Human Subjects Review and Digital Archaeology

On Wednesday I’m spending part of the class time giving a lecture on media licensing (heavy on the Creative Commons) and Human Subjects Review/IRB/ethics issues within digital media and archaeology. While the former has been a regular feature of the class, the latter will be a new feature. The University of California, Berkeley is a tier one research institution and integrating methodological procedures into lectures is an important aspect of our teaching mission. While archaeology generally avoids many of the issues raised by Human Subjects Boards (one of the few times it’s actually helpful to have dead informants), our projects do effect living humans and digital documentation of archaeological research sometimes features descendant communities or stakeholders who are potentially at risk.

The history of Human Subjects Review stems from revelations during the Nuremburg Trials of the medical experimentation performed by Nazi doctors during World War II. This biomedical research code was expanded several times during the 1960s, finally leading to firmer legislation in the 1970s, this time fueled not by war crimes in foreign lands, but our own government’s 30-year Tuskegee Syphilis Study, during which rural black men diagnosed with syphilis went untreated even after effective treatments became available.  The Belmont Report, created in 1979, outlined these three general principles for biomedical and behavioral research:

Beneficence: To maximize benefits for science, humanity, and research participants and to avoid or minimize risk or harm.

Respect: To protect the autonomy and privacy rights of participants

Justice: To ensure the fair distribution among persons and groups of the costs and benefits of research.

So what implications does this have for archaeological research?  Jeffrey Bendremer and Kenneth Richman discuss their research with Native American communities and note that while archaeology “does not satisfy the Common Rule definition of human subject” (Human subject means a living individual about whom an investigator conducting research obtains either data or identifiable private information), applying the codes employed by the Human Subjects Review or forming other independent research advisory counsels would be beneficial to ethical archaeological research. While I am not convinced that such counsels are necessary, archaeology has taken on an increasingly ethnographic bent, and for those of us who are interested in digital documentation, representation, and public outreach, an explicit ethics statement can be very useful in conducting our research.

For example, at Catalhoyuk in 2008 I shot a very short film about one of the kitchen staff (whom we rarely see outside of the context of the dig house) coming up to the tell to see one of the major finds of that season, a bench with intact bull buchrania in a burned building. Then she jumped in the trench that I was working in and started digging with us. I grabbed my video camera and captured some footage, which I later turned into a short film that we showed on community day. She was very happy with the film and I made her a DVD that she could show at home. This was a perfect example for my dissertation of digital documentation being performed in the trench, by excavators, and I asked her permission to put it online so that I could show it to larger audiences. She said no. Her reason? She didn’t want her husband to see her acting in a way that he might feel as inappropriate.

As Bendremer and Richman cite in their paper, the AAA professional code of conduct states: “Anthropological researchers must do everything in their power to ensure that their research does not harm the safety, dignity, or privacy of the people with whom they work, conduct research, or perform other professional activities.” The World Archaeological Congress is more specific in their application of ethics to the visual medium, stating in the Tamaki Makau-rau Accord that the display of human remains and sacred objects is “recognized as a sensitive issue” and that “display means the presentation in any media or form of human remains and sacred objects, whether on a single occasion or on an ongoing basis, including conference presentations or publications.”

So how do we surmount these ethical concerns and get on with our research? Helpfully, the Tamaki Makau-rau expands:

1)    Permission should be obtained from the affected community or communities.

2)    Should permission be refused that decision is final and should be respected.

3)    Should permission be granted, any conditions to which that permission is subject should be complied with in full.

4)    All display should be culturally appropriate.

5)    Permission can be withdrawn or amended at any stage and such decisions should be respected.

6)    Regular consultation with the affected community should ensure that the display remains culturally appropriate.

The upswing to all of this is that the long arm of Human Subjects Review is getting longer, and if we are actually interested in incorporating live people into our research, we should take these points into consideration. I’ve made a boiler-plate media permissions release for use on site, and we are in the process of getting it translated into Arabic for the coming field season.

Here is the boilerplate_media_release, I would appreciate feedback, if you have some to offer!

Old Bones, Digital Narratives: Re-investigating the Cornwall Collection in the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum

I just realized that while I had posted about this over at the Dilmun (was Bahrain) Bioarchaeology project blog, I hadn’t linked it to my main blog. I wrote this for the UMAC (University Museums and Collections) conference that is being held here at UC Berkeley next week.  The paper itself has four authors, but I took the lead on it. Here’s the abstract:

A joint team of archaeologists from the University of California, Berkeley and Sonoma State University are examining a collection of artifacts and skeletal material excavated in Bahrain and Eastern Saudi Arabia in the 1940s and curated in the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum.  This collection has hereto remained un-investigated since the time of Cornwall’s Harvard dissertation.  Motivated by modern innovations in the examination of skeletal materials and a greater awareness of broader Near Eastern history, we are considering this collection from a contemporary bioarchaeological perspective as well as in terms of the personal history of Peter B. Cornwall and his team. During this process we have attempted to raise public interest in the project, while remaining sensitive to the issues regarding the depiction and documentation of the remains of past peoples.  In making our research methodology more transparent through this digital documentation and presentation, we hope to distribute awareness of the Cornwall collection across a number of online platforms in a non-traditional format.  In this paper we critically examine the tensions between access to museum collections and respectful digital remediation of assemblages involving human remains.

Pretty standard stuff, right? Well, I’ve had to address a few more issues that have come up since. The Phoebe A. Hearst museum was last in the news in late 2008 when the unit handling some of the Native American human remains was disbanded. There is continuing protest and interest in related matters being blogged about here. At the time, many of the graduate students did not really know what was going on (with a few exceptions) and we were told a few different stories.

Fast-forward to a couple of weeks ago, when the San Francisco Chronicle ran a front-page story on Japanese war dead remains that were in the museum, in apparent contradiction to the Geneva conventions. And, indeed, article 17 of the Geneva Convention of 1949 states that the war dead must be honorably interred and their graves must be respected.

I did not expect that I’d be citing international humanitarian law when I wrote up my little abstract last year, and I’m still trying to sort out exactly how to contextualize our research on 4,000 year old human remains from Dilmun tumuli in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia within this dialogue on museum ethics.  The good people over at the Museum Anthropology blog have a great series of posts on the topic, (here, here, and here) and end with a very valid question: Why do people think so differently about Native American human remains?

I am certainly not the best equipped person to answer the question, but I feel like it’s an issue that anyone working in North America has to contend with. While I don’t work in the States for my dissertation, two summers ago I took some contract work with a local company that is part owned by a member of one of the local tribes and excavated prehistoric Native American remains in a rescue context. These remains were later buried. I don’t really have a problem with what I did, other than some of the methodology employed–I would have liked to excavate the site more generally and more fully, so we could understand the context of the burials a bit better. Some of my colleagues state that they’d never excavate human remains, in North America or anywhere else in the world.

So, like so many other things, it’s complicated. We’ve drafted an ethics statement for our research on the collection and it has made us ask some hard questions about the recovery of these bones and stakeholders who may be interested in our research. I’ll post the entire paper later if possible–it’s going to be published in the proceedings and some publishers are still hesitant to have pre-prints available on the web.