Britain is a crowded space. It is inevitable that development and archaeology will unearth the physical bodies of people who have lived and died in this place before us. But why should ancient residents be treated any differently from those who die today? We don’t think they should be. A human individual is a human individual. No one should be on display without their consent?

Get Involved! Suggest additions to our Open Heritage Map below by clicking on the + sign. Your suggestions will be reviewed before approval and publication. Thank you!

+Add location

✕

Exhumations HS2 Museums Public Submissions

made with OUM PRO

[See Notes below for details on how the data for this map was sourced.]

HAD believes that these bodies should never be seen as ‘things’ or ‘material’: they are individuals, they are persons. No one should presume to claim them. The phrase ‘human remains’, in any heritage context, should jar, provoking human concern and care.

For these reasons, HAD aims to define and promote fundamental respect and dignity for those who are in effect the ancestors of most of us living in the UK today.

HAD encourages discussion and consultation, creating guidance and supporting best practice for the way museums, archaeologists and other heritage groups treat these ancestors.  Study, display and educational uses need to be comprehensively justified.

HAD’s ‘Your Local Museum’ project uniquely collates and publicises collections and displays in museums and archaeological organisations.

Our searchable database is available here for all to explore.

Contact us to have your say or volunteer to give our ancestors an effective voice.

Notes

Exhumation Data was imported from Archaeology Data Services dataset (licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License), which in turn is a re-presentation of data held within the Heritage Gateway dataset at Historic England. The 3,898 exhumation records shown are only those classified where human remains were found. There are a further 94,000 records relating to exhumations of funerary sites where no human remains were identified. We hope the map serves to give a visual appreciation of the scale of exhumation of ancestors in the British Isles. Also note that these figures, and the data shown, only represent the results of the project to collate the data run by the Royal Commission on the Historic Monuments of England (RCHME) that stopped work around ten years ago (circa 2013). HAD will be exploring ways in which the missing data following this time period could be obtained. These figures also do not contain data from the many datasets maintained locally under the Historic Environment Records Offices (HERS). Exhumations of Christian sites are included in the above map data as this helps completeness and show the extent of exhumations. Finally, some sites’ records contained erroneous location data, putting sites in the English Channel for example. Where possible HAD has attempted to address this in the map but where location data was not present this has not always been possible.

HS2 Data was compiled from information obtained from the HS2 project between 2020 and 2023 under Freedom of Information Requests. It should be noted that, in the majority of cases, the data recording where the exhumed ancestors were (or are now) stored was redacted. HAD would like to know why.

YLM (Your Local Museum) data was compiled by HAD through questionnaires between 2008 and 2023. The changing shape of the museum landscape has meant that significant detective work has been necessary in order to try and represent collections of ancestors in museums accurately. However, we are aware that this is an ongoing challenge and HAD will be curating updates to YLM data annually in order to ensure the data quality is as high as it can be. YLM represents a unique source of information on human remains in museums in the UK.