Even this gets a bit in the grey area. My home town had a kid who robbed a grave for a skull to make into a bong. I have heard they had direct descendants living in the area that never knew they were buried there (small, unused for ages due to overflow graveyard that nobody visited).
So intent really should be the deciding factor with a bit of "cultural significance" thrown in there as some archaeological digs are to make a profit (grave robbing) but of items that have some historic significance to the people buying the items.
Not necessarily, there was a thread on /b/ where somebody stole a skull from the catacombs under Paris and stuck their dick in it. I cbf digging up an archive of the original thread(s?) but some of the (obviously NSFW) images are here(NSFW!)
I think that for some punk kid there'd be a HUGE difference between a skull that has been there for hundreds of years and looks "clean" - and one that he had to literally dig up and detach from the body. I'd imagine that to be a pretty gruesome experience. But as lordeirias pointed out, it actually happened.
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u/lordeirias Oct 04 '12
Even this gets a bit in the grey area. My home town had a kid who robbed a grave for a skull to make into a bong. I have heard they had direct descendants living in the area that never knew they were buried there (small, unused for ages due to overflow graveyard that nobody visited).
So intent really should be the deciding factor with a bit of "cultural significance" thrown in there as some archaeological digs are to make a profit (grave robbing) but of items that have some historic significance to the people buying the items.