Dr. Smiti Nathan

Transcript

Smiti: Welcome to “Curiosity Meets the Past” – a podcast for curious minds who love learning about the past. I’m Dr. Smiti Nathan, and I’m an archaeologist, and your host. 

In this episode, I’m speaking with Dr. Adam Netzer-Zimmer – a biomedical anthropologist, with a background in bioarchaeology. I met Adam years ago when we were both getting trained in public anthropology. Since then, I’ve known him as someone who is deeply conscientious about what it means to care for and study human remains that are in complex and sometimes surprising situations.

We start with the curious human remain that launched his journey in exploring what the dead still mean to the living in Iceland.

Adam: When I first came to Iceland, Dr. Sarah Hoffman, who was a graduate student at the University of Buffalo, said, “Oh, I have this skull from Iceland that’s now currently housed at Harvard. That looks like it had some modern medical interventions, but clearly is from the medieval era. So what’s going on here?” And when I looked into the history of how the skull got there, it was taken by a couple of Harvard researchers around 1906, and were brought to Harvard to basically help build up this big skull library.

I really wanted to look into the history of this as well as to see what other. Human remains might have been circulating throughout the medical school context in a similar way, but locally here. But the problem was when I was first doing my inquiries, I was emailing archaeologists here and saying, Hey, this is the time period that I’m looking at.

Usually it’s late 18 hundreds to mid 19 hundreds, which is really this peak time of physicians going and dissecting individuals for part of their medical education, and then oftentimes keeping the skeletons afterwards. But when I was doing these inquiries, a lot of the archaeologists here were telling me like, well, “Why are you coming here to study that?”

Like everybody that comes here is looking [00:01:00] at Viking remains or Viking bones or like stuff related to the medieval sagas, which are what people tend to think about automatically about Iceland.

That’s precisely why I wanna come here is ’cause it seems like this question isn’t really being asked about much more recent human remains.

And even when I got here, I first went to the National Museum, and did some inquiries about whether they had anything in their collection that they knew was. Either given to them or donated maybe by a retiring physician, stuff like this. And at the time they only had two examples. There was a large wooden box from a Dr. Henrik Lynette, that had been donated to them. And inside of this box were the remains of multiple individuals. There were, if I remember correctly, something like two, children around the time of birth. Not complete individuals, but various bones from them as well as a couple of bones from adults.

And then the other example that they happened to have was just simply a skull cap. So just like, what the Pope has the little white hat, that part of the skull removed from a person as well as their upper arm bone. And that similarly had been donated to them by a physician.

But at the [00:02:00] time, that was kind of the only examples that I had that really were looking at human remains that were being used for teaching by physicians here. And then it just so happened that my colleague, Dr. Joe Walser, who I’m now working on this upcoming grant with, he ended up saying like, I think that there’s actually a lot more human remains here that just are not considered part of the archeological record because they’ve never been like written about, they were never excavated, but they do have them, that they’re even still today using to teach, the medical students.

So then I ended up going to the medical school, contacted them about this, was able to get a tour of the medical lab. And it turns out that they did in fact have, at least 1,800 individual human skeletal remains. But even when I came here and I ended up asking questions about this, I got a lot of, “Why are these of any interest to someone who’s an archaeologist?” What, what I was told was “These are the bones of foreigners. They don’t have anything to do with Icelandic history.” That particular quote really informed me of like, oh, okay, so here’s why no one talks about the fact that there are all these human remains here is because they’re just not [00:03:00] thought of as being part of what actually makes up the history of the island.

And so that’s what this new project is about is trying to really reintegrate them into that story and say like, even if these individuals may not have ever lived here, they may not have, passed away here in Iceland. Their bodies still are helping to teach modern medical students and specialists within various fields.

And so they are still contributing to Icelandic society even in death.

Smiti: Mm. That’s fascinating. Thank you so much for sharing that. And I’m curious, can you tell us a bit more about how these bodies got to Iceland?

Adam: So from my dissertation research, I really was delving into all of those oral histories, all of the. Few written records that I could find, things like physician memoirs. And it seems like, this particular collection, the Læknagarður collection, was initially comprised of individuals who just happened to pass away from natural causes.

And then for whatever reason, the practicing physician at the time thought like, oh, this person would make for really great teaching subject for my handful of medical [00:04:00] students that I have. So people that died, from tuberculosis, from other communicable diseases, stuff like that. But then later on, when you start to see Iceland getting, more integrated into a global market, you actually start to see them entering this, like mass consumerism of human remains.

So initially it was opportunistic dissections and autopsies that they would then keep an arm or a leg that had like a special pathology that they thought might be useful. During this Spanish influenza, epidemic, it was frequently people who died of that, that also had some kind of social stigma attached to them.

Later on we start to see them actually starting to purchase the bodies of individuals from Germany, from charity Hospital.

The United States ended up essentially invading Iceland with. Some cooperation, and occupying for quite a while, to prevent the Germans from taking over. Then you see this immediate cease of importing any remains from Germany, and later on you start seeing the acquisition of remains that are coming probably from more American-based companies.

Like Iceland was on the receiving end. They weren’t necessarily going out and doing this act of collecting of bodies, but when they transitioned into the global market, then they start receiving the benefits of what these other colonial nations have done to go out and get bodies.

Smiti: So as you’ve been doing this work, what has surprised you the most about how people have talked about the Dead?

Adam: when I first moved here, I’d only been here for about six months this was after I had looked at some of the remains at the museum, but didn’t really know much about the Læknagarður collection. My landlord at the time was a former physician and he ended up hearing about what I was interested in. We had many conversations about what my work was. And so then just one afternoon he ended up coming downstairs. It was a basement apartment. He went “…by the way, I’ve had a [00:06:00] skull that I’ve had ever since I was a medical student back in like the sixties.

I don’t know what to do with it. It’s just been sitting on a shelf…

In the US we, we oftentimes think about like documentation, protocols and all this other stuff. And of course Iceland has that.

But there does seem to be this hidden category of human remains that are sort of traded around, so I ended up telling, my landlord likeI’m more than happy to talk with the medical school and see if maybe there’s a place that we can put them with the rest of the collection.

And so that’s what we ended up deciding to do. It really informed a lot of my work of realizing this is how a lot of these remains got here.

Smiti: you’re speaking, the whole idea of ethics as it relates to human remains is [00:07:00] just ringing through my head, and I know there’s a lot of layers to ethics. So I wanted to start with, informed consent,

so, do you mind defining informed consent for who might not be as aware of what that might mean?

Adam: I guess a shorthand way of talking about it would be just to say like, there’s a much bigger push these days when doing any kind of medical research, including medical research after death, to ensure that people are fully able to consent to whatever’s being done with their body and to their body.

And if we’re talking about using remains for research is really outlining what does this mean? So are you just giving your body over for tissue donations? But a lot of times in these historical collection informed consensus wasn’t even part of the process.

And so now, especially with like, the Boston University’s medical program also has a body donation program. They have things like memorial services where the families are invited after the students have done medical dissections to actually get to know the students and who’s been [00:08:00] working on their loved one’s bodies as well as for the students to realize, When you’re working with a living patient or even with a deceased patient, that it’s also not just them, that there’s an entire community of people that are connected to this person, that it’s this cause and effect that is so much bigger than what we, I think, previously used to think about.

Smiti: you for sharing that because both you and I come from educational backgrounds, especially in North America that has a legacy of mistreating human remains, and that’s putting it mildly.

Smiti: So when we’re thinking about ethics now this term called index of care .

Adam: Yeah.

Smiti: do you mind sharing a bit more about that and how that’s shaping your work?

Adam:Index of care is essentially this framework to understand when we’re looking at and documenting human remains, what are the specific things that we can be looking at that allow for this greater understanding of this individual as being part of a larger culture. And It’s expanding the framework of looking at the remains is not just kind of the story of one fracture or the story from trauma or the story of some disease, [00:09:00] but also looking at it in the greater societal context of saying, how is this all intersecting with these other social factors of whether this person got care, ultimately they did die.

Did they die as a result of that particular injury, or that particular disease? And if so, what can that disease tell us about like how long this person could survive? What does that tell us about those aspects of keeping them alive and ultimately why was that care? Pulled back so the person did pass away.

So this, particular framework of understanding and looking and documenting human remains, was, brought into the project by my colleague, Dr. Joe Walser. A lot of his work has been about the archaeology of disability and what we can really say and should, or should not say about, an individual’s life based on what we can see within their, their remains. It also informs us to make some decisions about what to do with these remains in the future as well. So looking at the full contextual history of how these individuals came to Iceland and before they came to Iceland, how did they get to the hospital that processed them?

That can also inform us about like [00:10:00] what’s particular, like physical interventions need to be done. But also should we consider, for example, for some remains repatriation because we cannot care for them as archaeologists in a way that is the most respectful.

So instead it’s time to really turn them over to. Whoever, based on the specific circumstances of those remains is better suited to do that.

Smiti: Well thanks for sharing that. And I think that’s a great segue into your current project that you’ve alluded to now, and that is your postdoc and you are expanding on your previous work, through a larger project, which has multiple components.

Adam: So what I do wanna say first off is that our, one of our main interventions and also part of this index of care is, preventing as much loss of information as well as loss of actual. Ancestral human remains as possible in the process. So we’re starting off the project by doing non-invasive techniques.

And for the listeners, non-invasive means things like picking up the bone, looking at it, what can you visually see? What can you maybe look at, with a microscope without actually [00:11:00] having to take any kind of samples. And with this particular collection, the like regard collection, that’s looking at things like, can we see cut marks on the bone?

That might indicate that this was done with a tool that would’ve been much more common in the 18 hundreds for a dissection, for example, or for processing or with some of the more or remains that we think are probably much more recent. There’s different patterns that indicate something done with like an electric saw, for example.

So this is giving us a really quick way to try and sort out individuals and where we think their possibility of origin might have been. And doing it from the non-destructive way first because leading into this isotopic analysis, most of this type of research is done by taking a sample of someone’s tooth.

So strontium, for example, comes from groundwater and the levels of strontium isotopes vary really drastically based on what region you live in.

By taking a sample of someone’s tooth and then looking at what strontium isotopes they have and the ratio that they have. You can then compare it to these larger global maps that we have of groundwater as well as to, other individuals who have been [00:12:00] sampled in those regions. And that can give you a better indication of this person would’ve been living in this greater region, when that tooth was developing, because that was when they were drinking the water that put the isotope in their tooth.

And so this, for us, this is important because with a collection like the ones that we’re working on now, I was saying earlier that we have literally no documentation. A lot of the stuff that we know about is just based on oral histories and little clues that we can put together by doing like non-destructive analysis, but that line of evidence can only get you so far. If your ultimate goal is to make those even bigger decisions about what’s best to do with this individual’s remains. it’s always a negotiation of course, of is it really worth it in the end to do any kind of destructive analysis? Because in the end you are changing someone’s remains in a way that again, they would’ve never consented to. But at the same time, if you try to plan it out in a certain way, especially with teeth are often considered, remains that are.

A little bit different than the rest of the body. Something that it’s a little bit more okay to take a sample from that. If you’re able to do that in [00:13:00] and select those individuals that you think might give you the most information, then that can actually pinpoint and say like, okay, yes, this is all the other evidence leading up to this point, doing non-destructive stuff, said we think these individuals came from here.

And so that’s what we are hoping to use this for is actually look at like, can we pinpoint where these people are or where they were coming from? Because up until now just these questions really were not being asked to the point that we have no data about any of it.

Smiti: gotcha. I really appreciate the care that you put into, into thinking about which methods to use and when.

Adam: A lot of my perspective is influenced by my PhD supervisor, Dr. Whitney Battle-Baptiste.

Smiti: Mm-hmm.

Adam: If listeners don’t know who she is, Dr. Battle-Baptiste wrote, the book Black Feminist Archaeology, and she’s the current head of the board of the American Anthropological Association.

From her writings and our conversations and perspective in Black feminist theory, a lot of the discussion of especially the remains in the United States of what to do with these skeletons we have of, Black women that were subjected to the same thing, [00:14:00] lots of violence within the medical system leading to then their bodies being kept by institutions after death.

Especially me being a white researcher, I can never be separated from the fact that I am still inflicting potentially destructive research on these remains on for people who never consented to it in the first place. This perspective really informed my dissertation research to come here to Iceland I mean now I think of myself as part of the Icelandic community ’cause I’ve lived here now for eight years. But at the same time I also recognize that these are not my ancestors and especially the remains of people who we think probably didn’t come here to Iceland at all that were simply purchased.

It really shouldn’t be up to me to make those decisions about what’s best to do with their remains next, if it’s best to give them back if maybe some communities also actually prefer that they continue to be used for teaching. And for me, the first step in actually doing all of that was doing broadband non-destructive analysis of trying to figure out.

What can we actually know and can we push the limits of what we can find out before we finally have to start having those really big conversations about like, is it worth [00:15:00] it to do this kind of a, a destructive analysis? Like the opes?

Smiti: Gotcha. Well thank you for that.

Part of your research is doing a nationwide survey, and I’d love to hear a bit more about that.

Uh, what you hope to find or maybe what you’ve already found out. That also just sparked this interest in doing such a survey.

Adam: So this project that we’re starting up now, so it’s my colleague, Dr. Joe Walser from the National Museum, as well as two colleagues from the, university of Iceland. So (Dr.) Gúðrun Whitehead is the head of the project, and we’re also being helped out by, (Dr.) Dagrún Jónsdóttir we’re collaborating with Gúðrun to, yeah, do this nationwide survey because especially as I was doing this dissertation research and as they were doing their own research, they were realizing that we just have never delved into this question of what do Icelanders actually do or think about, what is done with human remains after death.

There’s lots of stories that in, for example, the Icelandic sagas, like a Egill saga of like after ail passed away, he was rumored to be this like great beast of a [00:16:00] man. I think it was the priest who bought the property ended up finding his skull and stuck it on a fence post and was like, I like, oh, I’m sure this is a’s skull, and I wonder if he’s like, as big and strong as everybody said.

So he took a, either a sword or a small hand ax and hid his skull with it to see if he could break it apart. But Egill’s skull was so strong that it just like left a tiny little white mark on it. We have all these little anecdotes and like doing some, like literature reading from the 18 hundreds.

There’s tons of ghost stories about people being dissected, at the medical school and why their spirit still haunts it. There’s more modern novels like one that, it’s called Jar City in English, which is supposedly getting a remake in New Orleans. Actually, it was an Icelandic mystery novel.

But it’s actually, it’s about this very collection that we’re working with, this collection of human remains, especially preserved ones.

Why people are making the decisions that they are making as well as we’ve never just simply asked Icelanders do you think what we’re doing right now is best? Or do you think that there’s maybe a better approach that we, especially as like museum professionals as anthropologists can do that is actually more respectful of how we are excavating remains or [00:17:00] displaying remains.

Smiti: Gotcha. to that point, we’ve discussed human remains being in people’s homes

Adam: Yeah.

Smiti: a part of their households. Do you mind elaborating on that a bit?

Adam: This actually happens much more commonly than I would’ve realized before.

I’ve been teaching human osteology and the last time that I taught it, we ended up talking to our students about everything that we do and what our questions are and everything.

And several of them actually ended up coming in with remains that their families had had and said like, “Oh, this skull we’ve just happened to have like on our fireplace for four generations and like, we think it’s our great-grandfather’s skull.” And of course you tell other Icelanders here and many of them are like, what the hell?

I’ve never heard of anybody doing this. I think that was part of the impetus for us wanting to ask this question is that we never would’ve imagined so many of our students being like, Hey, by the way, here’s a skull that like we’ve kept in our house.

What do you think is going on here?

Smiti: I’m sure you’re gonna have even more interesting conversations as the survey goes on, and you’re also gonna launch a large [00:18:00] scale public outreach effort.

Adam: Yeah.

Smiti: what is that gonna look like, or what are you envisioning for that?

Adam: So we’re still toying with some of the ideas, but for example, with this survey about human remains that are owned by the general public. one thing that we have discussed doing and we’re planning to do for this upcoming grant is to turn it into, an open access, archive for the public.

People would be able to submit stories about what the remains mean to them, what they know about it, what the history is. If they would like to provide photographs, they could include them and we can insert that into the National Museum’s archives in an open access way.

One of the things that we’re still figuring out the logistics of it and, all the different aspects of it, but we’ve toyed with the idea of a bring your skull to the museum day, which we jokingly tossed out, when we started to realize how many remains were here in Iceland that just have no data whatsoever about them that are being owned privately, we really felt like.

Would it be possible for the museum to end up just having this open day where people can come to us with [00:19:00] whatever human remains they happen to have and allow us to help give them some insight into who these individuals were. If we can figure out why it is that they have it or some, people might just actually have the full reason of why they have it. And then ultimately also give them the decision of like, would you rather leave these remains with us as the museum to either curate or maybe, we can assist in the facilitation of rebury them in a church yard if they think that this is maybe what’s more appropriate. But trying to open up that conversation and allow the museum to be a safe space for people to come forward and say like, Hey, I happen to, yes, have all these bones that I thought if I went to the police, I’d get arrested for having human bones, but I also don’t really know where they came from.

So maybe it’s better to just give them to the museum.

Smiti: Gotcha. Well, in terms of thinking of safe spaces and this, open access database where people can sit, submit their stories and photos, makes me think of some of the questions we grapple with in terms of displaying human remains. So I’m [00:20:00] curious, how do you grapple with your personal views on displaying human remains? And how do Icelanders approach the display of human remains?

Adam: My relationship with displaying human remains, I have to admit it’s shaped by a bunch of different factors. When I was doing my very first bio archeological field school, I ended up going to Italy to work on a medieval excavation of a monastery.

At the time I also decided, before going on this, I ended up talking to my local campus priest about like, Hey, I’m going to be traveling to this, monastery in Italy. I don’t know that much about Catholic views on what’s most respectful for the dead. So like, I ended up asking him, which of course is not the same as actually going and talking to people in the community. But for me as an undergraduate student, it just seemed like a good way beforehand to prep myself and really get myself into their framework.

All of that is to say that I think a lot of it is very, very culturally specific and also very nuanced, and you really have to take as much as possible an individual [00:21:00] perspective according to each case by case basis. With a lot of the training that I did in the States, a lot of the remains that we used and still continue to use.

Came from, again, people that never consented to the remains being used like this. And from my perspective, you have one of two options if possible. It’s always best to get in touch with the community who that individual will ended up their remains that ended up coming from, and allow them to make whatever decisions are best.

But it’s not always possible to do this. And it’s also sometimes unfair to put the onus on the community to really figure out what to do with that. And so it always has to be this dialogue of, what can be done in the moment, what are maybe some remains that should be, allowed for further research in very limited capacity in order to actually identify what communities they came from.

And then also allow there to be, open dialogue as well in case there are some individuals, some family members, some communities that are actually like. I’d actually prefer that you continue to use them for [00:22:00] teaching because they might teach us about, health effects of inequality or also like, we just don’t particularly feel a connection with the dead.

So once you pass away, you pass away and I don’t really care. So if you wanna use them, go ahead. and I think coming from the states, rightfully so, that particular instance, this attitude of like, I don’t really care, go ahead and use them, is very much not the norm. And so I think we as bio archaeologists tend to fall under the caution of like, we should just not, show remains in any respect.

And so with this particular survey, we’re trying to really make it as open-minded as possible to a, not problematize a non-issue, but also to allow people to take that, this idea of what do you think should happen with your remains after you die in whatever direction they think is best.

And to try to not have us like guide the conversation from the perspective that we have of like, maybe we shouldn’t.

Smiti: That’s fair. Yeah. We always come in with the, our own biases and perspectives. And when you’re working in a different place, from maybe where you grew up or where you were [00:23:00] trained, it’s really important to be aware of

Adam: Yeah,

Smiti: So after everything you’ve seen so far, and I know your research is still ongoing, what do you think Iceland’s relationship with the dead can teach us about care and memory and responsibility more broadly?

Adam: That’s a really good question. One thing that I would say, and this it, this comes across as very, very cliche if you are in Icelandic studies at all, you’ve heard it a thousand times, but Iceland’s relationship with its past, is extremely different when a lot of Iceers talk about the past, you sometimes don’t know whether they’re talking about like five years ago or like 700 years ago.

Because the way that a lot of, of especially saga heroes are talked about, it’s just like they almost describe them as if it’s somebody that you kind of know. Or that you grew up with. And I think as a part of that, it doesn’t necessarily extend to human remains, but [00:24:00] we’ll maybe see that after the survey.

But I think that there is this kind of focus on preserving this particular heritage of, your relationship with people despite the fact that they have passed on. So like I mentioned the story of Egil, and it is considered like the saga hero of all of Iceland. And the idea that just some local parish priest is gonna go dig up a skull and then it’s like, oh, I’m gonna try and break it in half.

It’s this weird juxtaposition of like, oh, it’s a saga hero. So you would assume that it’s the remains of somebody that you like really want to revere and maybe like.

In the Catholic sense, preserve in a reliquary in this version of the story, it’s like, I just wanna see if he actually was like as thick bone as everybody said. And so tried to break it in half, the way that it was written at least doesn’t seem to have been done in a disrespectful way.

It was just like oh, I think Egill himself would’ve kind of been curious about what his bones would’ve been like.

and so I think there’s this really different, relationship with the dead in terms of still continuing to think of them as playing an active role in society. But there is still this really intense focus on landscape and heritage and [00:25:00] named people still existing within the landscape. Especially on the farms in the countryside that it can teach us to.

To still engage with the dead, whether that means intangibly or tangibly with their actual remains, or just maybe by continuing to tell their stories long after they’re gone, and not in a long forgotten kind of aspect, but in a like, yeah, this person had this effect on the landscape. This is why it looks the way it does now.

And so they’re still playing a role in the landscape by having shaped it in this way.

 Smiti: One of the biggest takeaways from this conversation is that human remains just don’t tell stories about the past. They continue to shape how we learn, teach, and connect with one another in the present.

If you’d like to learn more about Adam’s work, you can visit his website or follow him on TikTok.

You will find those links in the show notes along with a link to a full transcript of this episode.

And if you’re curious to dive deeper, Adam shares book recommendations based on some of the things we talked about in a Patreon exclusive video. Our Patreon is free to join and gives you access to all of our bonus content. Now, if you’re able to support the podcast monetarily, we’d of course appreciate that too.

Thanks so much for listening and cultivating your curiosity with us. We’ll see you soon.

Credits

Adam Netzer-Zimmer: Guest

Noor Hanania: Theme Music Creator

Laura Riveiro: Podcast Cover Art Creator

Smiti Nathan: Host, Video Editor

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Thank you to our paid Patreon members for supporting the creation of this episode:

Nancy Fulton, James D., Giancarlo Annese, Thomas Martin, Stuart A. Griffin

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