The Reburial of the Southwest

The desire to understand humanity’s past is as old as civilization itself, and archaeology and anthropology have long been the disciplines that make key insights possible. By studying ancient bones, tools, and artifacts buried beneath the soil of North America, scientists have reconstructed migrations that occurred thousands of years before written history, traced the rise and fall of ancient cultures, and uncovered clues about how climates and ecosystems changed over millennia. Museums and universities have acted as the custodians of this fragile record, preserving it not only for scholars but also for the public, ensuring that the story of the continent’s earliest inhabitants could be seen, studied, and understood not just today, but by future generations as well.

Now the work of preserving the past is increasingly at risk, threatened by a dangerous mixture of good intentions and harmful ideology.

In 1990, Congress attempted to reconcile the scientific process of analyzing archaeological artifacts with concerns raised by Native American tribes about the treatment of ancestral remains. The result was the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, a law intended to address past abuses while preserving the ability of museums and universities to continue studying materials that could not reasonably be connected to modern, federally recognized tribes. In theory, the statute represented a compromise: Sacred objects and identifiable ancestral remains would be returned to tribes while other artifacts and extremely ancient materials would remain available for research and public education.

In Arizona, state law designates the Arizona State Museum (ASM), located at the University of Arizona, as the official reporting authority when human remains or archaeological artifacts at least fifty years old are discovered. As a result, the museum plays a central role in determining how NAGPRA is interpreted and applied across the state.