The coins on the eyes of a dead person was not to keep them shut, they will not open on their own. The coins on the eyes goes way back to ancient Greece when coins were put on the eyes of dead people who were getting cremated, and the coins were meant as payment for the ferryman who rowed the spirit across the river Styx to the soul's final resting place.
Another thing about cemeteries, they are NOT forever. When I was in elementary school in the early 1950s they put in the first large housing development in our county on the site of an old farm. There was a cemetery there, maybe 80 graves, and we used to play army or cowboys and indians back in there and in the fields, the farm hadn't been in use for years and the buildings were falling down. When they put in the development they merely bulldozed the entire cemetery exposing bones and fragments of long rotted out coffins. Kids who lived the closest to the place even brought in human bones for show and tell. In this state all a developer had to do to bulldoze a cemetery on property that he purchased and now owned was to put a notice in the newspaper stating his intentions and if no relatives of those interred there came forth to claim any graves after a few notices the developer was allowed to destroy the cemetery. Progress must go on. Many towns have been built over native grave sites in this country for centuries, and in cities graveyards have been built right over. In Europe in many places people only get a grave for a time and then the bones are dug up and placed in catacombs so somebody else can be buried in the same spot since open land is so scarce. Like Hillbilly says, the Christian belief is that the soul leaves the body and the bones are a meaningless shell. After say 500 years I seriously doubt that many of our graves will still be intact as human expansion requires more space for living and growing food as has happened in areas of Europe. And as others have said, look at the thousands and thousands of graves built over or dug up in the name of science in Asia and Africa, and even here in the US. Is the grave of an ancient Chinese or Egyptian, or native American any less sacred than a modern Christian's resting place? Were these people heathens whose burial sites are not as "sacred" as modern people? For centuries many thousands of sailors have been buried at sea, does that mean people shouldn't detect in the ocean? The Zoroastrians, although not many remain have "air burials" where the remains of their dead are placed in towers for the vultures to devour, and even many folks in this country elect for cremation with their ashes spread to the wind or strewn in places they loved while alive. If your beliefs prevent you from detecting a cemetery, god bless you and follow your feelings, but please allow those who feel differently to detect old hidden and long forgotten sites in the woods without judging them, they are not really disturbing any souls or anybody.
"By the way? Do you have any gold teeth that your not using anymore?"
