Fleshy bodies? No thanks!

After talking about many different ways of preservation in class this week and seeing many of the pictures I oddly feel much more comfortable handing the bones of the dead now than I ever was before. Seeing fleshy remains just plain freaks me out!  However, the ones that are well preserved and just look like they’re sleeping don’t for some reason, like the little girl we saw in class, Rosalia Lombardo.  

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And Body Worlds that I saw in Calgary; I was fascinated to learn about our body under the skin and to get to see it in real life rather than through pictures or video was a real treat and an experience I'll never forget. I also got to hold a real brain in my hands! And yet I say I can’t handle a little bit of fleshiness? Go figure.

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I guess that goes to show how comfortable I am with the different stages of death and can show how removed one can make themself from the remains. It seems I am at the two ends of the spectrum and am only comfortable with the newly dead or the very dead, dead where everything fleshy is long gone. Whereas the middle stage of decomposition is just too squishy for me. Don’t get me wrong, I love learning about them but only from afar. But that makes me wonder what happens if your excavating somewhere bodies aren’t suppose to be or all of them are just bone remains, then you stumble across one that’s half decomposed or preserved? What do you do? Bite the bullet and do it anyways for the name of science? Or do you call in a specialist to do it for you? And what does that say about you as a scientist?  Even though I can’t deal with it I know how important these remains are to us and how glad I am for anthropologist to have access to preserved bodies since they can tell us so much about ancient life and the person who's remains they are. Like when they found Otzi, frozen in the Otztal Alps, scientists were able to determine his last meal and tried to determine what his life was like when he was alive and the remains tell us more about what kinds of things the people of this time were eating and have solid evidence for their conclusions.

“Otzi on ice” Source

Preservation and mummification can really help scientists learn about ancient life and can also be a useful way of teaching modern society about the human body. I just know that I will be keeping my hands clean (pun intended) by sticking to de-fleshed bones and learning about preserved bodies in a hands-off setting.