To Sell or Not to Sell: The British Association for Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology’s Position on the Trade and Sales of Human Remains in the UK
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We introduce the British Association for Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology’s ‘Trading and Sale of Human Remains Task Force’. This member-based subgroup started in 2016 and brings together professionals from a range of fields, including osteoarchaeology and forensic and biological anthropology, across academia, curatorial roles, and cultural heritage management. Subgroup members are concerned with and actively monitor the proliferation of human remains sales online. Here, we describe the history, goals, and current mission of the group, how we approach sellers and what assistance we provide to encourage donation over sale, alongside the challenges associated with this form of trafficking. We illustrate this discussion through select anonymised case studies to show the types of sales we respond to. These examples ultimately demonstrate that improved legislation is required if we are to end this industry in the United Kingdom (UK). Furthermore, the cases in this article exemplify the need to raise greater public awareness of the ethical implications associated with the sale and trade of once-living individuals.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.017 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.014 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".