Nothing to say, yet
Transcription
The Windover site in America is an interesting case study. It was discovered by a construction worker who found 7,000-year-old human remains. The site also contained well-preserved organic artifacts. However, research on the bodies and artifacts has been halted due to legal discussions about the treatment of Indigenous American remains. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) requires consultation with tribes before handling such remains. This presents a challenge for archaeologists and anthropologists in understanding and respecting Indigenous beliefs and cultures. The Kennewick Man case study, a 9,000-year-old body, sparked a debate on how to handle ancient remains. Native Americans view him as an ancestor and hold him in high spiritual regard. After years of argument, he is now being repatriated to tribes in Washington for reburial and proper treatment. Approximately six months ago, I watched a video on my free time that introduced me to one of the most interesting case studies we have here in America, the Windover site. The site was discovered in 1982 by one Steve Vanderhoek, who has absolutely nothing to do with archaeology and was actually just a construction worker working on a housing development in the Florida Everglades when he discovered a real-life human skull in his backhoe bucket. After a small run to the Florida State Highway Patrol to make sure he hadn't just uncovered a murder, the developers turned the site over to Florida State University and Dr. Glenn Duran, who did three seasons of excavations and the things he found were astounding. As it turns out, Mr. Vanderhoek had actually discovered some of the oldest and best-preserved remains on the Western Hemisphere. In total, 168 7,000-year-old burials were discovered from the peat bog. In total, 168 7,000-year-old burials were recovered from the peat bog, with 91 of them containing specimens so well-preserved, we can still see the medicines they took before their death and the hemispheres of their brains. Alongside these burials was a large collection of organic artifacts, which, if you know anything about Southeastern American archaeology, you know that organic artifacts are not something we find usually, as our soil is far too acidic to preserve bone and wood and cloth, all of which are present at the Wendover site. These factors make the Wendover site truly unique, yet if you were to walk away from this podcast right now and try to find information about the context yourself, you would find approximately two preliminary studies done by Dr. Durand himself, one containing the brains and one containing the stomach contents, and many, many secondary analysis of those original two studies, but no new research done on the bodies or the artifacts recovered with them. You see, in 1990, these burials have been stuck in a collections facility in Florida State University, while there is a complicated series of legal discussions about the proper treatment of the bodies. In 1990, new law surrounding the treatment of Indigenous American remains, called the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA for short, went into place. The original case study surrounded the demolition and development over a Native Hawaiian cemetery and functions to keep the remains and ancestors of Indigenous populations safe. These laws come after literally hundreds of years of appalling practices by both people in my own field and others that totally disregard Native American belief systems in history The law requires that any excavations that yield remains or funerary items that are linked to a tribe are then to halt excavations and ask for a consult from said tribe in order to figure out what the respectful and proper way to handle the context is. This creates a, which in Eastern, which in Eastern United, which in the Eastern United States almost always means a burial due to the belief systems held by Native Americans. This creates a tricky situation for us as archaeologists and for us as anthropologists because our job is to protect and understand the beliefs and cultures related to the artifacts we discover. This is an incredibly hard situation to navigate, especially when it comes to contexts like the Wendover bodies, which are pretty ancient by anyone's standards. To really understand the way NAGPRA operates, I'd like to draw your attention to another and arguably more famous case study, the Kennewick Man. The Kennewick Man is a body that was discovered in Washington State that is 9,000 years old. For many years, he was the oldest remains we had in North America, and some still argue that he is. That's a whole drama we won't get into right now, but when he was first discovered, it was a very hot-button topic on what the procedure would be for handling a body so old, so old that it is probably an ancestor for multiple tribes in the area and predates any sort of current culture we have today. Many of my colleagues and other researchers argued that the body was old enough to not be related to any tribe directly, but Native Americans had a different idea. This body was something that could have been a progenitor. This body is something that could be a progenitor for multiple tribes in the area. In fact, they refer to him as the Ancient One and hold him in incredibly high spiritual regard. Many of these Native populations hold very high spiritual regard. For many years, there was a bitter argument about what the proper handling of this body should be. Many of my colleagues, unfortunately, argued hard that his remains should remain excavated for research and studies done in the future, while Native American populations disagreed vastly. In their belief, to properly hold reverence for the dead, he must be reburied. Very recently, he was actually discovered to be genetically linked to tribes in Washington, and he is going to be repatriated, or given back to those tribes for reburial and proper treatment.
