Author Affiliation: Christopher Frerking, University of New Hampshire, USA; Heather Gill-Frerking, Vermont Law School, USA.
摘要
Human remains constitute an important category of cultural heritage, but do not easily fit into the legal frameworks that are used to protect other forms of cultural heritage or cultural property. While much of the law surrounding cultural heritage and cultural property focuses on built heritage, such as sites and monuments, artefacts and artwork, or the intangible heritage associated with living and recent cultures, law related to historic and ancient human remains is convoluted, geographically-restricted, and difficult to enforce. Further, current law seldom considers the human dignity of the individual deceased - particularly for human remains that lack specific cultural affiliation or that fall outside of particular narrow categories (such as 'indigenous').
One source of difficulty is that it is not always clear what should be treated as human remains for legal purposes. For example, while a natural mummy clearly constitutes human remains, this is less clear in the case of objects such as skull drums or cups, jewellery or other objects made of human bones or teeth. Classification of a specimen as an 'artefact' or as 'human remains' can determine the protections that are available under both national and international law. For human remains that can be classified as 'artefacts', current cultural heritage and cultural property regimes provide a degree of protection against, e.g., trafficking, but potentially at the cost of the human dignity of the deceased. For human remains that can be classified only as 'human remains', there may be little or no legal protection.
This paper explores the complexity of categorising archaeological human remains for legal purposes, and identifies some of the issues related to the identification of laws that protect archaeological human remains.
目次
ABSTRACT 49 I. INTRODUCTION 49 I.i Case Study -A Buddha Mummy from China 50 I.ii. Risks of Private Ownership 52 II. DEFINING HUMAN REMAINS 53 III. PROTECTION OF HUMAN REMAINS 54 IV. CATEGORISATION 57 IV.i Human or Object 57 IV.b Ancient, Historical or Modern 59 IV.c Indigenous Remains 60 IV.d Skeletal Remains or Mummified Remains 61 V. FRAMEWORKS - PROPERTY, HUMAN DIGNITY, HERITAGE, SCIENTIFIC 62 V.a Property 62 V.b Human Dignity 67 V.c Heritage 70 V.d Scientific Specimens 70 VI. WEAKNESS OF CURRENT FRAMEWORKS FOR PROTECTION 72 VII. CONCLUSION 73
