The poorly regulated international marketplace for human remains is the subject of recent research to document the non-academic trade of former teaching specimens and recently “surfaced” specimens of archaeological, ethnographic or medico-legal import. Expanding the research of Huffer and Chappell (Crime, Law, and Social Change 131–153, 2014), this chapter focuses on Instagram, a platform with a recent history of facilitating other ‘grey’ and ‘black’ market activities but otherwise unexplored with regard to cultural property crime. Manual search methods were used to track relevant hashtags over three two-month periods from late 2015 to early 2016 in order to gather data on the size, geographic scope and diversity of categories of human remains as well as connections among various collecting communities. We conclude by discussing current legislation and future research directions.

Today’s trade in anatomical, ethnographic, and archaeological human remains makes ready use of new social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Etsy and, until recently, eBay. Continuing the Colonial-era practice of collecting ‘curios’ or ‘specimens’ of natural history, today’s proliferation of e-commerce and social media platforms has only expanded the reach and influence of collectors and dealers and their sense of community cohesion. In this chapter, we discuss several ethical issues underlying this trade that address what the dealer community values, how they operate, interrelate, and interact with the professional osteoarchaeological research community. We ultimately argue that participants in the trade engage with or ignore these complicating factors at their own risk, despite the ownership of human remains being legal in many jurisdictions once an individual’s purchase has arrived.

Teaching and public engagement with the results and implications of bioarchaeological research have increasingly attracted more varied and social media-savvy audiences. Since 2010, the social media platform Instagram has also flourished, with millions of users forming untold numbers of communities of practice. Here, I seek to address the intersection of bioarchaeology and the virtual stage that social media represents. How is the discipline of bioarchaeology and the act of being a bioarchaeologist represented on Instagram? How do practicing bioarchaeologists (and enthusiastic supporters of the field) communicate about their own and others' research, fieldwork, laboratory work, et cetera? With ever-greater amounts of scientific communication and public outreach conducted over social media (e.g., Gura 2013; Kling and McKim 2000; Wheat et al. 2013), it is worth investigating how the living who study the dead interact with each other, form community, and engage online audiences that increasingly contain descendants of the dead being studied. The review below is short; hence, the nature and depth of inquiry is restricted. Nevertheless, enough data are available to allow broader speculation and to suggest that there is space for more concerted future research.

There is a thriving trade, and collector community, around human remains that is facilitated by posts on new social media such as Instagram, Facebook, Etsy, and, until recently, eBay. In this article, we examine several thousand Instagram posts and perform some initial text analysis on the language and rhetoric of these posts to understand something about the function of this community, what they value and how they trade, buy, and sell, human remains. Our results indicate a well-connected network of collectors and dealers both specialist and generalist, with a surprisingly wide-reaching impact on the 'enthusiasts' who, through their rhetoric, support the activities of this collecting community, in the face of legal and ethical issues generated by its existence.