UK archaeologists forced to reinter human remains within 2 years of excavation

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In 2007, the Ministry of Justice (rather than the Home Office) became responsible for regulations concerning exhuming human remains from ancient graves. The Guardian reports that the Ministry of Justice introduced a law in 2008 which declared that all human remains found in British digs must be reburied within two years. This makes sense if you have contractors and construction teams who are shoving deceased ancestors of living people out of the ground and then leaving them there without proper reburial. This does not make sense when you are an archaeologist digging up someone two thousand years old. Why?

It completely ignores the damage to the human remains themselves in the process of excavation and reinterment. For example, many of Harvard's human skeletons (the ones that haven't been repatriated through NAGPRA) are stored in boxes in climate controlled rooms, forever preserved and protected from the diagenetic processes of soil and sand and clay.

If we were to reinter many of these ancient human remains, we would completely lose:

  1. Preservation. We cannot guarantee the preservation of reinterred ancient human remains. The conditions of the reinterment site may not be protected, and the bones might be destroyed.
  2. Future Research. We are always inventing new research methods and technologies. Reinterring the bones for further decomposition means closing off new avenues of research in the future that would yield valuable evidence.
  3. Education. We would be unable to educate the public by using actual human remains to demonstrate the pathology of a human skeleton. Students would be unable to examine and work with real samples of these remains as a way to gain experience on identifying future excavated remains.

This is different from NAGPRA, which is a very narrowly defined piece of legislation that targets native groups who can reasonably prove a genetic or ancestral link with those to be reinterred or studied respectfully per tribal/Nation traditions and beliefs. What the UK has here is an overbroad rule that needs to be tailored to the needs of archaeology.