DAMIEN HUFFER

Damien was most recently a postdoctoral fellow (2017 – 2019) within the Osteoarchaeological Research Laboratory, Department of Archaeology & Classical Studies, Stockholm University. During 2014 – 2016, he held the Stable Isotope Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute/Division of Anthropology. As a co-founder of ACCO and an emerging museum professional in addition to an antiquities trade scholar, he is passionate about helping to raise public awareness of the existence and complexities of the ‘niche’ market that is the global traffic in human remains.

This research forms the core of his current work that uses digital methods to improve what is known about today’s online trafficking of the dead via social media and e-commerce, in collaboration with ACCO co-founder Shawn Graham. Work of this nature is relevant to forensic anthropologists, law enforcement, museums, and Indigenous descent communities. His research also looks to the Colonial-era past to understand collecting in the present, conducting osteological research on 18th to early 20th century collections of culturally modified human remains to look ‘behind’ the often-sparse historical record.

Read his published paper:
The Mainly Nameless and Faceless Dead: An Exploratory Study of the Illicit Traffic in Archaeological and Ethnographic Human Remains

Fleshing Out the Bones: Studying the Human Remains Trade with Tensorflow and Inception

Towards a Method for Discerning Sources of Supply within the Human Remains Trade via Patterns of Visual Dissimilarity and Computer Vision

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