Why should we protect the human past?

Cultural Resource Management[/pb_glossary] (CRM) relies on an understanding of what makes culture important and distinct from one human community to another. Archaeology relies on excavation and other scientific methods to understand the culture of ancient societies and answer questions about contemporary societies. As technology advances, archaeologists are not relying as much on excavation as we can also use less invasive methods to study sites and reduce site destruction.

The National Park Service uses a term known as Traditional Cultural Properties (TCP) which refers to geographical places of great shared cultural importance through multiple generations. (See Traditional Cultural Places and Indian Sacred Sites to learn more about TCP in the United States.) When we know the location of these TCP, we can avoid them out of respect. That is, archaeologists can decide not to excavate an area  to protect ancestral remains and culturally significant artifacts (objects used and made by humans) from destructive forces. Unfortunately, not everyone shares this belief in the importance of preservation and some sites are destroyed intentionally through looting (illegally removing objects from sites) by people hoping to find economically valuable artifacts.  This is in addition to natural forces that cause damage to these sites, for instance, erosion due to wind and rain. In this chapter, we will examine some of the major techniques of Cultural Resource Management and archaeology so you can understand how science works to preserve ancient cultures in contemporary times and, more importantly, why we should protect the human past.

Back in the mid-1990s, archaeologists at the national Society for American Archaeology (SAA) created and adopted a series of “9 Principles of Archaeological Ethics” that guide our actions throughout our research, including at field sites. This 7-page document is updated periodically and reminds us of our responsibilities as scientists and as protectors of land and culture. (Here is the document if you would like to learn all the details of these principles – Principles of Archaeological Ethics.) For this chapter, we will focus on the first three principles from this document.

• Principle 1 is about stewardship and helps us focus on preservation and protection of the human past, remembering that the accurate interpretation of the archaeological record relies on a respectful relationship with the descent communities. These are the people most directly related to the ancestors we uncover in our research.
• Principle 2 notes that archaeologists are accountable. That is they need to make every reasonable effort to actively consult and work with descent groups, ensuring clear lines of communication throughout the process so that there are no misunderstandings or mistrust.
• Principle 3 focuses on commercialization, or the use of the artifacts that are found as commodities that can be sold for profit or personal enjoyment. The market for these artifacts, which is often illegal, has resulted in the destruction of archaeological sites and of the information that the context of these sites can provide to better understand these societies. Looting believes in the idea of “finders keepers,” which is the opposite of the scientific research carried out by archaeologists that is based on preservation and education (Society for American Archaeology 2024).

As archaeologists, we rely on knowing a wide variety of natural environments as well as the peoples who lived and sometimes still live in a location. We need to know where we are, or are NOT, allowed to work and study within archaeological sites which requires getting permits and establishing collaborations with local institutions and communities. Before we begin looking at how archaeologists work at these sites to promote the principles of stewardship, accountability, and protection from commercialization that we noted above, we need to go back and learn about how the first scientists who practiced archaeology created this field.

For much of the history of archaeology, and anthropology more broadly, we focused on collecting and collections with an emphasis on salvage ethnography. The idea of salvage ethnography is that field anthropologists would interview members of a descent community. The goal was to gather as many personal histories, myths or sacred stories, and linguistic notes as possible before the Indigenous communities or earliest known civilizations in a specific locale disappeared. Salvage archaeologists, for their part in these investigations, focused on obtaining the cultural materials from the descendent communities as well as from archaeological excavations. Most anthropologists received proper training and gathered all the necessary information to keep the materials intact such as the name of the owner, the materials, and perhaps even the process of creating the object. Some salvage archaeologists systematically gathered data which is still available for reference today. This combination of well-trained anthropologists and careful data collection help us to figure out the cultural patrimony which refers to all the aspects of culture a community owns, which is built on that community’s past, whether it is through written records, material culture, or oral histories.

Cultural patrimony can be difficult when it comes to nonmaterial culture such as stories, songs, and performances, but identifying material culture as belonging to just one society can also be challenging. Many nations who lived close to one another shared raw materials and conducted economic trade of finished goods. Additionally, as people moved, techniques traveled from one community to another through intermarriage which reminds us that there are many ways for artifacts to move among communities. New types of technologies are providing clues in the creation of the objects that help us to narrow down a projectile point, such as an arrowhead, to the Pacific Northwest, the Great Lakes region, or the Southwest. Ancient trade routes such as evidence of trade between Ireland and the U.K. based on Cornish gold. Learn more from this article link Archaeologists Discover Evidence of Prehistoric Gold Trade Route.

While the concept of protecting these objects of cultural patrimony goes back to the early 1900s, the use of the term CRM shows up for the first time in the early 1970s. Archaeologists in the United States historically worked for the government or for research institutions such as museums or universities, but an increasing number of these archaeologists founded their own firms, working alongside construction companies and for transportation organizations as contract archaeologists. Instead of working for the Department of the Interior or the Bureau of Land Management, the archaeologists of the 1970s began to create their own projects and train their students to do the same.

Most international protections of archaeological sites and artifacts are administrated through UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. The relevant legislation is the UNESCO Convention of 1970 on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property.  This is an international treaty, which regulates the import and export of cultural objects. Two years later, in 1972, the Convention Concerning the Protection of Cultural and Natural Heritage first created World Heritage Sites.  A World Heritage Site is recognized by UNESCO as having cultural, historical, and/or scientific significance to humanity as a whole, and is protected by international treaty. To access some wonderful resources through the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), please go to this website where you have access to four PDFs to explain practical ways to manage World Heritage Sites – Managing Disaster Risks for World Heritage. This will help you better understand the preservation practices in practice at places such as Machu Picchu in Peru, the Parthenon in Greece, the pyramids of Giza in Egypt, and ancient temples throughout Southeast Asia (Figure 1).

Early archaeologists relied on paper maps and local knowledge of important locations. Now that we have advanced technologies like GPS and satellite maps of the surface of the Earth, we can anticipate and proactively protect ancient Indigenous sites like Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado (Figure 2). There are no Indigenous populations living in this National Park today, and archaeologists are still debating the reasons that these sites were abandoned in the past.

When the National Park first opened in 1906, long before it became a protected site in 1978 thanks to UNESCO, people helped themselves to artifacts and wandered all over the property, doing irreparable harm during this looting. That damage means we have lost archaeological knowledge forever, and descent communities have lost their physical links to their ancestors. To learn about the descendent communities associated with Mesa Verde who are related to the Ancestral Puebloan Nations who left over 700 years ago, see The 26 Associated Tribes of Mesa Verde.

Now, both tourist and scientific access is limited, and any artifacts discovered are claimed by the museum on site. There is a timeline from the 1700s to the present to learn about Mesa Verde’s history – Important Events in the Development and Preservation of Mesa Verde National Park (National Park Service 2024).

In addition natural processes can uncover previously hidden archaeological sites. In the early 2000s, a wildfire in the National Park exposed some living sites previously unknown to archaeologists. Learn more about those fires and the aftermath at Mesa Verde from a non-scientific point of view in the article After the Fires, (Gaug 2001). Since these sites had not previously been examined, specialists came in to investigate which were the sacred (religiously important to a culture and/or its descent community) sites and which were the secular (everyday, non-sacred) portions.

Scientific and Humanistic Approaches

In anthropology, we separate our research approaches into two major categories: the scientific approach and the humanistic approach. As you might imagine, the scientific approach is very data-driven, where we emphasize statistics and categorization. At a site like Mesa Verde, how many lithic (tools made of stone) points are there? How many of these points are made from stone available in the local area? How many are made from non-local sources and were perhaps traded from other locations? How many of these points show wear patterns? What do those wear patterns indicate about their use? To answer some of these questions, we might rely on the following scientific approaches to create ideas about Mesa Verde’s past secular (everyday, non-spiritual) activities:

• Source analyses of the stone’s chemical composition
• Experimental archaeology

Such methods allow us to reconstruct the technological past and think about the human behaviors that moved and modified the lithic materials.

How do we use the humanistic approach properly in archaeology? After all, if archaeology is the study of the human past, we need to include the specific humanity of the population and focus on learning everything we can about their culture (the behaviors that are shared and learned). We need to discover their demography (their population statistics such as adult vs. juvenile; healthy vs. sick; etc.) as well as their behavioral patterns such as how they processed and stored their food, with whom they traded, etc. While demography offers data-driven, research-based information about cultures, we cannot learn as much as we would like about individual lives of people within a population. The main exception to this is when there are precise written records available from primary sources (evidence left by the people at the time such as documents and other artifacts).

Sacred sites mean that for a culture, specific areas were treated differently by the community. Some sacred sites were used every day while others were used just for special purposes, such as initiation ceremonies (changing social status within a group from outsider to insider or child to adult). Some were private and inside buildings while others were meant to be accessible to everyone in the community. How do we know from studying these sites that they are sacred, and why does this matter to Cultural Heritage?

Sacred sites are important locations for a society, as they offer cohesion for the social system, especially in times of stress. Some sacred sites may be in the midst of secular areas, like burials within a trash midden. Other sacred sites will be apart, both physically and emotionally, from the secular parts of life. For example, in the middle of the holiest part of a site, but we might also find burials, objects of special value, and even ways to protect the sacred space from accidental discovery (hidden behind several sets of doors, for example).

Secular sites, while important to daily community life, can be rebuilt by smaller groups. If there is a house fire, another house can be constructed. However, it is much more challenging to recreate a sacred place for the origin of a culture (ethnogenesis) or a temple site for belief system no longer practiced or practiced in different ways. The biggest challenge is that we need to know which sites, or parts of sites, are the most important to the descent group before we perform analysis. If that community has been gone for generations or centuries, the challenge to identify the sacred spaces might be too large for us to tackle.

Even if a culture no longer lives in their original homeland, they might still have descendants whose rights and beliefs need to be respected. Just because someone follows the traditions of a specific religion, does not mean that they practice their faith the same way every other member of that religion does. Faith is personal in practice and belief. It is important to keep the humanistic approach in mind when collecting data since every discovery is potentially part of someone’s life, whether we know the descent community or not.

There are a lot of questions about who has the right to say whether archaeologists should work with descendent communities or if we should stay away. Each community knows what they want to accomplish, and if they are looking for an archaeologist to set up a CRM program for a sovereign native or indigenous Nation, there will be a job posting. Keep in mind the layers of laws you will need to be familiar with, from local jurisdictions as well as international mandates. Ethics are just the beginning of the challenge.

Examples from CRM

While there are many private CRM firms across the country, working usually with construction companies, one of the largest employers of archaeologists in the State of California is the State itself. The two biggest employees for CRM specialists include the California Department of Transportation (CalTrans) and the California Department of Fire (CalFire).

One of the major reasons that CalTrans hires so many archaeologists is that the State is constantly building and upgrading the roads and highways, leading sometimes to the uncovering of native and other historic sites. The more we know ahead of time which societies lived in which specific areas, the better our chances of either avoiding starting construction in that location, or we can form a plan to excavate and move materials from sites if necessary. If artifacts need to be removed, there are several components to this relocation: who on the crew will excavate the actual artifacts and ancestral remains, and where will all the finds go at the end of the project? Each project has its own mitigation plan.

An example is the 41 Tehama Street, San Francisco project completed before a towering high-rise luxury apartment building was constructed. Sonoma State faculty and students helped with the archaeological work in downtown San Francisco in the middle of the business district. By doing this work, they learned about the modest everyday lives of Gold Rush residents in this part of the city. Based on a combination of historical maps and a wide variety of artifacts, archaeologists determined details of the lives of individual families. The David A. Fredrickson Archaeological Collections Facility at Sonoma State houses those objects, including children’s toys. To learn more, see 41 Tehama Street, San Francisco (Anthropological Studies Center 2018).

CalFire, of course, is interested in mitigating damage done by fires as well as avoiding them in the first place. While the emphasis is protection of human life, CalFire also is tasked with making sure properties are safe. If employees can work with archaeologists and descent communities to identify and protect archaeological sites well in advance of fire season, then firefighters can focus on keeping destruction to a minimum if burns begin. CalFire creates maps of places most likely to burn based on past events such as previous years’ fires, but they also need to track fast-moving wildfires spurred on by winds. It benefits the departments to have people trained in the identification and protection of archaeological sites so firefighters can focus instead on the crisis at hand.

The more human activity spreads out into geographic locations that are not sustainable for year-round water and food resources, the more difficult it is to reach those communities in times of disasters. The more we can plan ahead of time which archaeological sites need protection (and which should be left alone), the more CalFire can focus time on action plans.

One major challenge with creating these maps of sacred spaces is once the map is published, it usually becomes public. More often those maps end up as PDFs online for people to search and print. That means absolutely anyone, from construction crews to vandals, knows where important archaeological sites are. As you can imagine, that leads to increased challenges with protecting these sites from destruction. We are in a catch-22: if we do not have the maps, in cases of emergencies, we cannot know where to focus our attention; however, having the map means everyone knows everything about a specific locale. One possible solution is to create the maps and provide them only to emergency services.

Another challenge in reading an archaeological site is the introduction of invasive species (species introduced intentionally or otherwise that take over an ecosystem), which do not act in the same ways as the original landscape. California is packed with eucalyptus trees from Australia which are incredibly flammable. Eucalyptus comes in, as do fig trees, take over an ecosystem, then their roots crowd out the native plants, the burn patterns change (especially with the eucalyptus oil being so flammable), and it changes the landscape of archaeological sites in California.

It is important to keep in mind that Indigenous peoples throughout the world relied on fire technology long before European Contact. In fact, the reason that places like Yosemite ended up so lush is that the local Native Nations (Paiute, Miwok, and Ahwahnechee) used traditional methods to keep plants, trees, and grasses from overgrowing (Figure 3). Understanding the time of year and the proper conditions required for a successful burn meant that Native peoples in the past consciously managed the conservation of the landscape. You can learn more about native versus later ideas about natural resource management in an article titled How John Muir’s Brand of Conservation led to the Decline of Yosemite (Johnson 2014).

Experts such as Professors like Dr. Don Hankins from California State University Chico continue to practice Indigenous burning techniques today, modeling them for the next generations and for CalFire to better perform controlled burns. Here is about his work with traditional burning in California: Lighting Cultural Fires (Hannibal 2014).

Similar projects exist in areas of Australia and Canada. In Australia, since it is such a large continent with hundreds of different Aboriginal Nations, there were different techniques for using traditional fire management that encouraged wildlife to return as well as plants to drop open seeds for germination. To learn more about the methodology still used today, check out this webpage on Bush Heritage Australia Fire Management. We may not think of Canada as having similar challenges as California or Australia, but as another country with widely varied ecosystems, the reliance on Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) helps to save lives every year. Working with descent communities to restore ‘buffalo jumps’ similar to ones used by the ancestors means burning grasses to bring back new growth to encourage buffalo to feed near hunting places. To learn more about the variety of ways First Nations (the Indigenous Nations of Canada) continue to use their burning technology, please see Indigenous Fire Management and Traditional Knowledge.

What if we do have some sort of natural disaster headed our way: typhoon, volcano, earthquake, forest fire (hopefully not all the above)? Step one: archaeologists are not going to remain in the field trying to save a site. We cannot protect sites from disasters of any size. We might have spent time removing materials from a natural disaster previously just to deal with this all over again.

For example, there was a volcanic eruption in AD 79 at a site known as Pompeii in Italy. Today, that same volcano – Mt. Vesuvius is still active. Archaeologists need to constantly make decisions about where and why to excavate further along with how to display, preserve and curate what has already been uncovered. Why would an archaeologist make the decision NOT to excavate? Remember that as soon as material is exposed, it breaks down much faster than if skeletons, for example, remain in an anaerobic (without oxygen) environment. Think about how much time and money it takes to excavate an entire city and all its contents.

There is an entire Roman city at Pompeii that the ancient world knew about due to trade routes and city planners; historical records indicated exactly when Mount Vesuvius erupted and covered much of the surrounding area. There were even maps of the city itself and we know the exact location of the different homes, businesses, and roads in the city. The problem is that we do not know the exact use of every artifact found within the walls of Pompeii. We can make interpretations based on other objects from other cities, and that is the biggest clue. Yet, we must also keep in mind that this is a place where many peoples’ ancestors lost their lives and in some ways, it is also an unplanned graveyard.

Ethical Display of Human Remains

A big question is how do we treat the ancestral remains with respect? What did the ancient Pompeiians believe about the afterlife and human remains compared to contemporary Italian cultural norms? The predominant religion in Italy today is Roman Catholicism which widely displays relics (personal items, including bodies, of religious people) in public. Is it permissible to have bodies on display since these people died naturally and were not buried? Often it is the decision of the local populations whether or not to display human remains. For now, the people in Southern Italy encourage tourists and archaeologists alike to visit Herculaneum and Pompeii,  leave many of the casts and bones on public view and allow photos to be taken of the dead (Figure 4).

Another example are the naturally occurring mummies that can happen under ideal conditions around the world: tannin-filled peat bogs. The National Museum of Ireland’s Archaeology building in Dublin, Ireland has several bog bodies on display. As an anthropologist, it’s awe-inducing to see when nature has the perfect combination of tannins to preserve the ancestral remains and some of the artifacts, but not everyone would like to see human bodies on display. The museum set up the exhibits brilliantly where, if you wanted to just read the signs and learn about the artifacts and ancestors, you could. However, you would have to move off the main path to reach the actual bodies and could not accidentally come across them.

It is fantastic to realize that many of our archaeological finds are pure coincidence: many bog body stories begin with peat farmers preparing their land and finding arrowheads/pottery/gold hoards/human remains (not all in the same place). If we are lucky, the farmers stop, call the local law enforcement (especially if there are human remains) so that all the evidence is in situ. However, this is not always the case. Sometimes the peat farmers only have part of a body since they were cutting up large chunks of peat for fuel. In any case, we would like everything to remain where it was so that we show up so we can systematically excavate. The best museums may even set up their display to mimic the original provenience (the location of everything at a site) so that visitors experience an authentic reproduction of the site.

In the high terrain of the Andes, finding mummies requires more effort and luck than plowing a field. It might mean climbing up mountains and dealing with strong winds, mud, and altitude sickness, as well as language and cultural barriers. In some cases, local descent populations know exactly where these sacrifices were made but not necessarily how long ago.

As a scientist, what will you learn about these naturally mummified individuals? They are primarily young women of good health and high status. We can tell their high status biologically from the wear on their teeth, the lack of multiple fractures on their long bones as well as general health of the skeletal materials compared with other ancestors from that period. We are especially lucky with high altitude finds since that lack of oxygen leads to more organic materials remaining intact, including stomach content. We will rely on bioarchaeology (learning from skeletons both their life and death stories) to estimate approximate age at death as well as health, height, and cause of death in some cases. We can tell their high status socioeconomically from the artifacts surrounding them: the quality of their clothing and the quantity of the jewelry they are wearing are straight-forward indicators of their family’s wealth.

Here is where the story becomes more complicated. We also know that the women ingested large amounts of narcotics before they died, because the evidence remains in their system, but did they take this willingly or were they forced or coerced into taking the chemicals? When did they understand they would become a sacrifice to protect their entire population? How much fear did they have, and were they scared enough to try to run away? Perhaps some people think this is not scientific. Some people may think there is too much speculation involved at this point. This is your choice as an archaeologist how much cultural interpretation you want to include, but the facts show that there are levels of coca in her system that date back one year before her death as well as alcohol. Based on the large quantity of both alcohol and coca in her body at the time of death, she probably did not feel pain as she slipped away. To learn more about these women, please check out this article from Nature – Incan child mummies show evidence of sacrificial rituals. (Hayden 2013). (WARNING: link contains photographs of ancestral remains)

Both scientific and humanistic approaches to archaeology can be labeled according to the general theoretical approaches of processualism and postprocessualism, respectively. Processualism is the scientific approach in which we catalog the approximate age, approximate health, the biological sex based on the skeleton, the number of artifacts, and the approximate year the victim died. Postprocessualism uses a humanistic approach to present individual lives. For example, telling us about the victims personally which helps outsiders to connect with their stories, but those details are not guaranteed to be as accurate.

In both these case examples from Ireland and the Andes, even though their landscapes may be completely geologically different, CRM practitioners would have parallel training in how to identify and preserve these culturally significant sites. The reality is that when mummies are involved, as with any ancestral remains, we are most likely going to remove them for safe keeping until they can be returned to their descendant group or protected in a museum. These will be the same challenges for archaeologists working with Native sites in the United States.

NAGPRA and the Protection of Cultural Heritage in the U.S.

Finally, one of the most important recent pieces of legislation for anthropologists and ethnohistorians is the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). It “address[es] the rights of lineal descendants, Indian tribes, and Native Hawaiian organizations (parties with standing) to Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony (cultural items)” (Bureau of Reclamation 2021). In compliance with the act, for example, the federal agency titled the Bureau of Reclamation submitted a Reclamation Summary Report in 1993, five region specific inventories by the statutory deadline of 1995. They also note several inadvertent discoveries and intentional excavations of NAGPRA cultural items have occurred since 1990.

The main purpose is to include affiliated groups when you encounter indigenous ancestral graves or remains. Our desires to do science are not the primary concern. These are someone else’s relatives, and under the law and under our code of ethics, we should not pursue scientific studies without consultation. It is not that forensic anthropologists and bioarchaeologists cannot work with Native ancestral remains; it is up to Native Nations to ask for trained scientists to identify their ancestors, if they choose to seek that kind of help. Non-Indigenous scientists do not get to decide what is appropriate and what is not.

It is important that archaeologists learn the four major categories of protection under this law so that when excavating, we pay special attention to the following:

1. Protect graves with Native American ancestral remains (in some cases, this might mean the respectful removal of the ancestors to another location
2. Consider the grave goods (materials buried with the dead) to be sacred and to be protected as well
3. Protect items of cultural patrimony (objects that belong to a specific culture and have meaning for them)
4. Ensure that sacred sites are protected, like the ground surrounding the burials, which we would refer to as cemeteries.

The idea is to protect the materials still in the ground, and by law, repatriate (return) any of the items that have already been excavated. NAGPRA does not have mechanisms to punish those who break the laws. As with other federal laws, the strength of the act is in its application by museums, colleges, universities, and other public institutions. Despite the best intentions of the legislators who enacted NAGPRA in 1990, there are some serious restrictions. For example, if the land or the stakeholders who have possession of the ancestral remains are privately owned and not under federal jurisdiction, there is no protection under NAGPRA. If the Native Nation is not federally recognized, or the materials are in Canada, Mexico, or overseas, NAGPRA cannot directly protect the remains or objects. NAGPRA only applies to the United States; each nation has its own sets of regulations to protect their Indigenous ancestors and cultural materials. We would need to rely on other laws, local or international, to help preserve the materials for repatriation.

Since NAGPRA was enacted in 1990, archaeologists have been incredibly careful in their excavations and research to avoid disturbing Native sites. That is why partnerships such as with CalTrans and CalFire are so important, because once those maps are created to indicate sacred and other important spaces, those maps can be shared with archaeologists and construction firms. A combination of working closely with tribal councils and an increased number of Native archaeologists has reduced the damage we have done to Indigenous cultural and ancestral remains.

Each Native Nation creates a taskforce or working group where all members are trained in the details of NAGPRA as well as local laws in addition to their tribal laws. The goal is to create a handbook that lists exactly what steps need to happen when someone calls to alert the task force that something might have been discovered. Some of these groups also train site monitors to work at construction or archaeological sites, so that a team member already knows the proper procedures to follow. Failure to follow the law can end up with a construction firm losing their license or an archaeological team to be censured. This is a small enough community that word gets out quickly when someone is unethical.

How do museums, colleges, and universities repatriate what is already in their possession? Much like the Native Nations, each college and university with a museum or other type of collection must also be aware of the rules of NAGPRA and the consequences for not following the letter and the spirit of the law. One of the biggest challenges for repatriating the ancestral remains or the sacred objects is a lack of paperwork. When there is a donation or addition to a museum, the intake paperwork is supposed to include all the significant information. For anything Native, that should include the name of the Native Nation and the exact location of the original find. When archaeologists retire from a college or university, if they do not leave a copy of their fieldwork notes behind, there may be no way for their colleagues to know the details. When we find handwritten notes that say, “Northern Alaska” or “Plains”, then this information is too broad to allow us to initiate a consultation with the correct Nation. However, we at least have a clue of where to begin.

How have Native Nations worked with museums and anthropologists to repatriate materials respectfully? Let’s focus on the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) and its three locations in New York, Maryland, and Washington D.C. (Figure 5). Its board of directors includes native leaders from across the continent who know NAGPRA and other related legislation. Only the Maryland facility houses ancestral remains. Before the D.C. location opened to the public, the Smithsonian held a series of consultations with tribal leaders who were invited to look at their portion of the collection. The goals were to make sure that everything was legal under NAGPRA, ensure objects with special cultural limitations were housed properly (e.g. objects that could be seen by men only, women only, initiated members only, etc.) or identify items for repatriation through the NMAI repatriation process.

Protecting Ancestors Outside the United States

What are the laws in places across the world that parallel the NAGPRA process? Let’s look at examples of ancestral remains found elsewhere in the world.

Just like native nations in the United States, there are hundreds of Australian Aboriginal Nations. Some descendent communities are from a specific area. Other groups moved seasonally such as the Tasmanian Aboriginal Nations of Australia. To help you understand the enormity of Aboriginal land, here is a map created by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies: Map of Indigenous Australia. Each descent community knows their own funeral rites through personal experience, but what about ancestral remains from tens of thousands of years ago?

Kow Swamp (Figure 6), located in southeastern Australia, became archaeologically significant in 1974 with

the discovery of an ancestor known now as Mungo Man. Immediately people wanted to know how long ago he lived. Archaeologists discovered he is tens of thousands of years old; he lived 42,000 ago. He matters to archaeology, because at the time, he was the oldest human found in Australia. To Indigenous Nations of Australia, he is significant because he is an ancestor to his people. Like many other important discoveries, his find was unexpected and welcomed by the scientific community. It makes sense, of course, to search near freshwater areas since that would be an important resource for survival. To find someone so old and so intact is largely due to the way his people buried him, protecting his remains for millennia.He was not the first individual found in that area. The area has access to freshwater which is an important resource for survival in the bush. Archaeologists also discovered the cremains (cremated remains) of Mungo Lady in the late 1960s. Her repatriation took place in 1991, while scientists waited to return Mungo Man to the closest descendent population in 2017. Learn more about their discovery and, more importantly, their repatriation in the BBC News (2017) article Mungo Man: Australia’s oldest remains taken to ancestral home.

Recent Wars

What about identifying and repatriating the war dead?

The Japanese military maintained a WWII Prisoner of War (POW) camp in Cabanatuan Prison Camp on the main island of Luzon in the Philippines. While there are maps of the camps and the surroundings, there are still prisoners who have not yet been identified after all these decades. In places like the Philippines where thousands died on battlefields, historians know exactly who began battles, so the point is to return remains to families where possible. Typhoons and earthquakes can accidentally unearth those who died and were buried on the battlefields. In those cases, we may not find entire skeletons or enough of the skeleton to return them to their closest relatives. You can learn more in the article Challenges to Identifications of the Cabanatuan Prison Camp Cemetery Remains (Megyesi 2019).  In tropical places like the Philippines, the combination of storms, jungle settings, and time passed since burial combine to destroy many of the skeletons long before recovery is possible. To learn more, here is an article from the University of Queensland Australia (2017) about the specific challenges of retrieving these bodies Body of Evidence.

Rwanda turned on its own people in the Civil War from 1990 to 1994, when the Hutu and the Tutsi killed each other in a horrible genocide where there were more similarities among the peoples than differences. Rwanda had to deal with admixture (when multiple human remains are mixed) which led to challenges in repatriating the dead. What do we do about mass graves (places where multiple sets of remains have been buried or covered) and what we find there? The approach to removing the dead in Rwanda needed to be systematically scientific since prosecutors needed all the possible pieces of evidence to bring charges against the perpetrators from the 1994 Civil War. Then the victims might be returned to their families based on personal effects and DNA if they could be located. To learn more about the history of the Rwandan genocide, visit Rwanda Genocide: 100 days of slaughter. (WARNING: this link includes some photographs and video of the ancestral skeletons as well as some ancestors wrapped in shrouds and war scarred victims).

Engaging in Archaeology Today

Archaeology has changed a lot over the years. One key piece of this change has been an overwhelming shift across much of the field towards protection of and preservation of cultural (archaeological) resources and the landscapes in which they are found. Recent changes have also included a wide variety of approaches to archaeology that focus on sustainability, community, education, relevancy, and social and environmental justice, including “who owns the past?” Crucially, this means many modern approaches to archaeology not only work to critically engage with that question and the power differentials so long connected to it, but also to explore the archaeological record through perspectives and forms of knowledge often ignored or silenced in the past and in the present. Finally, archaeology is building its capacity to reveal, address, and redress social injustices, including those archaeology as a field has committed in the past or continues to commit today. Some of the ways we think about doing this are through:

• Preservation Archaeology moves beyond a desire to protect and preserve culturally important resources, and involves actively working to do so. This can include working with various groups to seek legal protection for archaeological sites, educating the government and the public on the value such resources have to descendent communities and the general public alike, and raising funds to purchase and limit access to cultural sites and landscapes.
• Activist Archaeology could look like many things in practice, and has been defined as “the use of our craft to generate knowledge about the past in order to use that information to create action in the present and make a more humane future” (Barton 2021:2).
• Indigenous Archaeology is “an expression of archaeological theory and practice in which the discipline intersects with Indigenous values, knowledge, practices, ethics, and sensibilities, and through collaborative and community-originated or -directed projects, and related critical perspectives. Indigenous archaeology seeks to (1) make archaeology more representative of, responsible to, and relevant for Indigenous communities; (2) redress real and perceived inequalities in the practice of archaeology; (3) inform and broaden the understanding and interpretation of the archaeological record through the incorporation of Aboriginal worldviews, histories, and science” (Nicholas 2008:1660)
• Engaged Archaeology is also often called Community Archaeology and is based on a belief that projects should be driven by the needs and interests of a community or should at the very least fully engage with and involve the community in the work. This is more than inviting local peoples to participate in excavations, in that the goals are about creating archaeological projects that truly matter to the community and can bring benefits to the community in one way or another. Engaged archaeologies also incorporate the skills, knowledge, and perspectives of a variety of scholars well outside of anthropology to create more holistic understandings of the past.

Archaeology is not an easy science. No science guarantees outcomes, and many times we end up with more questions than answers. Archaeology is like a jigsaw puzzle where there is no reference picture, no known number of pieces, and no way of knowing if you have completed the challenge. However, it is an amazing interconnected field with opportunities for people who are interested in humans and human experiences. That is why it is so important for us to act ethically at all stages of our archaeological work, from making connections with descent communities before we begin projects (and maintaining those relationships throughout the work) to publishing thoughtful, accurate information that can impact generations to come.

 

Note: This chapter was adapted from a beta version of Traces.

Kristina Casper-Denman teaches anthropology at American River College in Sacramento. Her career began in primatology with fieldwork in Costa Rica and chimpanzee sanctuary work and continued in Native American Studies with an emphasis on educational sovereignty. While she was involved with Neanderthal fieldwork in southeastern Spain, her primary archaeology emphasis has been with repatriation of NAGPRA collections in Arizona and California. Her life goal is to visit as many natural history and archaeology museums as possible, especially if someone else will fund those trips.

Part of this chapter is from Traces by Whatcom Community College and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

References

Anthropological Studies Center (2018) “41 Tehama Street, San Francisco.” Sonoma State University Projects and Publications, March. http://asc.sonoma.edu/projects/41-tehama-street-san-francisco

Barton, Christopher P. (2021) Introduction. In Trowels in the Trenches: Archaeology as Social Activism, edited by Christopher P. Barton, pgs 1-19. University Press of Florida.

BBC News (2017) “Mungo Man: Australia’s oldest remains taken to ancestral home.” November 17.  https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-42020675

Bureau of Reclamation (2021). “The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act
(NAGPRA).” https://www.usbr.gov/nagpra/

Gaug, Maryann (2001) “After the Fires: Mesa Verde National Park.” Cyberwest, September 5. https://cyberwest.com/mesa_verde_fires/

Hannibal, Mary Ellen (2014) “Lighting Cultural Fires: Let it burn.” Boom, Fall, Vol 4, No 3. https://boomcalifornia.org/2014/09/24/lighting-cultural-fires

Hayden, Erika Check (2013) “Incan Child Mummies Show Evidence of Sacrificial Rituals.” Nature, July 29. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature.2013.13461 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2013.13461

Johnson, Eric Michael (2014) “How John Muir’s Brand of Conservation Led to the Decline of Yosemite.” Scientific American, August 13.  https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/primate-diaries/how-john-muir-s-brand-of-conservation-led-to-the-decline-of-yosemite/

Megyesi, Mary (2019) “Challenges to Identifications of the Cabanatuan Prison Camp Cemetery Remains.” Forensic Anthropology Vol. 2, No. 2: 113–121. DOI: 10.5744/fa.2019.1014 http://journals.upress.ufl.edu/fa/article/view/834/1016

Nicholas, George. (2008) “Native Peoples and Archaeology.” In Encyclopedia of Archaeology, vol. 3, edited by D. Pearsall, 1660-1669. Academic Press.

State of California (2024) “Cultural Resource Management.” The Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. https://www.fire.ca.gov/what-we-do/natural-resource-management/environmental-protection-program/cultural-resource-management

University of Queensland Australia (2017). “Body of Evidence.” Contact, summer. https://shorthand.uq.edu.au/contact-magazine/summer-2017/body-of-evidence/ 

Further Exploration

After the Fires: Mesa Verde National Park, by Maryann Gaug: https://cyberwest.com/mesa_verde_fires/

Archaeologists Discover Evidence of Prehistoric Gold Trade Route, University of Southampton: https://phys.org/news/2015-06-archaeologists-evidence-prehistoric-gold-route.html

Fire Management, from Bush Heritage, Australia: https://www.bushheritage.org.au/what-we-do/landscape-management/fire

Important Events in the Development and Preservation of Mesa Verde National Park: https://www.nps.gov/meve/learn/historyculture/stories.htm

Indigenous Fire Management and Traditional Knowledge: https://www.ictinc.ca/blog/indigenous-fire-management-and-traditional-knowledge

Lighting Cultural Fires, by Mary Ellen Hannibal: https://boomcalifornia.org/2014/09/24/lighting-cultural-fires/

Map of Indigenous Australia: https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/map-indigenous-australia

National Museum of the American Indian: Repatriation: https://americanindian.si.edu/explore/repatriation

Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act, Bureau of Reclamation: https://www.usbr.gov/nagpra/

Principles of Archaeological Ethics, Society for American Archaeology: https://documents.saa.org/container/docs/default-source/doc-careerpractice/saa_ethics.pdf?sfvrsn=75f1b83b_4

Rwanda Genocide: 100 days of slaughter: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-26875506

The 26 Associated Tribes of Mesa Verde, National Park Service: https://www.nps.gov/meve/learn/historyculture/upload/26meve_associated_tribes_508.pdf 

Traditional Cultural Places and Indian Sacred Sites, US Bureau for Land Management: https://www.ntc.blm.gov/krc/uploads/646/GuidetoTCPs&SacredSites.pdf