A few weeks ago, I wrote about the tearing down of confederate statues. While my ideas on the issues have changed a bit, what is happening now I find completely unacceptable and disrespectful. Apparently, activists are now raiding cemeteries and defacing statues on graves of confederate soldiers. I find this appalling, disrespectful to the families of these soldiers and the soldiers themselves. I don’t think that this is acceptable in any fashion, but a thought occurred to me that stumped me. At what point does a grave stop being a grave or historical landmark and begin to be acceptable for archaeologists the like to explore? What makes it okay to remove grave goods and put them into museums? I don’t think that violence is the answer by any means, and I do think that what the activists are doing now is going too far, but they aren’t doing any more or less than humans have been doing for centuries.
