Haunted by My Teaching Skeleton ...

[DGUtley]

Haunted by My Teaching Skeleton

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Many skeletons that students use to learn about the human body are the remains of people with lives and stories. We need to remember and respect that.

There is something unsettling about being alone in a room putting away human skeletal remains. As a teaching assistant for an Introduction to Biological Anthropology and Archaeology class at Iowa State University from 2006–2007, I had become accustomed to working with human skeletal material. Nonetheless, when alone with the remains back in the 2000s, I felt anxious.

Could these people be at rest when their remains are housed in boxes in a teaching laboratory and taken out for labs and demonstrations, only to go back to a box on the shelf? Was that laboratory haunted?

I learned from my professor that Number One was known to be female, of South Asian origins (like me), and possibly Pakistani. Other students remarked that she was tiny, but I realized that most of her bones were the same size as mine. Her clavicle was the size of my clavicle; we matched. Her cranial bones were zippered together with a wide dark line, which meant she was a young woman: old enough to have finished growing but too young for the bones to knit together and the lines to soften. Perhaps she had been in her late teens or early 20s. I was 25 at the time.

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https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/...tm_source=digg