Slides Presentation: Just like Biobanks? A New Approach to Human Osteological Collections.

Presented at: 28th Annual Meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists (EAA), Budapeste, Hungria, 31 Agosto a 3 September European Association of Archaeologists (EAA) (Budapest, Hungria)

This presentation forwards a new understanding of Human Osteological Collections (HOC), their role in advancing science, and their importance as agents of research agendas. Rather than framing HOC exclusively within cultural heritage and archaeological contexts, it expands their profile into the arena of biological and medical sciences, bringing a different perspective that may have implications on current practices and decision-making on storing human remains (regardless of their provenance), and consequently in societal policy-making. To achieve this, we will draw a comparison with the notion of biobanks – repositories of human biological samples associated both with personal and medical data. It explores how HOC would fit into this concept, specifically identified HOC, since these contain human remains and associated biographical data (e.g. sex, age, cause of death, and other information). Additionally, the ongoing academic discussion on the definition and provenance of samples/remains incorporated into HOC is not far from biobanks. As so, expanding the profile of HOC sets in motion the need to consider additional ethical, social, legal and practical issues when considering the storing and accessibility of HOC and associated data, as it happens with biobanks. Furthermore, we will address this latter point by combining the "cultural heritage" framework. This new approach to HOC raises questions that have not been considered to date, and that may impact curation and preservation practices and policies, by establishing HOC as relevant, reliable, and valuable resources for research.

Keywords: Human remains; biobanks; ethics; heritage; material culture.