Grave robbery

Grave robbery is the act of opening any burial site to illegally remove the body or artifacts. Historically, grave robbery has been associated with treasure hunting. In such cases, thieves break into the grave sites of wealthy individuals to steal grave goods and sell them. While most instances of grave robbery occurred in antiquity closer to when the graves were initially constructed, incidences of looting are on the increase in the modern era. These episodes of theft help feed the black market antiquities trade.

Grave robbery is not limited to the illicit theft of grave goods. For instance, in the nineteenth century, the corpses of people from socially disadvantaged groups often were exhumed without permission and used as medical cadavers. In other cases, bodies were stolen for scientific display.

Background

Grave robbery can have several negative repercussions. It robs archaeologists of the chance to study important cultural objects in situ. When grave goods are removed from their original graves without documentation of their location, scientists lose the chance to contextualize their meaning. Without such documentation, it may be impossible to fully understand the cultural meaning of grave goods, their point of origin, and when they were made. Additionally, looters often have little interest in the historical value of the graves they are defiling, so they may destroy more mundane objects that lack obvious intrinsic value, thereby permanently destroying archaeologists' ability to study these objects.

By contrast, buyers of black market goods note that many such items are found in regions of political and economic instability such as Syria, Iraq, and Egypt. They argue that while such tactics are not ideal, they are protecting valuable materials from physical harm by buying them. Nonetheless, archaeologists suggest that the black market for looted grave goods has become a major threat to attempts to preserve cultural antiquities.

In Egypt, experts have used satellite imagery to review the damage to archaeological sites over time. A review of these images in 2016 revealed that a quarter of Egypt's existing archaeological sites were damaged by looters. By 2040, it is estimated that all the country's archaeological sites will have been subjected to looting. Similarly, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) terrorist group is known to have looted several important Mesopotamian archaeological sites in Iraq and sold the goods on the international black market to fund their terrorist efforts.

Grave robbery is illegal in most places around the world. It is regarded as distinct from the archaeological exploration of graves. Grave robbery usually is associated with thieves attempting to make financial gains from their finds, whereas archaeologists are seeking to further modern understanding of past cultures. However, on occasion there have been moral questions raised about the deliberate disturbance of human grave sites for scientific or archaeological purposes. For instance, many Native American groups have protested the removal or display of human remains that predate the Western colonization of North America. In response to such concerns, the United States passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990. As part of this act, any remains that can be linked to an existing population of Native Americans must be returned. As a result, 42,000 sets of Native American remains out of a total of 157,000 in American collections were returned to various tribal groups by 2009. However, many tribes are still working to recover their remains and many universities have complicated the process for return. For example, as of 2024, Arizona State University had made less than 2 percent of its Indigenous remains available to Indigenous tribes. Others institutes, like the University of Alabama, have been in a decades long dispute over the return of remains to the tribes. The process has remained slow and many Indigenous people have spoken out against the barriers to reclaiming their ancestors.

Grave robbery for the purposes of obtaining medical cadavers, called body snatching, has been a problem in both Europe and the United States. During the nineteenth century, the number of medical schools in the United States grew from four to 160. The result of this increase was a heightened demand for cadavers that outstripped the ability of suppliers to legally procure corpses that had been sanctioned for medical purposes. This led to the sale of bodies that had been illegally removed from cemeteries. People who illegally procured bodies in this way were called resurrectionists. Twenty-first-century studies of several nineteenth-century graveyards connected to almshouses for the poor showed that many of the remains likely had been illegally subjected to medical dissection and experimentation post-mortem. However, such methods merely were an extension of earlier practices. As early as 1787, a group of free Black people sought increased legal protection for the Negro Burying Ground in New York City from grave robbers.

Well-Known Cases of Grave Robbery

Perhaps the best-known cases of grave robbery occurred over a lengthy period in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. The architects and guardians of the tombs located there sought to safeguard the graves by placing them in remote locations and then covering the entrances with rubble to make them difficult to detect. Even in this era, records show that the Egyptians were aware of security issues and began stationing guards. Unfortunately, both the guards and workers digging new tombs were prone to ethical lapses. The first known case of grave robbery occurred in 1113 BCE when a quarryman named Amenpanefer was convicted and likely executed for looting stone cut tombs.

Some pharaohs even encouraged official plundering to replenish the state treasury. Pharaohs also are known to have reused grave goods from previous eras in their own funerals. To prevent further thievery, Egyptians placed warnings to thieves about punishments in the afterlife. Such threats helped to give rise to superstitions about curses. Additionally, while constructing these tombs, Egyptian architects created false passages and shafts that led nowhere. The widespread looting of tombs in antiquity made the discovery of the nearly intact tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922 a remarkable and valuable find.

Among the most famous examples of grave robbery in the United States involved John Scott Harrison, the son of William Henry Harrison and the father of Benjamin Harrison, who were the ninth and twenty-third presidents of the United States, respectively. Harrison unexpectedly died on May 25, 1878. During the funeral, it was discovered that the grave of Harrison's nephew Augustus Devin, who had been buried the week before, had been disturbed, and the body was removed. In response, the family secured Harrison's remains in a concrete vault in a secret location while beginning a search for Devin's body. In the course of their investigation, they discovered the body of Harrison, which they had believed was still safely interred in his grave, at the Ohio Medical College in Cincinnati. The resulting inquiry uncovered a vast conspiracy of body snatching. The public horror over these series of events ultimately led to a new set of laws in Ohio in 1880 regarding the procurement of medical cadavers. Over time, these laws provided the basis for the creation of the national Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, which streamlined rules for organ donation.

Bibliography

Bryant, Charles W. "What's the Difference between Archaeology and Grave Robbing?" HowStuffWorks, 8 Sept. 2010, science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geology/archaeology-grave-robbing.htm. Accessed 18 Dec. 2024.

Ellefson, Sam, and Aspen Ford. “Only 2% of Native American Remains Returned to Tribes: Inside ASU’s Repatriation Record.” AZ Mirror, 12 June 2024, azmirror.com/2024/06/12/only-2-of-native-american-remains-returned-to-tribes-inside-asus-repatriation-record/. Accessed 18 Dec. 2024.

Killgrove, Kristina. "How Grave Robbers and Medical Students Helped Dehumanize 19th Century Blacks and the Poor." Forbes, 13 July 2015, www.forbes.com/sites/kristinakillgrove/2015/07/13/dissected-bodies-and-grave-robbing-evidence-of-unequal-treatment-of-19th-century-blacks-and-poor/#71c0d44b6d12. Accessed 18 Dec. 2024.

Klevnäs, Alison Margaret. Whodunnit? Grave Robbery in Anglo-Saxon England and the Merovingian Kingdoms. Archaeopress, 2013.

Mueller, Tom. "How Tomb Raiders Are Stealing Our History." National Geographic, June 2016, www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/06/looting-ancient-blood-antiquities/. Accessed 18 Dec. 2024.

Pappas, Stephanie. "The 6 Most Gruesome Grave Robberies." Live Science, 17 July 2015, www.livescience.com/51591-gruesome-grave-robberies.html. Accessed 18 Dec. 2024.

Ramos, Stephanie, et al. “Native Americans Fight to Bring 128,000 Ancestors Home From US Museums, Universities.” ABC News, 26 Nov. 2024, abcnews.go.com/US/native-americans-fight-bring-ancestors-home-us-museums/story?id=116214011#:~:text=Across%20the%20country%2C%20Native%20American,are%20often%20far%20from%20home. Accessed 18 Dec. 2024.

"The Science of Grave Robbing." Utne Reader, May-June 2011, www.utne.com/science-and-technology/grave-robbing-aboriginal-remains-nagpra-native-americans. Accessed 18 Dec. 2024.

Shultz, Suzanne M. Body Snatching: The Robbing of Graves for the Education of Physicians in Early Nineteenth Century America. McFarland & Company, 2005.

Strauss, Mark. "When Is It Okay to Dig Up the Dead?" National Geographic, 7 Apr. 2016, news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/160407-archaeology-religion-repatriation-bones-skeletons/. Accessed 18 Dec. 2024.

Van Beck, Todd W. "The Harrison Horror, Grave Robbing, and the Invention of the Burial Vault." Indiana Funeral Directors Association (IFDA), www.toddvanbeck.com/the-harrison-horror-grave-robbing-and-the-invention-of-the-burial-vault-1878/. Accessed 18 Dec. 2024.