She told me that when it arrived in the mail there was an initial “shock factor”, but this slowly transformed into fascination and, eventually, obsession. Like Scragg, Reynders and her husband started collecting after buying their first skull on a whim online. “But the people who collect and trade are really genuine people, open and lovely. “People outside of the community often see what we do as maybe a little disturbing,” she said. Many promptly blocked me or asked me not to contact them anymore.ĭebbie Reynders, a Belgian collector and trader who runs an Instagram account of almost 4,000 followers with her husband, told me that this reticence arises from fear of being stigmatised publicly as strange or morbid. When I started following and reaching out to a number of accounts that were clearly advertising human remains, they denied it flatly, referring to themselves as “art collectors” or purveyors of “cultural history”. While trading bones online might be legal, or at least legally ambiguous, there is still a degree of secrecy within the Insta-skull community. "It has transformed what was a fringe practice into a viable, global free for all.” "While the human remains market existed before Instagram, it has enabled so many more people to connect with each other and indulge in this obsession,” he said. (Scragg told me that as long as he labels his deliveries correctly, he is not bothered by UK customs authorities.)Īccording to Huffer, traders on Instagram have taken advantage of this apparent gap in the law to establish an international trade route, with major nodes in the UK, US, Canada, and Europe. But for the most part, Huffer says, laws are ambiguous and unenforced. In the United States, Louisiana, Georgia, and Tennessee all have regulations restricting the sale and possession of human remains. Other jurisdictions have a less laissez faire approach to the bone trade, however. And while displaying human remains publicly requires a license from the Human Tissues Authority, this is not the case for posting photos of them online. In the UK, human bones fall under the “no property rule” in common law, which essentially means that they belong to whoever happens to be in possession of them, with no paperwork required to prove their provenance. Unlike other illicit markets on Instagram - exotic animals, looted antiquities, weapons - there is nothing explicitly illegal about trading human remains on the platform. Many sellers don’t advertise prices for their wares – preferring to leave the messy business of negotiating to direct messages – but through his own sleuthing Huffer has found some items selling for upwards of £16,000. And Huffer says that the true total is likely to be much higher. Their findings reveal a rapidly growing trade: in 2013, sales totaled only $5,200 (£4,190), but by 2016, that number had risen to $57,000 (£46,000). Archeologists Damien Huffer and Shawn Graham have been surveying the scale of this shadowy market since 2013, searching and analysing several thousand posts advertising human remains on the platform.
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