The Stewardship of Human Remains
Our last Webinar for 2023-24 — “Hard History Methods: Studying Human Remains at Hopkins and Beyond” with journalist and PhD student Jessica Leigh Hester and assistant professor of anthropology and Africana studies Dr. Aja Lans — is set for Monday, April 22, 2024 at 12 noon eastern time. Join us live. Registration is quick and free, here.
An end of 2023 story — “Maryland Seeks to Return African American Remains Stored in State Lab” — sent a current through Hard Historie. Governor Wes Moore announced an initiative dedicated to identifying human remains in the state’s possession and then returning them to “lineal descendants or to an appropriately culturally affiliated group.”1 The project’s first undertaking will be the remains of 15 African American individuals long-held by the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory.
At Hard Histories, lab members were also grappling with the history, legacy, and fates of human remains. Dr. Kelsey Moore, a recent Johns Hopkins history PhD, approaches these questions in her work on how Black burial grounds were flooded by the South Carolina Public Service Authority’s Santee-Cooper Project between 1938 and 1942. Hard Histories director Martha Jones had spoken about what it meant to find her family history — clippings of her grandmother’s hair — held at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology.
We asked what it would mean to turn these questions inward, to direct them at Johns Hopkins. On Monday, April 22, the Hard Histories Webinar will feature Jessica Leigh Hester, a science journalist, historian, and PhD student at Johns Hopkins, and Dr. Aja Lans, assistant Professor of Anthropology and Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins, both experts on the history, politics, and ethics of stewarding human remains. They will share innovative methods and ethical approaches to bioarchaeological investigations, particularly in universities and museums. What challenges arise when institutions house and study human remains? How can Black feminist theory shed novel light on – and provide solutions to – these questions?
Please join us on Monday, April 22. And remember that you can always catch up with Hard History Webinars at our YouTube playlist. Recently posted are “Hard Histories Live from Berlin” with Dr. Ariela Gross (UCLA Law) and Dr. Leslie Harris (Northwestern) and “Slavery and the Rise of Catholic Universities,” with Professor Rachel Swarns (NYU) and Dr. David Carey (Loyola Maryland).
It’s almost spring in Berlin and as our world grows increasingly troubled we hope you are finding some balm in the change of season. — MSJ
Joe Heim, “Maryland Seeks to Return African American Remains Stored in State Lab,” Washington Post, December 24, 2023.