Association of Professional Geneaologists, Member Number: 0015330
Human Skeletal Biology, Ethics, Archival History, and Public Health
Network:
E.
OSTEOLOGY COLLECTIONS MANAGEMENT
2022-present
If you can’t understand the bones as people who are missed and loved, with a mother and father standing by the edge of the grave waiting, you can’t do this work. If you can’t understand the bones as evidence to be analyzed and examined, you can’t do this work. You must touch bones and be touched by them. You must be able to drink your tea with the dead.
- Alexa Hagerty, Still Life with Bones
How do we treat human remains with both scientific care and basic decency? Museums haven’t always had the best answer. Sometimes, the way we preserve things ends up damaging them, or the dignity of the person they once were.
I currently advise on how human remains should be stored, documented, and handled - not just as specimens, but as individuals. That often means asking uncomfortable questions. It sometimes means saying, “we shouldn’t display this at all.”
In 2022, I developed a new method for articulating medical specimens: a way to stabilize skeletons for display without drilling into them or running wires through fragile joints, which has been the industry standard for longer than I’ve been alive. It was small, technical work, but to me it felt like a quiet course correction, a shift toward preservation that didn’t require harm.