Fifteen years ago it seemed my dreams were coming true. Jane Buikstra had just agreed to take me on as her PhD student and I was invited to begin an inventory of the skeletal remains at Copan, Honduras. I poured over standards for data collection and inventory methods, spoke with experts, created a digital inventory template, and gathered every reference on skeletal conservation in the months before departing to a place that had long captivated me. I was ready, or so I thought.

Materials in hand, I excitedly walked into the bodega (storage facility) passing Copan’s remarkable sculptures and other artifacts to the area where the Copan skeletal collection was curated. Huge yellow cases that read entierros (burials) were stacked precariously on shelves that nearly reached the high ceiling that was open at the roofline. There was not much light and the air had a sour odor that I would later learn is the hallmark of rodents. I set my materials on a termite-ridden table near the shelves, sat down, and found a loosely covered substantial wooden box under that table. It looked like it had been there for years and contained the flexed burial of an adult male whose bones had clean white breaks, a clear indicator of postmortem damage. It took another eleven years to obtain the permission to excavate and conserve that burial and learn its origin. While it had not been there forever, it had been there since 1953. As I worked through the heavy yellow cases I realized my naiveté. This project was much more than an inventory; it was going to also require conservation and it was going to take a long time.

The questions soon followed – How do I get permission to overhaul the collection’s housing? What money is available and how much will it be? How do I organize 1,000 (or more) burials from the 100 years of archaeological projects when the boxes only say entierros? What materials should I use and how do I get them? I did not have many answers in that first summer, but I did know that I felt a deep ethical responsibility to do something to take care of the people whose remains were in the cases that surrounded my table in that dark bodega.

Many summers were spent on the simple tasks of cleaning, inventorying, and documenting the collection on modest funds. It was through my wonderful colleagues at Copan that I learned of the dedicated work of those who came before me and their valiant but unsuccessful efforts to acquire the funds to rehouse the collection. The National Science Foundation agreed with an argument outlined in my DDIG proposal and awarded substantial conservation funds for the collection, agreeing that it would be unethical to study an at-risk legacy collection without ensuring its future safety. The rehousing began in earnest in 2011 with the support of a dedicated team from Copan, the wonderful staff at the Copan Regional Center for Archaeological Investigations, shopkeepers in the town center, and many colleagues.

The processes of how this collection, and others like it around the world, were conserved and studied are described in this special issue of Advances in Archaeological Practice. The authors, my fellow guest editor, Dr. Carolyn Freiwald at University of Mississippi, and I aim to outline answers to the questions like those posed above for a variety of laboratory and field contexts to ensure the ethical care of archaeological human remains.