Scattered Episode 24: Ethics and Human Remains – Interview with Kimberlee Moran

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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Do you have a suggestion for a topic on the Scattered podcast?

Do you have a question about working with human remains?

Drop Yvonne a line at ykjorlien@gmail.com

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 investiga