Damien Huffer
Biographic Data
| ID | 84122 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Damien Huffer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Damien |
| FAMILY NAME | Huffer |
| SIGNATURE | HUFFER D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Carleton University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4027-1772 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 112 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
The real mummy’s curse
The rise of the internet, especially social media, has amplified international trafficking and driven demand for unique cultural heritage, including mummified humans and animals. However, these preserved remains pose health and biosecurity risks due to the toxicity of embalming methods and/or suboptimal storage that can promote microbial growth. This article investigates these risks by analyzing 128 online posts from Meta platforms, e-commerce si…
To Sell or Not to Sell
We introduce the British Association for Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology’s ‘Trading and Sale of Human Remains Task Force’. This member-based subgroup started in 2016 and brings together professionals from a range of fields, including osteoarchaeology and forensic and biological anthropology, across academia, curatorial roles, and cultural heritage management. Subgroup members are concerned with and actively monitor the proliferation …
Ethics and applications of isotope analysis in archaeology
This synthesis explores specific ethical questions that commonly arise in isotopic analysis. For more than four decades, isotope analysis has been employed in archeological studies to explore past human and animal dietary habits, mobility patterns, and the environment in which a human or animal inhabited during life. These analyses require consideration of ethical issues. While theoretical concepts are discussed, we focus on practical aspects: wo…
Buy One Get One
Today’s global human remains trade – how it operates on and offline, where remains come from, and how algorithmic amplification allows for complex networks to form between buyers, sellers, and middlemen – has seen an increasing amount of research and media attention. Underpinning this increasing interest is the growing realization that poorly regulated trafficking inflicts genuine psychological harm on the living (whether relatives of body donors…
Behind Closed Doors
The existence of a thriving trade in human remains online is facilitated by social media platforms. While much of this trade is conducted in fully public forums such as e-commerce platforms, the retail website of bricks-and-mortar stores, public personal and business pages on social media, etc., there also exist numerous private groups using the affordances of various social media platforms to buy, sell, and share photographs of human remains. Th…
A Protocol for When Social Media Goes Private
Our major project explores the discourses that surround the buying and selling of human remains over social media. We discuss the research ethics framework established in Canada by the 'Tri-Council' research agencies as it pertains to studying social media in general. Issues of privacy and consent are paramount. Human remains trading happens in both public and private social media. We detail the process we went through, and the protocol that we e…
These Were People Once
These Were People Once
People buy and sell human remains online. Most of this trade these days is over social media. In a study of this ‘bone trade’, how it works, and why it matters, the authors review and use a variety of methods drawn from the digital humanities to analyze the sheer volume of social media posts in search of answers to questions regarding this online bone trade. The answers speak to how the 21st century understands and constructs ‘heritage’ more gene…
When TikTok Discovered the Human Remains Trade
In the summer of 2021, a video on TikTok was heavily reposted across a variety of social media platforms (attracting conventional media attention too). Unusually (for TikTok), it was about the trade in human remains. Thus, we were presented with the opportunity to watch how knowledge of the trade exploded into broader public consciousness on a comparatively newer platform. In this article, we scrape TikTok for reactions to that moment. In our pre…
Identity and community structure in Neolithic Man Bac, northern Vietnam
The osteology and provenance of a portion of the Parkinson collection, Gazelle Peninsula, New Britain, c. 1897
This article presents the results of combined osteological and archival research into the demographics, preservation condition, taphonomy, pathology, cultural modification, and collecting history of that specific portion of the Parkinson collection of human crania from New Britain, collected c. 1897, currently housed in the Etnografiska Museet (Ethnography Museum), Stockholm, Sweden. This assemblage of crania ( n = 45) was acquired by Richard Hei…
Shuar and Munduruku modified remains
The purpose of this communication is to present reflections on the practice of collecting Munduruku and Shuar heads from colonial contexts, their subsequent curation in global museum collections, and the importance of understanding the origins of this collecting practice considering both the existence of «forgeries» and the continued search for «authentic» examples by collectors today. Our research aims to contribute to the discussion on the impo…
Towards a Method for Discerning Sources of Supply within the Human Remains Trade via Patterns of Visual Dissimilarity and Computer Vision
While traders of human remains on Instagram will give some indication, their best estimate, or repeat hearsay, regarding the geographic origin or provenance of the remains, how can we assess the veracity of these claims when we cannot physically examine the remains? A novel image analysis using convolutional neural networks in a one-shot learning architecture with a triplet loss function is used to develop a range of ‘distances’ to known ‘referen…
Towards a Digital Sensorial Archaeology as an Experiment in Distant Viewing of the Trade in Human Remains on Instagram
It is possible to purchase human remains via Instagram. We present an experiment using computer vision and automated annotation of over ten thousand photographs from Instagram, connected with the buying and selling of human remains, in order to develop a distant view of the sensory affect of these photos: What macroscopic patterns exist, and how do these relate to the self-presentation of these individual vendors? Using Microsoft’s Azure cloud co…
Reproducibility, Replicability, and Revisiting the Insta-Dead and the Human Remains Trade
The trade in human remains on social media happens in an ever-changing field of digital media technologies. We attempt to replicate our earlier study, exploring the differences in what we can observe now in the trade on Instagram versus our first foray in 2016 (published in Huffer and Graham 2017). While the previous study cannot be reproduced, it can be replicated, and we find that the trade is accelerating
What the Machine Saw
This article represents the next step in our ongoing effort to understand the online human remains trade, how, why and where it exists on social media. It expands upon initial research to explore the 'rhetoric' and structure behind the use and manipulation of images and text by this collecting community, topics explored using Google Inception v.3, TensorFlow, etc. (Huffer and Graham 2017; 2018). This current research goes beyond that work to addr…
What the Machine Saw
This article represents the next step in our ongoing effort to understand the online human remains trade, how, why and where it exists on social media. It expands upon initial research to explore the 'rhetoric' and structure behind the use and manipulation of images and text by this collecting community, topics explored using Google Inception v.3, TensorFlow, etc. (Huffer and Graham 2017; 2018). This current research goes beyond that work to addr…
Fleshing Out the Bones
There is an active trade in human remains facilitated by social media sites. In this paper we ask: can machine learning detect visual signals in photographs indicating that the human remains depicted are for sale? Do such signals even exist? This paper describes an experiment in using Tensorflow and the Google Inception-v3 model against a corpus of publicly available photographs collected from Instagram. Previous examination of the associated met…
The Living and the Dead Entwined in Virtual Space
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 …
The Insta-Dead
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 rem…
From the Ground, Up
The exact nature of the illicit antiquities trade from ground to market in Southeast Asia remains poorly known outside of Thailand and Cambodia, where most research has been focused. This paper helps to address this imbalance by documenting and contextualizing looting activities at the Bronze and Iron Age site of Vưườn Chuối, located within urban Hanoi. A brief excavation history is provided so as to place recent looting into archaeological conte…
How Much Life do I Lose from the Plague? Educational Board Games as Teaching Tools in Archaeology and Ancient History Courses
This article describes the development, implementation, assessment, debriefing and outcomes, and potential uses of a university student-driven educational gaming project, as a major assessment item in an archaeology course entitled ‘Ancient Medicine’. Discussion of these various aspects of the project is explored in the context of educational gaming theory and practice. We demonstrate that educational board games not only represent an effective m…
Conserving the Past Through Play
According to Heritage Watch, a collaborative NGO based in Cambodia which is active in archaeological salvage work, village outreach, and education, the looting of archaeological sites in Cambodia has now reached "epic proportions."Current looting activities primarily involve Bronze Age and Iron Age (c.3500-1500 BP) burial mounds located in northeastern provinces.Perceived economic incentive and coercion of local villagers by duplicitous "middle-m…
Paralysis and severe disability requiring intensive care in Neolithic Asia
This communication documents one of the earliest verifiable cases of human paralysis associated with severe spinal pathology. A series of skeletal abnormalities is described for a young adult male (M9) from a Southeast Asian Neolithic community. Differential diagnosis suggests that M9 suffered from a severely disabling congenital fusion of the spine (Klippel-Feil Syndrome, Type III), resulting in child-onset lower body paralysis at a minimum (max…
Morphometric affinity of the late Neolithic human remains from Man Bac, Ninh Binh Province, Vietnam
The excavation of the Man Bac site (c. 3800-3500 years BP) in Ninh Binh Province, Northern Vietnam, yielded a large mortuary assemblage. A total of 31 inhumations were recovered during the 2004-2005 excavation. Multivariate comparisons using cranial and dental metrics demonstrated close affinities of the Man Bac people to later early Metal Age Dong Son Vietnamese and early and modern samples from southern China including the Neolithic to Western …
Morphometric affinity of the late Neolithic human remains from Man Bac, Ninh Binh Province, Vietnam
The excavation of the Man Bac site (c. 3800-3500 years BP) in Ninh Binh Province, Northern Vietnam, yielded a large mortuary assemblage. A total of 31 inhumations were recovered during the 2004-2005 excavation. Multivariate comparisons using cranial and dental metrics demonstrated close affinities of the Man Bac people to later early Metal Age Dong Son Vietnamese and early and modern samples from southern China including the Neolithic to Western …
Health and the Experience of Childhood in Late Neolithic Viet Nam
The article aims to examine aspects of mortuary behavior in late Neolithic/early Bronze Age (Phung Nguyen phase) populations represented at the site of Man Bac in Viet Nam, specifically how mortuary behavior illuminates the role of children, and adult attitudes toward children. In addition, the authors discuss biological characteristics of the human sample, focusing particularly on the child burials, in order to explore aspects of childhood palae…
Paralysis and severe disability requiring intensive care in Neolithic Asia
This communication documents one of the earliest verifiable cases of human paralysis associated with severe spinal pathology. A series of skeletal abnormalities is described for a young adult male (M9) from a Southeast Asian Neolithic community. Differential diagnosis suggests that M9 suffered from a severely disabling congenital fusion of the spine (Klippel-Feil Syndrome, Type III), resulting in child-onset lower body paralysis at a minimum (max…
The Insta-Dead
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 rem…
Ethics and applications of isotope analysis in archaeology
This synthesis explores specific ethical questions that commonly arise in isotopic analysis. For more than four decades, isotope analysis has been employed in archeological studies to explore past human and animal dietary habits, mobility patterns, and the environment in which a human or animal inhabited during life. These analyses require consideration of ethical issues. While theoretical concepts are discussed, we focus on practical aspects: wo…
What the Machine Saw
This article represents the next step in our ongoing effort to understand the online human remains trade, how, why and where it exists on social media. It expands upon initial research to explore the 'rhetoric' and structure behind the use and manipulation of images and text by this collecting community, topics explored using Google Inception v.3, TensorFlow, etc. (Huffer and Graham 2017; 2018). This current research goes beyond that work to addr…
When TikTok Discovered the Human Remains Trade
In the summer of 2021, a video on TikTok was heavily reposted across a variety of social media platforms (attracting conventional media attention too). Unusually (for TikTok), it was about the trade in human remains. Thus, we were presented with the opportunity to watch how knowledge of the trade exploded into broader public consciousness on a comparatively newer platform. In this article, we scrape TikTok for reactions to that moment. In our pre…
The Living and the Dead Entwined in Virtual Space
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 …
Identity and community structure in Neolithic Man Bac, northern Vietnam
Reproducibility, Replicability, and Revisiting the Insta-Dead and the Human Remains Trade
The trade in human remains on social media happens in an ever-changing field of digital media technologies. We attempt to replicate our earlier study, exploring the differences in what we can observe now in the trade on Instagram versus our first foray in 2016 (published in Huffer and Graham 2017). While the previous study cannot be reproduced, it can be replicated, and we find that the trade is accelerating
Towards a Digital Sensorial Archaeology as an Experiment in Distant Viewing of the Trade in Human Remains on Instagram
It is possible to purchase human remains via Instagram. We present an experiment using computer vision and automated annotation of over ten thousand photographs from Instagram, connected with the buying and selling of human remains, in order to develop a distant view of the sensory affect of these photos: What macroscopic patterns exist, and how do these relate to the self-presentation of these individual vendors? Using Microsoft’s Azure cloud co…
A Protocol for When Social Media Goes Private
Our major project explores the discourses that surround the buying and selling of human remains over social media. We discuss the research ethics framework established in Canada by the 'Tri-Council' research agencies as it pertains to studying social media in general. Issues of privacy and consent are paramount. Human remains trading happens in both public and private social media. We detail the process we went through, and the protocol that we e…
From the Ground, Up
The exact nature of the illicit antiquities trade from ground to market in Southeast Asia remains poorly known outside of Thailand and Cambodia, where most research has been focused. This paper helps to address this imbalance by documenting and contextualizing looting activities at the Bronze and Iron Age site of Vưườn Chuối, located within urban Hanoi. A brief excavation history is provided so as to place recent looting into archaeological conte…
Morphometric affinity of the late Neolithic human remains from Man Bac, Ninh Binh Province, Vietnam
The excavation of the Man Bac site (c. 3800-3500 years BP) in Ninh Binh Province, Northern Vietnam, yielded a large mortuary assemblage. A total of 31 inhumations were recovered during the 2004-2005 excavation. Multivariate comparisons using cranial and dental metrics demonstrated close affinities of the Man Bac people to later early Metal Age Dong Son Vietnamese and early and modern samples from southern China including the Neolithic to Western …
Health and the Experience of Childhood in Late Neolithic Viet Nam
The article aims to examine aspects of mortuary behavior in late Neolithic/early Bronze Age (Phung Nguyen phase) populations represented at the site of Man Bac in Viet Nam, specifically how mortuary behavior illuminates the role of children, and adult attitudes toward children. In addition, the authors discuss biological characteristics of the human sample, focusing particularly on the child burials, in order to explore aspects of childhood palae…
Conserving the Past Through Play
According to Heritage Watch, a collaborative NGO based in Cambodia which is active in archaeological salvage work, village outreach, and education, the looting of archaeological sites in Cambodia has now reached "epic proportions."Current looting activities primarily involve Bronze Age and Iron Age (c.3500-1500 BP) burial mounds located in northeastern provinces.Perceived economic incentive and coercion of local villagers by duplicitous "middle-m…
Paralysis and severe disability requiring intensive care in Neolithic Asia
This communication documents one of the earliest verifiable cases of human paralysis associated with severe spinal pathology. A series of skeletal abnormalities is described for a young adult male (M9) from a Southeast Asian Neolithic community. Differential diagnosis suggests that M9 suffered from a severely disabling congenital fusion of the spine (Klippel-Feil Syndrome, Type III), resulting in child-onset lower body paralysis at a minimum (max…
From the Ground, Up
The exact nature of the illicit antiquities trade from ground to market in Southeast Asia remains poorly known outside of Thailand and Cambodia, where most research has been focused. This paper helps to address this imbalance by documenting and contextualizing looting activities at the Bronze and Iron Age site of Vưườn Chuối, located within urban Hanoi. A brief excavation history is provided so as to place recent looting into archaeological conte…
How Much Life do I Lose from the Plague? Educational Board Games as Teaching Tools in Archaeology and Ancient History Courses
This article describes the development, implementation, assessment, debriefing and outcomes, and potential uses of a university student-driven educational gaming project, as a major assessment item in an archaeology course entitled ‘Ancient Medicine’. Discussion of these various aspects of the project is explored in the context of educational gaming theory and practice. We demonstrate that educational board games not only represent an effective m…
The Insta-Dead
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 rem…
Fleshing Out the Bones
There is an active trade in human remains facilitated by social media sites. In this paper we ask: can machine learning detect visual signals in photographs indicating that the human remains depicted are for sale? Do such signals even exist? This paper describes an experiment in using Tensorflow and the Google Inception-v3 model against a corpus of publicly available photographs collected from Instagram. Previous examination of the associated met…
The Living and the Dead Entwined in Virtual Space
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 …
What the Machine Saw
This article represents the next step in our ongoing effort to understand the online human remains trade, how, why and where it exists on social media. It expands upon initial research to explore the 'rhetoric' and structure behind the use and manipulation of images and text by this collecting community, topics explored using Google Inception v.3, TensorFlow, etc. (Huffer and Graham 2017; 2018). This current research goes beyond that work to addr…
What the Machine Saw
This article represents the next step in our ongoing effort to understand the online human remains trade, how, why and where it exists on social media. It expands upon initial research to explore the 'rhetoric' and structure behind the use and manipulation of images and text by this collecting community, topics explored using Google Inception v.3, TensorFlow, etc. (Huffer and Graham 2017; 2018). This current research goes beyond that work to addr…
Towards a Method for Discerning Sources of Supply within the Human Remains Trade via Patterns of Visual Dissimilarity and Computer Vision
While traders of human remains on Instagram will give some indication, their best estimate, or repeat hearsay, regarding the geographic origin or provenance of the remains, how can we assess the veracity of these claims when we cannot physically examine the remains? A novel image analysis using convolutional neural networks in a one-shot learning architecture with a triplet loss function is used to develop a range of ‘distances’ to known ‘referen…
Towards a Digital Sensorial Archaeology as an Experiment in Distant Viewing of the Trade in Human Remains on Instagram
It is possible to purchase human remains via Instagram. We present an experiment using computer vision and automated annotation of over ten thousand photographs from Instagram, connected with the buying and selling of human remains, in order to develop a distant view of the sensory affect of these photos: What macroscopic patterns exist, and how do these relate to the self-presentation of these individual vendors? Using Microsoft’s Azure cloud co…
Reproducibility, Replicability, and Revisiting the Insta-Dead and the Human Remains Trade
The trade in human remains on social media happens in an ever-changing field of digital media technologies. We attempt to replicate our earlier study, exploring the differences in what we can observe now in the trade on Instagram versus our first foray in 2016 (published in Huffer and Graham 2017). While the previous study cannot be reproduced, it can be replicated, and we find that the trade is accelerating
Identity and community structure in Neolithic Man Bac, northern Vietnam
The osteology and provenance of a portion of the Parkinson collection, Gazelle Peninsula, New Britain, c. 1897
This article presents the results of combined osteological and archival research into the demographics, preservation condition, taphonomy, pathology, cultural modification, and collecting history of that specific portion of the Parkinson collection of human crania from New Britain, collected c. 1897, currently housed in the Etnografiska Museet (Ethnography Museum), Stockholm, Sweden. This assemblage of crania ( n = 45) was acquired by Richard Hei…
Shuar and Munduruku modified remains
The purpose of this communication is to present reflections on the practice of collecting Munduruku and Shuar heads from colonial contexts, their subsequent curation in global museum collections, and the importance of understanding the origins of this collecting practice considering both the existence of «forgeries» and the continued search for «authentic» examples by collectors today. Our research aims to contribute to the discussion on the impo…
When TikTok Discovered the Human Remains Trade
In the summer of 2021, a video on TikTok was heavily reposted across a variety of social media platforms (attracting conventional media attention too). Unusually (for TikTok), it was about the trade in human remains. Thus, we were presented with the opportunity to watch how knowledge of the trade exploded into broader public consciousness on a comparatively newer platform. In this article, we scrape TikTok for reactions to that moment. In our pre…
These Were People Once
These Were People Once
People buy and sell human remains online. Most of this trade these days is over social media. In a study of this ‘bone trade’, how it works, and why it matters, the authors review and use a variety of methods drawn from the digital humanities to analyze the sheer volume of social media posts in search of answers to questions regarding this online bone trade. The answers speak to how the 21st century understands and constructs ‘heritage’ more gene…
Buy One Get One
Today’s global human remains trade – how it operates on and offline, where remains come from, and how algorithmic amplification allows for complex networks to form between buyers, sellers, and middlemen – has seen an increasing amount of research and media attention. Underpinning this increasing interest is the growing realization that poorly regulated trafficking inflicts genuine psychological harm on the living (whether relatives of body donors…
Behind Closed Doors
The existence of a thriving trade in human remains online is facilitated by social media platforms. While much of this trade is conducted in fully public forums such as e-commerce platforms, the retail website of bricks-and-mortar stores, public personal and business pages on social media, etc., there also exist numerous private groups using the affordances of various social media platforms to buy, sell, and share photographs of human remains. Th…
A Protocol for When Social Media Goes Private
Our major project explores the discourses that surround the buying and selling of human remains over social media. We discuss the research ethics framework established in Canada by the 'Tri-Council' research agencies as it pertains to studying social media in general. Issues of privacy and consent are paramount. Human remains trading happens in both public and private social media. We detail the process we went through, and the protocol that we e…
To Sell or Not to Sell
We introduce the British Association for Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology’s ‘Trading and Sale of Human Remains Task Force’. This member-based subgroup started in 2016 and brings together professionals from a range of fields, including osteoarchaeology and forensic and biological anthropology, across academia, curatorial roles, and cultural heritage management. Subgroup members are concerned with and actively monitor the proliferation …
Ethics and applications of isotope analysis in archaeology
This synthesis explores specific ethical questions that commonly arise in isotopic analysis. For more than four decades, isotope analysis has been employed in archeological studies to explore past human and animal dietary habits, mobility patterns, and the environment in which a human or animal inhabited during life. These analyses require consideration of ethical issues. While theoretical concepts are discussed, we focus on practical aspects: wo…
Sociology (14 works) · History (13 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Forensic Anthropology and Bioarchaeology Studies (12 works) · History (12 works) · Archaeological Research and Protection (11 works) · Archaeology (11 works) · Social media (10 works) · Political science (9 works) · Law (8 works)