Ethical Considerations and Publishing in Human Bioarchaeology

As bioarchaeologists and forensic anthropologists, we are writing to highlight the apparent lack of ethical consideration, or mention of ethics, in published papers, especially when publishing on archaeological human remains. In many situations, data deriving from excavated human remains provide the deep time perspective relevant to populations today (e.g. Binder, Roberts, Spencer, Antoine & Cartwright, 2014). However, bearing in mind current ethical debates around the excavation, analysis, and curation of human remains (e.g. Squires, Errickson & Márquez-Grant, 2019a), and any in the future, we do need to address the ethics surrounding our research and its publication as we go forward.