‘Tis the season for boxes of body parts

Earlier this month, a person or persons unknown left a glass display case containing human remains in front of the Rhineland-Palatinate General Directorate for Cultural Heritage (GDKE) archaeological showcase in Speyer, Germany. The remains inside the case include skull parts, a mummified leg and textile fragments.

Staff called the police who confiscated the case. At first they thought it was a Halloween prank, but forensic pathologists examined the remains and determined they are at least 1,000 years old. After the police released a public request for information on October 23rd, the person who dropped the human remains and ran contacted the authorities the next day. He explained that the case had belonged to his now-deceased mother. She claimed that she found the remains decades ago in South America and brough them back to Germany. When the family was cleaning out her stuff, they decided it would be wrong to just trash this awkward assemblage, so they put it in front of the GDKE’s archaeological exhibit.

It makes an odd kind of sense, I suppose, and they clearly were hoping the GDKE archaeologists would give their random body parts a new home without running the risk of rejection, hence the secret deposit. As it happens, the GDKE does not in fact accept body parts of unknown origin for examination or storage. They only handle the ones they find in excavations.

Dropping mummified remains and running does not appear to be a crime, neither is owning them. If they had tried to sell them, that would definitely be a criminal offense, but obviously that did not occur here. Before the responsible parties came forward, police were pursuing the possibility that the case had been stolen from a museum or private collection, but found no evidence of any such items missing from anywhere. They have now investigated the explanation they’ve been given of the origins of the remains and it is credible. The police still intend to forward the report to the public prosecutor’s office for review, although no charges are expected to be filed.

Coincidentally, the Rhineland-Palatinate state parliament just passed a new law allowing people to choose their preferred form of burial. Previously, there was a legal requirement that (with exemptions for religious reasons) all deceased be inhumed in coffins or cremated and their ashes placed in urns for burial in cemeteries. The new law gives people the option of bringing ashes home, processing a portion of them into memorial pieces like gemstones or ceramics, scattering ashes outside of a cemetery or in designated locations on the state’s four major rivers (the Rhine, Moselle, Lahn and Saar). Bodies can also be shrouded and buried without a coffin.

* This article was originally published here