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When I was a freshman at MSU in 1970 I was a member of the MSU amateur radio club. One day the faculty leader recruited me to help a Phd student with his Slow Scan TV experiments. The Phd student had a technicians license which didn't have operating privileges on the HF band.
So we operated in tandem and I got to learn all about the then brand new world of SSTV. It was really jerky video but you could send it all over the world. Remember vividly talking to an Egyptian ham who did a live broadcast from the pyramids with camels walking about and it was all live, hot stuff for the time.
The SSTV community was pretty small at the time, no more than a dozen leaders in the U.S. One of them was a fellow by the name of Don Miller from Indiana. Even after all these years I remember the name because there was earlier a rather infamous ham by the name of Don Miller who was an MD, who quit to travel the world putting rare nations on the air.
https://www.amateurradio.com/the-don-miller-enigma/
Shocked to learn a half century later that I was speaking with the greatest archeological thief of all time. Guess both Don Miller's from Indiana were scoundrels.
According to your article, that Don Miller got sentenced to prison for 25 years to life for trying to murder his estranged wife.
I'm not so sure its the same person, but maybe the article is wrong?
The post says it's not the same person, talks about two Don Millers.
The first Don Miller from Indiana is the sole reason I remembered the name of the second Don Miller after fifty years.
Ah okay.
Now if only the vanity fair article linked in this thread didn't mention this, which got me confused:
"Miller got his ham radio license in 1943, founded his own electronics company called Wyman Research, and helped develop slow-scan TV, a technology that transmits still images across high-frequency radio bands. In 1972, he was honored as Amateur of the Year by a ham radio convention and later helped get SSTV aboard the Mir space station, building the system that beamed back images of earth in December 1998."
It's just so strange that there's _two_ Don Millers (both whom live in Indiana) involved in the relatively small amateur ham radio scene, one developed SSTV tech, the other traveled the world and tried to kill his wife.
Something like 90% of amateur radio operators born before 1980 are named Bud. Itās not exactly a diverse crowd.
I know this isn't the same guy and I don't know much about antenna's but it is pretty clear from one of the photos on this page that his house has a couple massive ones... scroll down to the 17 photos section.
https://www.indystar.com/story/entertainment/arts/2019/02/27...
Slow scan TV is an analog method for sending still images, not video. The fastest method allows sending a 160x120 greyscale image in about 8 seconds using ~3 kHz bandwidth.
>>_Shocked to learn a half century later that I was speaking with the greatest archeological thief of all time._
Worse. Desecrating hundreds of graves to take remains is the one thing that cannot be explained or forgiven.
I see Roman coins or Roman era stuff for sale on some FB groups. Frankly, buying them, even if illegal (some countries have laws making anything historical found state property), is not the end of the world provided you don't destroy them.
Once someone is dead, they are dead. The body is just a vessel carrying around the person, I don't think it /is/ the person. I don't think there is much difference between preserving some bones behind a glass case, and some Roman coins.
I understand why some people do, but it's just some bones - something that is not rare or particularly special in the grand scheme of things. Obviously there is a lot of spirituality and religion attached to remains, but that shouldn't have any bearing on practical matters.
You're perfectly entitled to think that. You're not entitled to dig up my parents because of those beliefs, and if you do, you will rightly be locked up!
The "rightly" in your statement is simply a function of who has political power. For example, I doubt many people who dug up Native Americans' parents got locked up. Also, once your parents' grandchildren or maybe great grandchildren pass away, there is little chance anyone will care about digging them up, especially if the land is in demand.
The fact that some people did not get punished does not imply that what happened wasn't wrong.
You're also mistaken that people don't care. In fact archeologists think carefully about the dignity of human remains:
https://historicengland.org.uk/advice/technical-advice/archa...
https://apabe.archaeologyuk.org/pdf/APABE_ToHREfCBG_FINAL_WE...
I think generally you're right. OP has a point, but at the end of the day, as social beings we all play a collaboration game. This involves sometimes doing things or forgoing doing things that we have no interest in because others have an interest they want respected. In exchange, we expect respect for our interests, even when others don't share that interest.
If OP doesn't care about human remains, there's nothing wrong about that. However, others do care about how remains are treated. in exchange for care about whatever OP does hold sacred or in honor, OP ought to show care about human remains, despite being disinterested.
The first link you posted 404d for me, but I read the second PDF to largely agrees with me and OP actually that it is the interests of the currently living people we actually care about. To be clear, I'm one of them.
And I wouldnāt dig up any remains that somebody had a connection to - I totally get that.
Socially it is not the done thing, but society changes, and I wonder if in 50/100 years we value the land more than desecration?
Human remains and how they are treated is always going to be a divided subject
I see your point. People are emotional, have taboos of all kinds and are funny about life and family. Itās not about logic.
Is there a limit to how many years after one dies that oneās remains or grave can be disturbed?
The concept of having ownership of a piece of the universe even after death is puzzling to me.
What is a last will and testament if not that? You dying doesn't give anyone else the right to just claim ownership of your house the second you die. Also, most burial plots include essentially a lease for maintenance. It is probably the cemetery owner who would press charges for theft. There are probably also specific laws on the books that make this illegal.
IIRC, this is basically a U.S-only phenomenon. In Europe and most other places of the world, there is the understanding that a grave will not last forever.
In most parts of Europe, the grave is actually "guaranteed" to still be yours for quite a short time (~40-50 years) before the lease is up. If you want to keep it, the family has to pay to keep it.
Aren't certain crypts preserved for centuries, though?
> I see Roman coins or Roman era stuff for sale on some FB groups. Frankly, buying them, even if illegal (some countries have laws making anything historical found state property), is not the end of the world provided you don't destroy them.
The problem is that buying these artifacts incentivizes bringing more of them to market. The result is looting of archeological sites. Diggers get their marketable trophies to sell at the cost of destroying the knowledge future archeologists could obtain from the site because it has been jumbled. Recovering looted antiquities is a small consolation as the value of such objects to archeology is severely diminished when they are divorced from their archeological context.
The only ethical thing to do in our current situation, if you value archeology as a method to understanding the past, is not to engage in the antiquities trade and encourage others to do the same.
Google "don miller artifacts" and you can see pictures and other accounts. It's really extraordinary what this guy had. I can't believe this wasn't bigger news.
Here's a Roman mosaic of his:
https://www.fbi.gov/image-repository/indianapolis-artifacts-...
Yeah. If he'd have been younger he'd have been prosecuted for doing what he did... sympathies of his neighbors notwithstanding, this guy probably destroyed more information about native culture than any other person since Cortez.
Plenty of people nowadays get their vehicles seized and jail time for getting caught digging one hole somewhere they shouldn't... this guy wholesale looted graves for decades and people thought he was just a nice old guy.
And 50 years ago he probably would have been given awards and accolades.
This story reads like a plot for about 12 movies. Amazing this wasn't a bigger story here in Indiana where a world record steer is front page news. I will say this: it is amazing the things people have in barns and sheds in the middle of nowhere, Indiana.
>Amazing this wasn't a bigger story here in Indiana
Because they know their customers. "Elderly amateur archeologist has collection seized by FBI for doing basically what professional state sanctioned archeologists do but without state permissions" would go over like a lead balloon pretty much anywhere that isn't fairly affluent and left leaning. The details here don't paint a charitable picture of the FBI unless you go into this with a lot of priors that the FBI are the good guys (and generally speaking being "not poor" and "not right" are prerequisites to those priors). This isn't a cache of antique machine guns so you don't get the benefit of having ~half the people who care biased against the guy from the get go.
There's zero chance Miller's heirs want and have the capability to do anything do to with several shipping containers worth of archeological junk that need to be cared for lest it go bad. The only thing the FBI did here was accelerate the process of combing through the collection, repatriating remains as applicable and cold calling museums and asking if they want junk as applicable by making it happen during his life rather than immediately after. Regardless of who his heirs were they almost certainly would have gotten in contact with someone who knew their archeology and had them see the collection, the bones and native stuff paired together would have raised flags, they'd have called authorities and we'd be right in the same place.
So what good came out of any of this?
That said, I think as far as the feds go they acted pretty reasonably here, way less needless destruction than I'm used to expecting from them.
_> So what good came out of any of this _
As far fetched as it may be -- I'm not sure who would do this in the first place -- this will help to dissuade any future persons from trying to do the same thing. It's not always about the current crime, but preventing the next one.
But, here, it seems like this was never about prosecuting Miller.
_> There seemed to be little will at the Department of Justice to prosecute Miller, who was 91, for what was tantamount to property crimes _
The main focus of the FBI was to get the items and remains back to where they belonged. They just wanted right the wrong.
Finally, the article does cover exactly what you mentioned -- that more of these "collections" will likely be discovered over the coming years as the next generation inherits them and wants to have nothing to do with them.
_> He expects to hear about more problematic private collections over the years as theyāre handed down to younger generations more troubled by them_
So they took a 91 year old man's life work away from him. A collection that otherwise would most likely have never been recovered at all, and would've just been paved over.
You're mistaken that it being "recovered" now means it was preserved. Much of the information that could have been gained from leaving the items where they were found was lost as soon as this guy dug stuff out with a shovel and took it with him.
Most of the information archaeologists gain isn't from finding objects and studying them, it's from mapping where they are in relation to other objects, studying residues on them, studying the environments in which they were found, and even sometimes what orientation they were buried in.
This guy destroyed a huge amount of information about these items for the sake of "collecting" and helped no one but himself. He wasn't a sympathetic old man, he was a criminal that was never prosecuted.
I own a stone tool with representational carvings that would have been incredibly valuable to scientists had my great-grandfather not uncovered it by sluicing down a mountainside looking for artifacts. It's the only known example of a minor art style in a specific location, and it's completely worthless because some dude pulled it out of the ground and put it in a box.
He desecrated graves and stole skulls from remains ā including from fresh burials (itās in the article). He also manually put arrowheads into some of these skulls to make it look like that was their cause of death.
And the items that would have been of archeological or anthropological significance werenāt documented or handled in such a way to as to make them useful from a historical point of view.
Letās not glorify this.
Nothing in the article mentions anything about fresh burials.
_> Videos and photos taken by Miller and Sue show the two of them digging in the Dakotas, Mexico, South America, and elsewhere, often in remote areas. In one video, Millerāwith an ear-to-ear smileāis shoving a skull into a brown bag as other bones sit nearby. In South Dakota, Miller is lying in a recently dug grave. A photo from Mexico shows a childās casket._
Iām not really going to quibble with whether or not there was a body in the recently dug grave or not. I donāt think the distinction matters. And child sized caskets arenāt exactly found in āancient burial groundsā.
A bit further down in the articleā¦
_> And in one of the most disturbing shots, a Native American skull cut in half is filled with yellow apples. Until now, the FBI has never shared any of these images. āI want to dispel the notion that Don was a responsible collector,ā Carpenter says. āHe was not. He was a grave robber.ā_
where does it mention fresh burials? I just rechecked the article and still missed it.
> Because they know their customers. "Elderly amateur archeologist has collection seized by FBI for doing basically what professional state sanctioned archeologists do but without state permissions" would go over like a lead balloon pretty much anywhere that isn't fairly affluent and left leaning.
This story is so weird and so strange that it would have got quite a bit of attention here. Even though Indiana is a red state, there would be plenty of people that would read about an old guy that could be your neighbor that has an authentic terracotta warrior statue in his living room. So much more interesting than, say busting a ring of paddlefish poachers (which was actually front page news), or our legislature outlawing sex with chickens (actually happened).
> "Elderly amateur archeologist has collection seized by FBI for doing basically what professional state sanctioned archeologists do but without state permissions"
If you think what he did is what professional archaeologists do, you have no idea what they do.
> Because they know their customers.
As a former Hoosier you wildly underestimate the appeal of neighborly gossip to this group of 'customers'. Midwesterners TALK.
More likely, no one quite understood the story or its magnitude.
The article talks about 'cabinet curios' collected in the 1800's by amateurs. I remember the drug store downtown Iowa City, had a cabinet with 'indian bones' displayed among other things. The old guy was long gone but his collection remained on display.
Later I discovered a 'History of Johnson County' local vanity-press book published in 1882 that described the collecting! There were 50 to 100 'indian mounds' in the county, and one person's interview in the book told of digging them up. They'd find a burial in each one, curled up with arms around knees and facing West if I remember right. Anyway one of the skeletons was a particularly robust individual. That was the skull and jaw on display in the drug store! The guy claimed it came from some proto-man because of the enormous jaw. But who knows.
The drug store is long gone, the collection scattered to the four winds or discarded. The mounds long ago plowed over and no trace remaining (I've looked).
Did anyone else keep on hearing Indiana Jones saying "THAT BELONGS IN A MUSEUM" when considering the kinda ironic title of this article?
It seems beyond charitable to call him an Indiana Jones type to be honest, it glamorizes and romanticizes a man who spent his life bribing officials and robbing graves for his personal satisfaction.
It's even more ironic when you consider how limited the government's means of putting all the stuff the museums and tribes don't want into anything but a dumpster are.
You or I can post a free add on an amateur archeology FB group looking for takers to keep stuff out of the dumpster. The government doesn't roll that way, especially when it comes to property that was evidence in a high profile case.
Of course the nice stuff will find homes in museums but nobody has a collection that's all nice stuff. The pristine pot will wind up in a museum. The pottery shards that no museum can justify the space for but some small time private collector would want will probably mostly be trashed. If we're lucky some intern will be tasked with taking a ton of ultra hd photos on the way to the dumpster so they're not completely lost forever.
The government simply doesn't have good mechanisms for getting rid of stuff like this (whereas private individuals will happily send a flat rate box to whoever paypals them $25 if it means sending part of grandpa's collection to a good home). Seeing as this is a high profile collection they may expend the effort but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it to show up on govplanet.
He had a museum. It's kind of a personal dream of mine as well. I wouldn't actually do that but I certainly dreamed of it as a child and it still occupies a place in my mind. Despite the moral and legal ramifications of this man's museum it is a pretty damned awesome thing he had. A lot of his thinking was probably rooted in mores of days gone by.
Bruh there was a raccoon in a bag full of human bones, does that sound like an archival quality childish dream to to you?
Some people go thru life wandering aimlessly. Some others find their calling.
Even fewer turn out to be a Don Miller.
Unfortunately for society as a whole - he skipped a few steps in the process (apprenticeship in archeology)
Miller got his ham radio license in 1943, founded his own electronics company called Wyman Research, and helped develop slow-scan TV, a technology that transmits still images across high-frequency radio bands.
Don't they mean VHF, and UHF? I haven't yet worked HF, but is SSTV used on HF?
Also, wow, this guy helped create SSTV.
Yes, SSTV is mostly used on HF, with a little bit of use on VHF/UHF (mostly from e.g. satellites and the ISS as a curiosity/postcards, though there are some local SSTV nets). On 20m, all kinds of random pictures go by: pictures of ham shacks, scantily clad women, fast cars.
http://www.wb9kmw.com/WB9KMW/live_SSTV.html
Fast scan TV (aka normal analog TV, DVB, etc) is used on UHF and up.
SSTV is mostly used in HF these days. Mostly to send bikini pictures. I enjoy replying with cat pictures to the old dirty hams. :)
Hence the 'slow', it's more like a fax than a TV really.
Yes, SSTV is _so_ slow that the bandwidth requirements satisfy the regs for transmission on HF.
> bandwidth requirements satisfy the regs
Please note that only the USA (afaik) imposes an arbitrary and restrictive 300 bd limit on HF digital modes.
Here, amateurs are free to experiment with as much bandwidth and as high a baud rate as the physics will allow, provided we keep within legally allocated spectrum.
AKA you can transmit wide signals and take up the whole band :P
The 300bps limit doesn't make sense anymore, but an occupied bandwidth limit sure does...
Where's "here"?
Sounds like the Woodpecker site at Chernobyl. Hey, that was "legally allocated spectrum" too, right?
To be fair, occupied bandwidth limits that were designed for 1920s-era modes don't make much sense with modern spread-spectrum technology. I don't care if an interferer takes up the whole HF spectrum, as long as their chip rate is too fast to make it through my < 3 kHz IF. Those ancient regulations have done a lot to keep Amateur Radio in the dark ages, as well as radio communications in general.
Here's a local article with some photos:
https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2021/10/how-the-fbi-discove...
I don't know why but I really despise this article.
It isn't journalism. You don't have cartoon recreations of the story in journalism. This is somebody's lit journal piece covered in cartoons masquerading as journalism to grab some ad revenue by using the name Indiana Jones in the title for vanity fair.
That probably seems like too much but something about this really rubs me the wrong way.
Strange I had the exact opposite reaction. This is the kind of journalism I wish there was more of, taking a dry chronological set of events and weaving it as best as possible into a riveting story that best evokes some of the excitement and feelings of those who participated in the effort. I also thought the artistic depictions were kinda cool, but really I didn't spend much time on them compared to the excellent story.
I don't particular like the illustration style, which doesn't feel appropriate. But that doesn't make it 'not journalism'. It makes it 'not the art editor's finest hour'
I stopped reading and decided to google Don Miller.
https://www.sapiens.org/culture/fbi-repatriation/
This had a few photos and I found it quite interesting. Would love to find a photo dump of what he had!
Here are some better articles
https://www.indystar.com/story/entertainment/arts/2019/02/27...
https://culturalpropertynews.org/plundered-artifacts-from-ag...
The FBI seized his collection despite not being able to validate his authenticity of ownership. They couldn't actually prove he illegally obtained those items, in part because he collected these objects over the course of decades of his life (when and where laws he'd broken didn't even exist yet, and probably still don't), and because he also willingly gave up his collection.
The Vanity Fair article said how FBI only seized human remains and those artifacts that were obviously illegally obtained. Miller got to keep majority of his collection and wasn't even prosecuted. No word in the article what happened to rest of the collection after his death.
> The Vanity Fair article said how FBI only seized human remains and those artifacts that were obviously illegally obtained. Miller got to keep majority of his collection and wasn't even prosecuted. No word in the article what happened to rest of the collection after his death.
The VF article does not say "obviously illegally obtained" but that the FBI confiscated without a search warrant and against legal advice took more than just items they knew were illegally obtained.
From the article: Some of the agencyās attorneys argued that Carpenter would need to establish probable cause on every single item, even though there were countless artifacts for which Carpenter hadnāt obtained evidence or even seen. Miller, for example, told Carpenter about an Anasazi pot Carpenter believed was illegal. But Miller had hundreds of Anasazi pots, and Carpenter didnāt have specific information on those, only the one. Establishing probable cause on each would be unreasonable and essentially impossible. Instead, Carpenter argued that Millerās collection was ācommingled,ā meaning the FBI could seize a whole set of pots based on evidence of one. After back and forth with the Department of Justice, Carpenter won out.
It also says they siezed a stack of his passports.
I meant this part:
> The agents believed theyād seized the majority of the obviously illicit items. So they dismantled their village, took down their tents, and packed up.
They even took the items with Miller's consent. You seem to be saying FBI took too much, which is a bit baffling to me. Seems to me the whole collection should've been seized, but I guess it wasn't worth the effort as nobody was interested in prosecuting and even museums didn't want the stolen hoard.
Passports and photos were taken as evidence of the crimes, right?
Apparently he also committed extensive tax fraud with claiming his trips as travel expenses, but those crimes were surely expired already.
ā¦ donāt read it then? Why do you need to tell the world reading that the article made you sad because it had cartoons in it?
Wow he survived an atomic bomb? Or just a regular thief?
I donāt think we should idolize these people
Just a thief and a conman. The article explains that he was not involved in any actual atomic bomb tests, but rather helped develop a minor piece of equipment. He lied and exaggerated his involvement to sound larger-than-life.
What a read!
The agents analyzed skulls pierced with arrowheads and determined that Miller hammered in those arrowheads himself.
At first I was fascinated, then I was horrified!
What's up with the WikiHow style illustrations?
The first picture at the top struck me as reminiscent of the the 1989 Indiana Jones: Last Crusade computer game:
https://images.gog-statics.com/05869835e8442e054b58246339b07...
Short video on youtube about this: FBI Seeking Owners in Cultural Artifacts Case
Only 7000 items were seized from the collection of 42,000. I wonder what will happen with the remaining items.
It belongs in a museum
> I wonder what will happen with the remaining items.
They will give away what they can to museums who will take what they can (museums are space limited). Most of it will probably go in a dumpster.
Frankly they will probably do a much worse job than whoever miller's heirs would. Private individuals tend tend fall back to give that sort of stuff away to other private collectors when they can't give it to museums. Government agencies don't expend nearly as much kind of effort on that kind of thing nor do they have a workflow for posting free shit ads on enthusiast forums, FB marketplace and CL. They do however, have people who's normal duties involves throwing things in the dumpster, so that's what will happen to it in all likelihood. The stuff that's in cases and ready to display will probably all fine homes but whatever stuff was low value enough that Miller wasn't already displaying it will probably mostly be thrown away.
Imagine Miller dug out your parents, along with some other bones, glued them together es he saw fit, hammered arrows into the skull of your mom, and then baked the result in the oven to make them look like on TV. That guy wasn't some honorable private archeologist looking for roman coins or something. According to the article, those bodies were sometimes only a few decades old. He just dumped most of the remains into plastic bags and let them rot for decades, simply for his private amusement.
> ...and let them rot for decades, simply for his private amusement.
Maybe I am too straight-laced - but might 's/private amusement/major mental illness/' be appropriate? It does not sound like he is suspected of killing anyone, but...
Whose parents did Miller dug ? The article doesn't mention it
As opposed to them rotting naturally?
Top. Men.
What a tragic waste of a mans life work.
What life work?? The guy robbed graves and disfigured people's remains.
"The skeleton Miller said was Crazy Horse was actually several people. Miller had taken pieces from other skulls, a different mandible, someone elseās teeth and bones, and glued it all together, Frankenstein-like."
"The agents analyzed skulls pierced with arrowheads and determined that Miller hammered in those arrowheads himself."
"A video clip shows Miller and others at a burial cave on Easter Island, one of the worldās most famous archaeological sites, bringing out skulls and other remains, grinning while tossing the skulls into a bag. And in one of the most disturbing shots, a Native American skull cut in half is filled with yellow apples."
40k items. Imagine trying to amass a collection of 40k pieces of ordinary silverware; I'll bet most people couldn't, or would require a lifetime to accomplish it.
This man could fill museums with genuine artifacts. "Life work" seems perfectly appropriate.
While I can't condone collecting the human remains, and fail to see the allure personally, there is no denying what he had accomplished was exceptional.
The article is obviously heavily biased and sensationalistic, written to prioritize ad revenue and social media sharing, so I'm reserving judgement on a man I've never met; especially judging his 90+ years through the lens of 2020's social norms.
That's 40k pieces of archaeological information destroyed. It's more of an antiwork; he's single-handedly prevented several careers in archaeology.
(The recording of context, and preservation of finds is often more important than the finds themselves)
The recording of context doesn't matter that much when viewed through the modern lens, honestly. Too much interference from modern experience.
>he's single-handedly prevented several careers in archaeology.
Only by the same reasoning that a hydraulic grabber arm prevents a career in household refuse removal.
This dude _had_ a career in archeology. Granted he did some dumb stuff, particularly regarding handling skeletons, but I have a hard time believing those practices weren't more prevalent in professional archeology back when he picked them up (being super anal about leaving things undisturbed is a fairly recent trend). He did the traveling and digging part that's hardest to get funding for for on his own time. If anything the stuff the FBI dumped into museum collections has enabled more careers in archeology. Nobody will fund gallivanting around the globe looking for artifacts. But if you have an existing artifact it's much easier to convince people to pay for a trip to go look for more stuff like it, investigate the site further, etc, etc. It's a positive feedback loop.
The only way the outcome could have been better would be if the FBI didn't get involved until after he died. That way the bones still could have gotten back to the tribes that wanted them but more of the low value stuff that isn't novel or special enough to be worth museum space or repatriation would have been kept out of the dumpster. The government doesn't have the processes and isn't well practiced at the ways you get rid of many small lots of niche stuff that's not novel enough for museums so that's likely where a large chunk of the collection will end up.
I'm going to have you spend maybe more than a few seconds imagining how you would feel if those were your ancestors within a few generations and then reconsider your equivocation of human remains with grandma's spoons.
I took your few seconds, and still have 0 frecks to give.
I would be way more concerned about lost time that somebody took from me trying to make it important.
How many generations ? I don't know for the US but in Europe many museums and churches expose human remains
My ancestors were subsistence farmers somewhere in eastern Europe. I don't know anything about them beyond that.
Having great great great grandpa Vlad's skull in some rich man's private collection isn't quite as cool as being able to say you're descended from some skull that's in some fancy university museum but it's a step in that direction. In both cases I'd know a lot more about my ancestors than I do now.
That's ridiculous, a prolific thief is still just a thief.
His crime is that he stole from the dead ?
So much passion for such trivia...
I think there is a bit of a difference between taking artifacts and digging up corpses and taking parts of them.
What difference after so many years?
What is this, supernatural episode? Should we stop burning fossil fuel because technically, you are burning dead animals and maybe even some people of ancient civilization ?
Whats the limit on how long until we can dig people up? Is it ok if someone digs up a corpse a week after the funeral? a year? a decade? Who gets to decide and if a culture believes that remains must be left untouched forever, who gets to decide that that cultures beliefs are irrelevant and overrule them if that culture is still around?
It can reasonably be assumed that corpses on dedicated locations like cemetery should be protected while there are direct live connections (kids, partners). Lets say 100 years at most although it is probably overkill.
However, even today if you don't pay a parcel rent, cemetery can dig the corpse up and ditch it. Entire first generation of cryogenic people were lost due to this problem (grandkid didn't want to pay for grandpa for eternity in cryogenic coffin). So with all this in mind, it makes sense that after your are legally dead and lets say 1 year passed (to allow for the "return from the dead" cases we know happen), you should be considered dead nature. After that time, it becomes a matter of your relationship with the cemetery or other company and contract you have with them. If their "SLA" is that they will "own" it for you, then digging it up can be considered legally as a theft.
If you have culture that wants to keep dead forever, then that culture will find ways to manage it the official way I guess along with the laws on theft, and wont leave it to the little dwarfs to manage. You must keep in mind tho that each day number of dead people is rising and number of alive stays close to the same. Any civilization wanting to keep dead forever will have a lot of problems with this idea, unless it can find a way to teleport them to different dead dimension unrelated to us. Such advanced civilization will sure have much better way to preserve uniqness of each individual.
If your culture is that your corpse must remain untouched, and you drop dead in the middle of a mall, no one is going to leave the corpse there.
Incredible people have to be reminded of this still.
What is incredible is that people confuse dead nature with the living one.
Besides, five minutes ago you didn't even know there is something deep in the ground and now you construct all kind of weird GenZ shenanigan around digging it up...
Obligatory, I guess:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUBtKNzoKZ4
>At one point, Carpenter was looking at a case of stone axes with an archaeologist who specialized in Celtic cultures. āHe said, āIāve spent my entire career looking for just one of these in this condition,ā ā Carpenter said. ā āAnd he has 50.ā ā
Am I the only one that questioned how hard he was actually looking? Or is the assumption that there were only 50 in the whole world and Miller managed to snatch all of them
I can only imagine how much better the outcome would've been if he used his locating skills to flag archeological sites without taking anything out of the ground. Now his legacy is a grave robber with an illicit, useless hoard of antiquities that have no documentation to place them in context. A complete waste of a life indeed.
He didnt get permission to dig anywhere or take anything he found. That is the hard part, not finding where to dig.
