Profiting From Disturbing the Dead: UK Grave Robbers and a Skull Called "Charlie"

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porn unlike certain auctioneers

There are it seems no bounds to human indecency, Muriel Taylor, the widow of a UK amateur archaeologist/artefact hunter who dug up a load of graves at Welbeck 'Anglo-Saxon ' cemetery, stored human remains in a wardrobe in her home for years and now is selling them off. She's expecting between fifty and eighty thousand quid for a group of objects her husband dug up and kept at home. She says the skull is called "Charlie".

Hanson's has no qualms about shouting it from the rooftops, no doubt posting a full frontal picture of a naked human skull is intended to get people talking about the material and then somebody will set up a crowd-sourcing page so he can get his money and the objects get in a museum. Oh yes, let's talk about it then.

1) Who gave anyone the right to dig up these remains out of curiosity and put them in a cupboard at home? Where is the publication? What documentation is there, and what state is it in? Why were the objects not deposited in a museum right away instead of forming a private collection? Here is a very good argument for a permit system in the UK.

2) But if the body called by Mrs Taylor "Charlie" (why? Who gave anyone that right?) was buried with the Square headed brooch, it was a woman anyway,.

3) If the objects are sold off for fifth to eighty thousand, how much of a cut will the landowner get?

4) Has Muriel Taylor a document from the landowner confirming transfer of title (and under what conditions) that has been deposited with the collection being handled with such gay abandon by Hanson's ? 

5) What ethical code governs the treatment of human remains by the British antiquities trade? Is publishing disrespectful skellie-porn photos of naked ancestral human remains in accordance with that ethical code or a breach of it?

And actually, once the objects and their labels are mixed up by the collector or his wife when she decided to profit from the past by flogging off her dead husband's artefact collection, is the 'project archive of this amateur excavation not now just a few boxes of loose artefacts?

What a disgrace.