THE Museum of London wants to rebury most of the 17,000 skeletons in its collection. The move has stirred a furious debate among academics over the morality of keeping human remains for research.

Jack Lohman, its director, told The Times that it was “an ethical issue”. “The way forward is to study them properly and then rebury them.”

He said that most of the bones in his museum’s collection, now kept in boxes stacked floor to ceiling in storerooms, should be analysed and documented and, where appropriate, given a Christian burial.

More than 70 per cent of the skeletons unearthed in the capital over the past 30 years had Christian burials, judging from artefacts found beside them or because they were unearthed from monastery sites, and they deserved a final burial, he said.

Academics have been opposed until now to reburial as human remains are considered invaluable for research into human origins, health, diversity and history.

Sir Neil Chalmers, director of the Natural History Museum, which houses almost 20,000 human remains, most of them British, said: “There’s never a sense you’ve discovered everything. There are great medical benefits to humanity (from skeletal collections). These must be weighed against the ethical issues.”

James Steele, chairman of the British Association for Biological Anthrolopogy and Osteoarchaeology, said: “Reburial may mean the loss of any future potential to analyse the material.”

The Natural History Museum collection has been visited recently by surgeons seeking to develop knee replacement techniques and by forensic anthropologists working on the identification of victims in mass graves in Bosnia.

The Museum of London, which attracted 363,000 visitors last year, boasts one of the world’s most important holdings of Roman, medieval and post-medieval skeletons. It has just received a grant of £438,250 from the Wellcome Trust, the medical charity, to create an online database.

It will help scientists to understand London’s early history, human health and urban living. But, once the remains have been analysed, the museum wants them reburied, perhaps in the crypt of a disused church or consecrated ground.

Hedley Swain, the Museum of London’s head of early London history and collections, asked whether human remains should have to “spend eternity” in storerooms.

“The people making decisions should ask themselves whether they would feel comfortable about their bodies being dug up one day and stuck in a cardboard box.”

The museum is drawing up guidelines on the issue that will set a precedent for the 130 British institutions which hold the remains of 80,000 bodies.

Until now, concern about human remains has largely focused on foreign bones. Australian Aborigines and Native Americans have long campaigned for their return. The Manchester Museum and the Royal College of Surgeons have recently returned remains to claimant groups.

The issue was raised last November in a report by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, which called for an independent licensing authority to ensure “fair and transparent procedures” for considering requests for repatriation.

Now the debate has turned to British skeletons. The Church of England is so concerned that it has commissioned its own report. Joseph Elders, archaeology officer for the council for the care of churches at the Church of England, said: “The Church has a presumption that Christian remains will be reburied. We would normally grant a certain period of time for human remains to be analysed, if a good case is made for that. We would expect the Museum of London to get in touch over where reburials would take place and in what manner.”

Simon Mays, a human skeletal biologist with English Heritage, which is helping to produce the report, said: “We are trying to provide guidelines . . . for the scientific, ethical and legal treatment of human remains. We will balance the ethical concerns of the Church against the scientific needs of the community at large.”

Maurice Davies, deputy director of the Museums Association, which represents 1,500 institutions, said that storing the material in crypts or consecrated ground would be a compromise solution.

The Museum of London will also have to consider the fate of its non-Christian skeletons.

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