transcript
Kimberlee Moran: My name is Kimberlee Moran, I’m an associate teaching professor, and director of forensics at Rutgers University in Camden.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And where is Camden? Just for all the people in the world who are not up on the US geography.
Kimberlee Moran: So Rutgers University is the state university of New Jersey. It has three campuses. It’s flagship campus, it’s kind of smack in the center of the state in New Brunswick and then it has two satellite campuses, one in Newark, New Jersey, which is kind of more of its urban campus, and then Camden, New Jersey. And Camden New Jersey is by far the smallest of the three campuses. And so we have very much kind of a small liberal arts college kind of feel. We’re in the southern portion of the state, basically right across the river from Philadelphia.
Yvonne Kjorlien: I see. You’re right in that Northeast corner of the US.
Kimberlee Moran: Great place to be, lots going on.
Yvonne Kjorlien: I imagine autumn there is just beautiful.
Kimberlee Moran: Yeah, it really is. For me, so my background is Forensic Archeology. I started off my career as an archaeologist. I studied the Greeks, the Romans, Mesopotamia. Never in a million years that I ever think I was going to be doing forensic science. I did end up in the forensic world as a Master’s student and have never looked back. Although I still do a lot of work in traditional archeology as well. So half of the time I have one foot in the past half of the time I have one foot in the present. I’m working in both kind of modern criminal justice and crime scene investigation, but then every now and again, I swing back to my roots and archeology. So being in New Jersey is a wonderful place. It’s very, very good forensically because we’re right smack in the middle of major metropolitan areas that have really excellent forensic laboratories and forensic systems but also archaeologically it is a very historically rich and archaeologically rich area to be. So I get the best of both worlds, being in New Jersey.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And now I was recently having a conversation with somebody about sort of the premise of modern archeology and the way that, I guess the call for archeology nowadays isn’t so much that we go out and willy-nilly dig up Heritage or historical sites. It’s more of a salvage.
Kimberlee Moran: Yeah.
Yvonne Kjorlien: We need to rescue the sites from impending doom because of construction or some other kind of destruction.
Kimberlee Moran: Yeah, so there’s a bunch of different things going on. I mean, one thing that I really appreciate about our modern approaches to archeology is we are grounding archa eology much more robustly in the sciences. And we’re really applying a lot of scientific principles, scientific approaches and scientific testing to what we do within archeology. So back in the day, as you say, it was kind of like willy-nilly, let’s just go find some cool stuff, but now it’s like, okay what are some research questions that we have? What is it that we really want to learn about this site and this material? And then what are the methods that we’re gonna employ to actually ensure that we’re answering those research questions? So there’s that kind of aspect kind of, bringing archaeology more in line with other science fields but also kind of as you say, this idea of salvage, maybe it’s a little bit more about stewardship because archaeological resources are finite. They will not last forever, particularly if they’re impacted by human action. And so, we’re thinking about more of how we preserve archaeological material, preserve that cultural heritage for future generations. And then, in those instances where we can’t just in the ground, leave it alone, how do we, again, kind of rescue it and ensure that it’s being adequately, stewarded, not just the artifacts that come out the ground, but the knowledge that comes out of the ground as well.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Yeah, and I’m always floored by what we do nowadays compared to what is glorified and portrayed in the movies and media, and what have you, about just going out the archaeologists going out and digging up treasure. They’re looking for treasure.
Kimberlee Moran: Right, right.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And whether or not the museum gets it back. And then, even if the museum gets it will, then it’s kind of in the gilding cage.
Kimberlee Moran: Right.
Yvonne Kjorlien: The people that that artifact or the site belongs to, they never get to see it again. And it’s behind this plate glass. Nobody touches it. You’d be lucky if you ever get to study it.
Kimberlee Moran: Sure, I mean, we’ve just recently had another Indiana Jones film, right?
Yvonne Kjorlien: Haha.
Kimberlee Moran: And for my generation, we grew up under Indiana Jones, many of us are in archaeology because of Indiana Jones. And, I also see this in my forensic career as well, right? We have all these flavors of CSI programming and many students are in my classroom because they’ve watched, all those CSI shows and they think, that that’s their portrayal of what a crime scene investigator or forensic scientist does. So these shows are great for generating interest in the respective fields and maybe inspiring people to go into them. But yeah, obviously they’re not accurate representations and there’s a lot of responsibility that we have as archaeologists to interact with the public and to kind of bring a more realistic version of archeology and to kind of dismantle that idea of the gilded shape cage of museum collections and museums and really bring the collections out to the general public and have them make that connection of the present with the past.
One of the things about museums is only about 5% of everything a museum has in its collection is ever on display. So there are just troves of material that never see the light of day that are just in storage. Part of that is because it’s stuff that might not be particularly interesting to the general public. Like mounds and mounds of shards broken pottery and things like that. Whoever is curating it might think, okay, nobody really wants to see just a pile of what looks like trash. Archaeology is just kind of historic trash picking in a way. And so again it’s really important to connect people with what’s going on behind the scenes in museums because these collections are accessible. They’re there for research and further study and, even members of the general public have access to those collections if there’s something that they’re studying or they’re researching. So there’s a lot going on behind the scenes in museums. But yeah, again, typically on a day-to-day basis, we just don’t see that other world.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, and so that kind of brings us around. The reason I wanted Kimberlee on the podcast was to talk about ethics of working with human remains because there’s been sort of a shift in perspective, I think over the past 10 yea rs at least. It used to be okay to work with human remains and not just okay but more desirable because you need to work with the remains in the classroom so that you can effectively work with the remains when you’re out in the real world. So you know what to look for, now how it feels, and it just makes you better at what you’re going to be doing. But nowadays, there’s just…people are kind of almost putting a ban on working with remains especially archaeology, anthropology. So I wanted to talk about that. And you have this lovely little story about….was it Philadelphia? You were working on a… you had heard about some human reigns found in Philadelphia. Is that the way it goes?
Kimberlee Moran: Sure. So first of all, just kind of taking a step back, historically anthropologists and archaeologists and I’m going back, a hundred or more years have had a very cavalier approach to human remains. This kind of idea that bones are cool. And there have been a lot of pretty terrible things that have happened within archeology and anthropology, in terms of the treatment of human remains, the acquisition of human remains, particularly of kind of vulnerable populations. We’ve got a long and horrible history in the United States of how we have addressed the remains of indigenous peoples that have very strong feelings about death, and what is appropriate to happen to the human body and archaeologists in the past have just completely disregarded that and trophy hunted, essentially.
And over the generations. we’ve really taken a good hard look at ourselves and our profession and have really kind of tightened up our approach to human remains. So this really came to a head in the 1990s. When we passed legislation in the United States to protect the graves and the cultural heritage of Native Americans. So, NAPGRA is the name of the law that protects and helps to repatriate cultural material related to indigenous people and their human remains.
But that’s kind of the only legal framework that has ever been put in place in the United States in terms of the treatment of this kind of material. So while we’ve gotten a lot better and we’ve really established some good ethical frameworks, we only have that one legal framework, and you still get kind of the spectrum within bioarcheology, anthropology, forensic anthropology of the use and the treatment of human remains.
So in terms of my own work and my thinking has really shifted over the years as well, but back in 2016, I was on the train to work one day and I’m an avid newspaper reader and I opened up the newspaper and I saw this article that was entitled “Old Bones Found and Nobody’s In Charge”, and it was a story of a construction site in Philadelphia. Bones were coming out of the ground and everyone kind of raised their hand and said, “Uh, not my problem. Has nothing to do with me or my agency.” So the Medical Examiner’s Office was called. They established at these were historic human remains — so nothing legal or forensic, nothing to do with them. The Historical Commission was then turned to and they said, “This site lies outside of a registered historical district so nothing really to do with us either.” And then finally, the site was a private construction project, so there were no kind of public funds involved and so other protections that might be in place at kind of the state level also did not apply. So it very much fell into this gray area. And part of the article was this picture of the site foreman looking kind of unhappy and he was holding this box of bones. And it only took a glance to realize that these very much were human bones, human remains. So, this is 2016 and I’m thinking to myself, “Gee, I’d love a box of bones. I could do something with a box of those. I’d at least like to know more about what’s in that box.” So I was a little worried that I might kind of sound like a weirdo if I just called up the construction company and say, Hey, give me your box alone, right? Yeah, probably that wouldn’t go over so well. So I contacted a friend of mine. Who’s the curator of the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia? The Mütter Museum is a museum dedicated to medical history. They currently have a lot of human remains on display — that might not be forever — but the Mütter Museum has a very well-known reputation in the city and I thought, if it’s someone from the Mütter museum called, that would look way more legit than just me calling. So, I reached out to my friend, and I shared with her the article and I said, “Hey, we should get this box of bones and find out what’s here and try to understand why they’re bones coming out of this site in the first place, and are we likely to encounter more human remains?” So she wasn’t particularly interested and then I kind of uttered the famous last words that to this day, I regret. I texted her. “Don’t worry. I’ll do all the work.”
Yvonne Kjorlien: Those are very famous last words.
Kimberlee Moran: Yes. And, man, have I gotten that back in spades.
So again, to make it very long story short, we got the box of bones and we came to find that this site was the former First Baptist Church of Philadelphia Cemetery. And according to all the historical records out there, it shouldn’t be there anymore. There shouldn’t be any human remains. In 1860, it was relocated to a kind of large public open space, kind of cemetery, called Mount Moriah, which is kind of in the southern part of the city kind of close to what’s now the Philadelphia airport. The church had relocated. It was originally on 2nd Street. It had moved a couple of times and nobody was really looking after their burial ground. There were indications from newspapers at the time and from church records, that the cemetery had really fallen into disrepair. There were tenement houses that surrounded the cemetery and people were just throwing their daily garbage into the cemetery and it had gotten into quite a state. So the First Baptist Church in the 1850s bought a plot in this Mount Moriah Cemetery and they put lots of public notices in the papers saying, we are digging up our old burial ground and we are relocating to this new place, and if you have any family members buried here, contact this guy, Locksley, and get it sorted out. And there’s also newspaper articles of the actual work in progress. In fact, there were some interesting observations of how well-preserved individuals were. They would open up a coffin of somebody who had died 30 plus years ago, and family members were still able to recognize the individual.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow.
Kimberlee Moran: So that’s very interesting, right? But again, this cemetery should not still be here at Second and Arch Street in Philadelphia. So, initially we thought that maybe these were just a few individuals that had been missed or maybe these were individuals that didn’t have next to kin, so they just left them alone. So our initial approach to the site, once we got permission from the property developer who did not want to have to be dealing with any of this, but they let us come on site just to monitor the overall excavation with the backhoe. They were putting in a two-story parking garage, and because they were going so deep into the ground, this is why they were encountering these remains that were left behind. So what started off as what we thought was just a salvage excavation, turned into a full-fledged archaeological excavation and ultimately in the end around about 500 individuals have been excavated from this site.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Holy cow.
Kimberlee Moran: And there are still more that are under existing structures. After doing our research, we know that we have at least 1700 named individuals that were buried in this burial ground, but we may have up to 3,000 burials in the burial ground.
Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s more than just missing a few individuals.
Kimberlee Moran: Right. Right, exactly. so, Mr. Locksley, clearly did not do his job in 1860.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah.
Kimberlee Moran: Again, we now have evidence as to why that happened. But, we became the stewards of nearly 500 sets of human remains, and we can talk more about some of the legal things later on, but we were given permission by the courts in Philadelphia that oversee unclaimed remains to study those remains for approximately five years, try to identify any of them if we could, and then all the remains were to be reburied in September 2023. It is now October 2023 and those remains are in my building, just next door, and have not been reburied yet and we can kind of circle back as to why that is.
But that has been what originally started as a box of bones, ended up being a whole cemetery, something that we never anticipated in a million years. What we thought was just going to be a very discreet, little research project, ended up being five to six years of our lives and I say ‘our’ because this is now become a real kind of collaborative initiative. It’s expanded way beyond myself, but, yes, it has dominated our lives for at least six years and it’s not over yet.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Because our previous conversation, before the recording, we talked about some of the legal and ethical issues that came up with that. Let’s take a step back because when we were talking before, you told me about the MOVE group.
Kimberlee Moran: Yeah.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And I had always wondered kind of why we are now at the place we are with this whole perspective on not at all using human remains in research, in any study, you can’t even use them in pictures and all that kind of stuff…
Kimberlee Moran: Right.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And where did that come from? Because I’m probably around the same generation as you and, we were brought up using real human remains, in the lab, in the classroom…
Kimberlee Moran: Right.
Yvonne Kjorlien: that’s what you learned on, and you learned how human remains felt. But now the pendulum is swinging quite the opposite way. Where not even human remains in pictures. So, where did that all come from? And you were saying it’s from the MOVE group. So, tell us about that.
Kimberlee Moran: So really, I mean, there’s kind of a culmination of multiple things at play.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, that’s usually the way it is.
Kimberlee Moran: We’re in a really complicated time in history right now.
So, first of all, we have everything that’s happened from the pandemic, and from everything that’s happened, post-George Floyd and a much height in sense of social justice which is really wonderful. We really need that. So we’re a lot more aware of all the various kind of groups that have been oppressed and have been neglected and all the things that, we as white people have just kind of taken for granted. And so that’s part of it is just kind of having our heads in a different space. We’re really paying more attention to things than we ever did before.
The other side of it, and again, it really has come into this interesting moment of history, is something again that happened in Philadelphia, a couple things that have happened in Philadelphia. One of those is the discovery that some human remains from a pretty horrible incident that I’ll describe in a minute we’re never returned to the next of kin. So, back in the 1980s, there was a kind of social group called MOVE. And they kind of lived, kind of communally, the kind of main portion of this group took over a block in Philadelphia. They had kind of communal raising of their children, they all kind of changed their surnames to Africa. They were trying to be self-sufficient in terms of growing their own food and various things like that. And they had a lot of negative interactions with the police and also some of the neighbors as well.
But, they were well known to the police and individuals were kind of regularly arrested and various things like that. So, in the 1980s, there was really a kind of watershed moment where the police department in Philadelphia decided to — and this is not an exaggeration — they decided to drop a bomb on the compound from a helicopter. So you can look this up in the newspapers at the time or more recently. So a bomb was dropped on this city block in Philadelphia. Obviously there was a huge fire. Lots of people from the MOVE movement died as a result of everything kind of going up in flames and a number of those individuals were children.
So after the fire was put out and the Medical Examiner and death investigators came to process the scene and collected the human remains, there were quite a few charred human remains that were recovered and sent to the Medical Examiner’s Office. The Medical Examiner worked with several anthropologists based at the University of Pennsylvania. And, this is pretty routine. Even today, the Medical Examiner kind of works with outside anthropologists when there are skeletonized human remains. And for whatever reason, some of these remains, two bones of children, were retained by the anthropologists. And the anthropologist used them in classes, used images of them in public lectures, and the identities of these remains were known and the next of kin to these remains were known. And yet these remains were retained. There was also another box of remains that were later found in the Medical Examiner’s Office that the Medical Examiner was trying to kind of quietly cremate and dispose of but they were found as well.
So relatively recently within the past couple of years it came to light that these remains had been moving around, to different institutions, used in, again very cavalier and kind of callous way, and clearly never any intention by the anthropologist to ever return them to the next of kin. So has caused…it just it’s been a massive incident in Philadelphia. There are regularly newspaper articles about this and kind of the next, iteration of the saga, and it has sent ripples across the anthropology / bioarcheology community.
In conjunction to that, the University of Pennsylvania has for many, many years have a collection of skulls called the Morton Collection. And Morton was a very unapologetic racist and he collected all of these skulls to basically show that the brain capacity of non-whites was smaller than white individuals. And so it’s come to light that many of these skulls were kind of grave robbed, or they come from enslaved individuals, various things that again just casks, even more of a shadow on this collection of remains. So again, lots of negative press for the University of Pennsylvania. And, unfortunately, it’s been that negative press that has really kind of caused a lot of fear and trepidation amongst the larger community.
So rather than kind of digging deep into the issues and determining what is and isn’t appropriate and having some conversations and maybe coming up with a framework, just again kind of out of fear of what could happen and the articles that could come out, there’s been this kind of retraction within the community of pulling inwards and I’m putting an air quotes “cleaning up” what we have and just kind of pretending, kind of sweeping things under a rug. That’s kind of how I feel, that rather than just coming straight out, “Let’s talk about this,” it’s more kind of, “Let’s just make this problem quietly go away.” And yeah, that’s kind of where we are at the moment. So it’s a really challenging environment.
Kimberlee Moran: and I think we have a lot of work to do to kind of come out of this in a productive way that allows us to continue train our students and prepare them for work in the field, to continue good ethical research, and to also continue having good practices within museums that have collections of human remains. There’s a lot of work that we still need to do.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. A lot of that the past work… because I’m not too sure that there’s a scientific discipline out there that doesn’t have kind of a shadowy past where, there’s at least a few individuals that we’re not doing right things.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Good things and what’s the discipline to do about that shadowy past?
Kimberlee Moran: Right.
Yvonne Kjorlien: But yeah I think as archaeologists and bio anthropologists. We’ve kind of got our work cut out for us.
Kimberlee Moran: But at the same time that there’s a lot of fear, this could actually be a very exciting point in history for us to be doing this work. I find it very kind of intellectually stimulating, and also morally stimulating to want to jump in and engage in this and have these discussions. I think we do ourselves a disservice by not just kind of facing these issues head on.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Absolutely, absolutely. I fully agree with you on that. I look at this as, “What lessons are we to learn from this.”
Kimberlee Moran: Yeah, definitely.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And how can we move forward in a productive manner that we can all live with?
Kimberlee Moran: And this is a great teaching moment for our students.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.
Kimberlee Moran: Let’s pull our students in and make them part of this conversation because they are the anthropologist and bio archaeologists of the future.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Mm-hmm
I asked you in an email about this. I’m sort, of how much does personal integrity play into professional ethics. Because for, I mean, we’re not only dealing with perhaps a generational perspective of these anthropologists who are circulating the world with these two children’s from the MOVE group. So, maybe a generational integrity and their perspective there, but also a sense of professional ethics that’s becoming more and more, I guess, I want to say, more distinct in anthropology. But then there’s also a personal integrity as well,…maybe that the morals and values part of that. So yeah. How does that all play in?
Kimberlee Moran: Right, right. So, the personal integrity is what makes you care in the first place and what makes you want to address these issues. When you don’t have that personal integrity, that’s when these bad things happen. But at the same time, you have professional ethics which really kind of codify a set of standards within the discipline. So even if you don’t care, there should be a framework within which you have to work, because you are part of this profession, you have signed up to be members of particular association. So, we have the Society for American Archeology We have the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. We have lots of different organizations. The American Academy Forensic Science, that has an anthropology section. We have lots of organizations organizations that, if you are part of those organizations, you have agreed to follow the Code of Professional Ethics, that they have set out and different organizations, they all have basically the same general ethical principles but different organizations are more kind of direct in what they say you should do as opposed to others. So some professional organizations just basically say don’t do bad things, don’t misrepresent your credentials. Very, very kind of generalized. Whereas other professional organizations really say these are our values and these are the things that you need to abide by if you’re going to be part of this community. We take our personal integrity and we take those folks that care, and we build professional ethics that then we all have to abide by, but there will still sometimes be gaps and that’s where you get kind of the spectrum of interpretation of how, I guess I should say, how far we should go in terms of what we do with human remains.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Let’s take that and talk about what you went through. With the construction site, the Baptist Church in Philadelphia…
Kimberlee Moran: Sure.
Yvonne Kjorlien: because it was a gray area. You said, there was some legal and…
Kimberlee Moran: Right.
Yvonne Kjorlien: all stuff going on before you were to work with the remains.
Kimberlee Moran: Yeah, there was a lot of stuff. So, first of all, we’ve got, the legal gray area where nobody is regulating what’s happening here because this is a private project, it falls outside of preservation regulations and things of that nature. Again, initially we just thought here are a few leftover remains. We had no idea of the scope of what we were dealing with. One of the things that became apparent very early on is that the construction company was…they weren’t going to allow us to do good archeology. They were kind of placating us by allowing us to be on site to just monitor the backhoe. And when the backhoe hit human remains, we had a few minutes to stop the backhoe, take a few pictures to document location and context, basically hand excavate the remains and put them into a box to then go someplace else. And then, the backhoe would just continue to work. Construction was not stopped because we had no authority to stop it. And there wasn’t anybody with authority that was interested in getting involved in this situation. If we annoyed the construction company any point, they could tell us to leave and then nothing was gonna happen. No salvage, no protection was gonna happen. So that was our first ethical issue is: what is worse, bad archeology or no archeology at all?
We were reaching out to various organizations, trying to get some guidance on what we should do, but again, still trying to kind of be on the down-low, because we knew that at any point, we could get kicked off the site and that would be the end of it. And one of the archaeologists that we spoke to point blank told us to walk away, that we should have nothing to do with this, we were going to set Philadelphia archeology back by 30 years. And we said to this archaeologist, “Look, if we’re not there, these things are getting thrown away. We know that they’re being mashed up by construction machinery, and they’re going into big dump trucks to be taken off site with all the dirt that they’re trying to remove. How can we in good conscious allow that to happen?” The archaeologist had no answer for us, just continued to reiterate that we shouldn’t be involved. The rationale of why we shouldn’t be involved is because being involved gave the construction company of veneer of legitimacy. They could say, “Look, we’re doing the right thing. We’re working with archaeologists,” even though clearly we were not producing a good archaeological product here. Though, I understand where she was coming from, but, from my personal integrity, I couldn’t leave that site. Knowing what would happen in our absence.
So we made the decision to continue to be involved, even though all of us were kind of terrified that this was gonna be the end of our careers, we’ll never work in this town again, sort of deal, but we just couldn’t in good conscience allow these remains to be just flagrantly destroyed. So that was our first kind of ethical conundrum.
Our second ethical conundrum was these remains did not want to be disturbed. This was not something that they intended or consented to back in the 18th and 19th centuries. So, this is a pretty terrible situation. How can we bring good about in this situation? How can we — and maybe even a bit we’ll talk about some ethical frameworks, but there’s one ethical framework which has to do with minimizing harm and maximizing good — how can we strike that balance? How can we minimize the harm happening to these remains and maximize benefit for both the remains and for the larger public and for the academic community as well.
Part of that has to do with the actual subsequent analysis that happened to these remains. And our goal has really been to try to build stories. We were calling them osteobiographies: trying to use what is available to us of the physical individual, as well as the historical record, as well as other sort of scientific techniques that can give us insights into who this person is. What is their story? What was their life like? Rather than making these individuals objects that just were salvaged or rescued or whatever language you want to use, but turning them into people that we can have a relationship with. And that also kind of goes to some ethical frameworks, this idea of relationships and care.
And part of that for us has been involving our students in the work as well as doing analysis in the first place. So, these remains aren’t just sitting in a dark storage room, waiting to be reburied. There has been an interaction with these remains, between our researchers, between our students to try to, again, build relationships between the past and the present, build stories, and maximize the benefit that could come from what was otherwise a terrible situation.
Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s lovely. I really like the idea of having a relationship with the remains, and not just with the remains, but the people who used to be the remains.
Kimberlee Moran: And that’s something you lose when you don’t work with actual human remains…
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.
Kimberlee Moran: when you don’t involve actual human remains in teaching or when you don’t have them on display. One of the many books that I have in my office is a book on Ethics and Professionalism in Forensic Anthropology. It’s written by Nicholas Passalacqua — I always say his name wrong — and Marin Pilloud. It’s not a very big book, it’s pretty thin, but it’s got some real treasures in here. And one of the things I really like is that…so, Europe generally, but also the United Kingdom has dealt with these issues generations before we’ve even been thinking about them. I studied in the United Kingdom. One of the things that happened in the UK when I was over there, it came to light that medical doctors were holding on to human tissue, after death, after transplants, all sorts of stuff — and again children were kind of involved — and using them for research and stuff like that. And there was a huge backlash and what resulted is something called the Human Tissue Act. And the Human Tissue Act is very reactionary and it tightens up what can and cannot be done with human tissue, including human remains to the point where it’s really stifled a lot of research and work and education and stuff like that.
There are models out there to look towards that are both good and bad. There are aspects of the Human Tissue Act that are really great and really wonderful and really necessary. But it also shows what can happen within legislation when things swing in a reactionary way. But one of the things that’s in this book is a statement that was developed by the United Kingdom, called Guidance for the Care of Human Remains in Museums. This is from 2005. And it states that the primary reason for museums to display remains are in quotes “to educate, medical practitioners, to educate people in science and history, to explain burial practices, and to bring people into physical contact with past people, and to encourage reflection” end quotes. And I do think that’s really profound and really important and something that maybe we need to think about as we start to reassess, in this instance, human remains as displayed in museums.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Absolutely. Yeah, that’s definitely something that I feel would be missing from putting human remains in a gilded cage or making them inaccessible. I just find that Western society, in general, lacks a relationship with their dead and that starts as soon as the person dies.
Kimberlee Moran: Yeah.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And then it continues. But other cultures across the world, they have very intimate relationships with their dead, with their ancestors.
Kimberlee Moran: Right. Going back to Yeah.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And that includes, yeah, that includes the human remains, whether they’re buried or not or somehow preserved, sometimes they keep them in their homes, sometimes they’re in a certain spot that they visit on a regular basis and they commune with.
Kimberlee Moran: Yeah. Going back to my original field of Near Eastern archeology, there are numerous cultures that bury their ancestors under the floor of their houses,…
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.
Kimberlee Moran: …they literally had them in their house, in perpetuity.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, so that the ability to have, to start a relationship and continue relationship, if we choose, I think that’s paramount and we shouldn’t disallow ourselves from that possibility.
Kimberlee Moran: Yeah, definitely. For sure.
Yvonne Kjorlien: So, when we look at where we are now, and these professional ethic frameworks, and what happened with the remains from the MOVE group, I just want to maybe take a moment and kind of get an environmental scan about what’s going on now. From what you’re seeing in the classroom. At the triple As, and what have you. Can you give us a sense of what you’re seeing right here, right now?
Kimberlee Moran: Sure. For some folks it’s just business as usual. There’s not a whole lot of change that’s happening. But in other areas, there’s been a call to or some folks have decided that it’s best to just remove all human remains from the classroom. Because we do have really, really excellent replicas now that have all the detail that one would need to kind of do education and training. So there’s that. There are museums. So again, going back to the Mutter Museum. The Mutter Museum is now under new leadership, and there’s been talk about removing human remains from display at the Mutter Museum. The University of Pennsylvania just recently announced their museum of anthropology and archeology, they will be taking all human remains off from display. So, there’s that.
There’s also — and this is not necessarily a bad thing — a reassessment of what either teaching collections or museum collections, what we actually have in our collections and where did it come from. And what do we do when we find no provenience? We have no idea where it came from. It’s just been there forever. Or, when there are problematic proveniences. And, that’s a very good thing. We really should know what we have.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yes, yes. We should.
Kimberlee Moran: We should know where it came from. Right? Right. So that is a good thing. But then the more extreme kind of approaches have been just to remove everything from display, not use it in teaching. Already – and, again, this is not a bad thing — we’ve been increasingly more cautious as to what images we use.
And actually I’ll circle back kind of with the Arch Street material and one of the ways that my thinking has sort of changed. So when we first had the material from Arch Street, we were very adamant that we do not allow pictures of skulls, full frontal facial skulls because we had a lot of newspaper reporters. Of course everyone wants a picture of skull. We were very clear we want to be respectful for the remains. If you do take a picture, we want to make sure that the skull is rotated away from the camera. Or, just don’t take any pictures at all, if you can help it. But I’ve since sort of changed my thinking, and again, this has to do with some of the teaching that I’ve now done with ethics, and my exploration of philosophy and moral philosophers. And there’s some philosophers that, again, talk about the human connection. and seeing people as subjects instead of objects, meaning a subject as a person with their own story and their own individuality as opposed to an object. And I think that’s very important, particularly when it comes to skulls because we’ve had objectified skulls forever. I mean, we’re coming up to Halloween, right? What do we see everywhere? Skeletons, and skulls?
Then there’s another moral philosopher who was around during World War II and was in a concentration camp and spoke a lot about looking an individual in the eyes, and when you look someone in the eyes, you connect with their humanity. And I really thought about that when it comes to skulls. If we’re turning the skull away from the camera, what are we saying about that? Are we making it an object and not an individual?
Yvonne Kjorlien: Very good point.
Kimberlee Moran: If we actually look into the eyes of this person, of what remains of this person, does that elicit more of a connection with this individual? So, I’ve since — I’m not taking pictures of skulls and posting them everywhere, clearly — but, I now have kind of maybe a different attitude towards if we were to take a picture of a skull and to have it, full frontal, that kind of connection. So I don’t know. That’s something that’s been on my mind recently.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. I completely see your point. There may not be an answer. I mean, this doesn’t a black and white type.
Kimberlee Moran: Right? And that is the interesting thing about ethics is that many times in these ethical situations, there is no right answer. What makes you ethical is thinking about it, and grappling with it and discussing it. Because there might not be a clear yes or no. Because I still haven’t decided, I’m not in a position where anyone’s asking to take pictures of a skull, but I certainly haven’t decided what I would do in that particular… I guess we depend on the situation. But part of really embracing ethics within this field, again, is thinking about it, talking about it, not just having one sentence off-the-cuff dismissive, kind of attitude. It’s really about grappling deeply with these issues.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And I think, brings us kind of full circle to where we started about that the current climate about people not wanting to post any pictures, not work, with the remains, no nothing.
Kimberlee Moran: Right.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay. Why is that? Can we please discuss this? What is your thinking around this? Why do you want to do this? And there is a lot of fear, but, at the same time, nobody willing or even able to talk about why they want to do it. They just say, “It’s wrong.” Okay. Why is it wrong? What is your perception on this.
Kimberlee Moran: Right, right. So yeah. So that’s really important, is whenever we do make a decision, an ethical decision of yes, or no, right or wrong, we really need to be able to articulate the reasoning behind that, because if you can’t, then it’s not really ethical, right? It’s dogmatism.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.
Kimberlee Moran: So I want to briefly go through some of the ethical frameworks from moral philosophy…
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yes, please.
Kimberlee Moran: because they really give us the rationale and they give us the ability to debate these things back and forth again. There might not be a clear answer, but at least you have the logical trail that has led you to where you are.
I got really interested in ethics thanks to the Society of American Archeology. They have an Ethics Bowl. And I’ve now seen more organizations have ethics bowls as part of their annual conference. And the way that then Ethics Bowl works is you have two teams, they’re presented with a scenario, an ethical dilemma, and, if it’s well written there shouldn’t be a clear answer, it should truly be a dilemma that really sparks the debate. And then the two teams basically debated it out in front of a panel of judges. And the panel really decides who made the best argument, not necessarily who had the right answer, but who made the best argument. I’ve been a moderator for the Ethics Bowl for many, many years, and I always thought, “Gee, this would make a really great class, to actually talk about ethical dilemmas and moral philosophy and then have this class culminate in the debate.” And so, coincidentally, when everything was happening with Arch Street, that semester I also started working with colleague of mine in our philosophy department to set up this course, And so, I was very much learning by doing, and this course is now run for six years. This year will be the seventh year that we run this course, it’s now become a fixture.
It’s called Debating Ethical Issues Across Disciplines. And what we do is we introduce the students to the four main ethical frameworks within moral philosophy. The textbook that we use is A 21st Century Ethical Toolbox by Anthony Weston. Highly recommend this book. It’s a really easy way to introduce yourself to moral philosophy and these various frameworks. So the first framework is probably the one that is the easiest to connect to all this discussion with human remains. This is — and I’m just gonna use the terminology use in the textbook — this is what’s referred to as the ethics of the person. So this is grounded in mainly Emmanuel Kant as our main kind of philosopher and it’s this framework that gives us justice, and rights. And it basically says that people are individual and they are deserving of respect and to be treated with dignity. So you can already see how this totally connects with everything that we’re talking about with human remains.
There’s some other interesting aspects about the ethics of the person or particularly about Emmanuel Kant’s various philosophies, and one of the them is this idea of universality, that for something to be ethical, you should be able to have it applied in every situation, you should be okay with a universal kind of doctrine. That can be quite difficult in a lot of different ways – but we might circle back to that — but basically ethics of the person, the idea of dignity, rights, respect, justice, all that sort of stuff.
The next framework using this textbook is called the ethics of happiness. And this is where we get to Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill and utilitarianism or consequentialism, which has to do with we often think of the greatest good for the greatest number of people. But really it’s about maximizing good or happiness — happiness / good kind of synonyms — and minimizing harm. And in this particular framework — and this is one that we use all the time, democracy is kind of based on this framework — there are trade-offs. There’s always going to be winners and losers in this particular framework. Not everybody is going to be happy, but you’re trying to create the most happiness, the greatest amount of good. And so we see this in a lot of different ways and I kind of refer to it earlier about how, in this bad situation, we were just trying to reduce harm as much as possible and try to again, maximize good with our efforts.
The third framework is the ethics of virtue. This is our oldest framework. It goes all the way back to Aristotle and it’s all about character traits. Humaning well. Being the best humans that we can be. Being honest, being transparent, being hard-working, means you go on and on and on with the list of virtues. And so being an ethical person means exercising these virtues, these character traits. As an archaeologist, how do I archeology well? And that would be communication and outreach, again. Honesty, not misrepresenting my qualifications, transparency, hardworking, good practice, all the rest of it.
And our last ethical framework is sometimes called the feminists at the cool framework. So, all these other frameworks tend to be much more centered of justice, and more of masculine approach. This last one is often considered the more feminine approach and it’s grounded in the work of Carol Gilligan and Nell Noddings. And it’s often called the ethics of care or the ethics of relationships. And the idea is that we all live in communities, and being ethical is about the care and the stewardship of relationships.
It’s really interesting: Carol Gilligan just came out. Her seminal book is called In a Different Voice and it has to do with research in psychology that she was participating in that was looking at moral development. They were looking at boys and giving boys certain questions and seeing how they answer those questions. And again the boys tended to approach it by justice and this is what’s right and following the law and stuff like that. Whereas the girls tended to have a more nuanced approach: what are the responsibilities that the different actors have to each other? And at the time, the girls were seen as less morally developed because they didn’t have clear answers, because they had this more nuanced approach. And Carol Gilligan really realized that is wasn’t that they were underdeveloped. It was that they thought of these things differently. She wrote this book In a Different Voice and that’s really kind of changed a lot of our mindset. Now, she’s just recently come out with a new book that basically says that this isn’t a feminist approach. This is just a human approach.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Mm-hmm
Kimberlee Moran: Making it feminist means that you’re cutting out half the population.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.
Kimberlee Moran: That we all have the ability to think about care and relationships.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.
Kimberlee Moran: So again, thinking about human remains, our care of them, our stewardship of them, how we use them, that we’re not “using” them…
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.
Kimberlee Moran: that we’re building relationships with them and our students and so forth. So, using these four frameworks, sometimes these frameworks work together, very nicely. Sometimes these frameworks kind of butt up against each other. But the important thing is to, whatever your decision is with human remains, to try to view that through one or more of these lenses as your rationale.
With the Arch Street material, we decided to learn from the remains, to study the remains. We felt like, first of all, we could do this by preserving the human dignity, that it was actually more dignified, for us to learn from these individuals and tell their stories and see them as people and not as objects. We felt like we were maximizing the good that could be created from the situation. We felt like, as archaeologists that, practicing the virtues of what makes a good archaeologist is to, again, create knowledge in a way that preserves dignity. That just putting these things in a storage container isn’t archeology well. And then also the idea of relationships. That we were creating relationships between the past and the present, that we were stewarding these remains. So, that was our justification one way for us to create the rationale of the approach that we had.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Just reflecting on what you’ve been talking about, one of the biggest things that I learned from studying anthropology is that different groups will have different perspectives and…
Kimberlee Moran: Yes.
Yvonne Kjorlien: that anthropology, as an anthropologist, I need to realize that and respect that.,
Kimberlee Moran: Yes.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And in dealing with ethics, different groups will have different perspectives, including anthropologists.
Kimberlee Moran: Yeah.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And we have a different view of working with remains. And different groups of anthropologists will probably have different perspectives on working with human remains. I think, I mean, using that to put the lens on ourselves so that we can respect the different viewpoints, then talk about them.
Kimberlee Moran: Yeah.
Yvonne Kjorlien: That may not be the most natural for us to do, but I think it turning our discipline upon ourselves.
Kimberlee Moran: Yeah. Yes, yes. Yeah, I’ve been to many a conference that has ended up in, raised voices and …
Yvonne Kjorlien: Uh oh.
Kimberlee Moran: …anger issues amongst anthropologists that are supposed to be having a civilized debate and it just kind of…
Yvonne Kjorlien: Spirals.
Kimberlee Moran: …falls apart. Yeah.
Yvonne Kjorlien: I’m going to set the time so I don’t want to too much longer. But this has been amazing food for thought and I really hope that listeners go away with a lot of questions, which is good.
Kimberlee Moran: Right, right. And again, engage with these ethical frameworks. They’re maybe and probably are very good arguments of why we shouldn’t do certain things with remains. I mean, again, we were talking about different cultural groups, going back to respect and dignity has to do with honoring the wishes of next of kin and cultural perspectives. So yeah, definitely think these things through. Part of ethics is all about thinking. So if you want to be an ethical archaeologist-anthropologist person, really engage deeply, instead of just trying to find easy answers. There are no easy answers.
Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s too bad. I was hoping for an easy answer out of this.
Kimberlee Moran: That’s no fun. An easy answer is no fun.
Yvonne Kjorlien: The fun is the journey.
Kimberlee Moran: Exactly, exactly.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Thank you very much for this. This has been wonderful.
Kimberlee Moran: My pleasure. I mean these are issues that are near and dear to my heart, and I do love talking about them and engaging with them. Thank you so much for giving me this time and the space.
Yvonne Kjorlien 
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