History Professor Shawn Graham and Adjunct Research Professor Damien Huffer have co-authored a new book, These Were People Once: The Online Trade in Human Remains, and Why It Matters (Berghahn Books, 2023), which was just reviewed by Erin L. Thompson for Hyperallergic. A short excerpt can be found below with the full article, “Why Is It So Easy to Buy a Human Skull Online? Damien Huffer and Shawn Graham’s These Were People Once mines the illicit online sale of human remains and the social media algorithms that enable it” available online.
Human life might be fragile, but our bodies are surprisingly durable. Thus, many cultures have preserved and displayed human remains; think of Ancient Egyptian or Andean mummified bodies, Tibetan ritual implements made from skulls or thighbones, and the many bits of Catholic saints enshrined in reliquaries. This wide variety of practices is evidence that we humans have likely always been intrigued or shocked by how other communities treat their dead.
The longevity of bodies and our fascination with their treatment means that human remains have often been sold in the times and places when cultures rub up against each other. For example, Torres Strait islander communities collected the skulls of enemies and sometimes sold parts of these trophies to men from Papua New Guinea in the 19th and 20th centuries. One of these sellers rather disdainfully reported to an anthropologist in 1935 that the purchasers then “made big talk,” claiming it was they who had been the killers.
Historians have increasingly investigated the explosive growth of the commerce in exoticized human remains during the colonial era. But what happened when the internet, with its unprecedented acceleration of cultural exchange and global commerce, enters the equation? Damien Huffer and Shawn Graham have summarized their years-long research into this question in their new book, These Were People Once: The Online Trade in Human Remains, and Why It Matters (Berghahn Books, 2023).
Huffer, a forensic anthropologist and criminologist, and Graham, an archaeologist and historian, have spent years monitoring online sales of human remains. To do so, they developed ethical protocols and digital toolkits available in the book’s appendices for collecting and analyzing information from a shifting array of e-commerce sites and social media platforms. The resulting book is their attempt to answer three key questions about the online trade in human remains: “how the trade works, why people do it, and where the people bought and sold might have come from.”