Indian Skeletal Remains Pit Scientists Against Tribal Religion

The backhoe load of human skulls and bones scooped up last spring at a construction site on Maryland’s Eastern Shore may have looked a bit grisly, but to anthropologists it was a beautiful sight.

The remains appeared to be those of 30 to 40 Choptank people who lived near the Chesapeake Bay between AD 900 and AD 1400. Their bones, the scientists said, offer a sort of snapshot of ancient life in the region.

Not since the early 1960s had anyone in Maryland found a mass-burial pit, or ossuary.

To present-day Indians, the prospect of scientists’ handling the bones--perhaps cutting into them for laboratory analysis--was disturbing, if not horrifying.

“I certainly don’t want to see my relatives’ bones on a shelf,” said Bobby Little Bear of Columbia, Md., a member of the Osage tribe. “Ask somebody else if they want to see their grandmother’s bones in a glass case.”

Indians welcomed the state’s excavation of the remains to save them from destruction, but because of a dispute over what to do with them, the bones have been sitting in 18 boxes in an office in Annapolis, the state capital.

Archeologists want to conduct a non-destructive analysis they say will take several months. Tribal leaders, including one man who says he is descended from Choptanks, want to rebury the bones immediately.

“What if a scientist said, ‘We want to do a study of people in Arlington National Cemetery?’ ” asked Kevin Harley of Waldorf, who heads the Maryland Commission on Indian Affairs, a state advisory group. “People would say that’s a sacrilege and never allow it.”

The discovery in Caroline County has added to a nationwide emotional conflict over who has first claim to ancient skeletal remains. Scientists see them as precious links to the past, but contemporary Indians regard them as ancestors who should be returned to Mother Earth.

Maryland has no law on the matter. With more and more fields and forests being bulldozed for development, further disputes are bound to arise.

In the last year, increasingly vocal Indian groups have wrested some of the estimated 600,000 remains from museums, universities and even roadside tourist attractions.

In September, for example, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington agreed to allow Indians to reclaim materials from among its 35,000 tribal American remains and artifacts. Recently, the Calvert County Museum approached Maryland’s Indian commission and offered to return a skull.

“Museums have had these remains for so long. They got them from back when Indians were killed on the battlefield,” said Patricia L. King, executive director of the state Indian commission. “They hacked away at the bodies; there was no science to it.”

Maryland archeologists and state officials, however, say that their analysis will be professional, done with respect and could be completed in about six months. They say they understand the Indians’ belief that the bones must be allowed to disintegrate so the souls can complete their journey to the Great Spirit.

“But the journey being interrupted a month versus six months is about the same, as far as I can see,” said J. Rodney Little, state director of historical and cultural programs.

Members of the commission appealed Little’s decision to his boss, Jacqueline H. Rogers, secretary of the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development. In October she ruled in favor of Little.

The Indians, she said, could draw up guidelines to ensure that the remains are handled with respect. She also established a policy that the state would excavate remains only if they are somehow endangered.

“This is an issue where people’s feelings run very deep,” Rogers said. “Both sides are pretty polarized.”

The debate quickly rekindled the Indians’ abiding outrage over their treatment at the hands of European settlers. That the bones of their ancestors should be unceremoniously dug up to make way for a shopping center or a housing tract seems the final indignation, they said.

“It’s the last thing left to do to us,” said Mervin Savoy of Indian Head, Md., tribal chairwoman for the Piscataway-Canoy Confederacy and Sub-tribe. “Our people have suffered too much at the hand of progress. No other people in the world are on display.”

It is a painful dispute, as well, for archeologists and physical anthropologists, who said they cannot understand how their scientific curiosity has made them vulnerable to charges of everything from ethnocentrism to grave robbery.

“Indians who don’t know . . . their religion and claim this reverence to the past are in an all-out war with me and my colleagues, who have devoted our lives to studying them,” said Al Luckenbach, Anne Arundel County, Md., archeologist.

“It does make me feel uncomfortable,” said Richard B. Hughes, chief archeologist for the department’s Division of Historical and Cultural Programs. “You would think we would be the most likely groups to work together, but we’re at loggerheads on this one.”

The commission estimated that 25,000 Indians live in Maryland, about 7,000 of them in Prince Georges, Charles and St. Marys counties and the rest in Baltimore and along the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake. Most Maryland Indians are Piscataway. Other native tribes include the Nanticoke, Susquehanna, Shawnee and Delaware.

The battle over the bones is posing problems for federal and local officials, as well as museum directors. Several bills to protect such early remains are pending in Congress, and several states have passed laws.

In Maryland, the Caroline County bone cache has made clear the need for the law to establish who has the right to unmarked burial remains, both sides agree.

“There’s got to be something done, because there will be more and more development,” King said. “Suppose a site is disturbed by a developer. Can archeologists excavate? Who’s going to pay for it? Who pays for reinterment?”

Little, the Indian commission, historians, archeologists from the Maryland Historic Trust and others have been trying to draft legislation that would protect both marked and unmarked graves.

Some of the issues: Must an Indian show direct descendance from the dead to claim remains? Should artifacts found at Indian burial sites also be reinterred? Should Maryland research institutions give up their collections of Indian remains?

In the Caroline County case, the analysis will be conducted by a physical anthropologist under contract with the state, who will measure and sort the bones according to age, sex and stature as well as evident diseases, injuries, dietary habits and other physical characteristics, archeologist Hughes said.

Some Indians are skeptical about the value of such research.

“What could this analysis tell me? How some Choptank woman lived? That she ate wild rice? Well, so do I. Big deal,” Savoy said.

Others, such as Little Bear, see the value of research “as long as some cute little archeologist doesn’t stick (any of the bones) in his pocket.”

But they almost all abhor the idea of “destructive analysis,” by which pieces of bone are subjected to laboratory tests. Some archeologists, however, said that such testing, which is still being developed, could provide insights into the Indians’ genetic makeup and immune systems. The sacrilege, they said, is not in disturbing the bones, but in reburying them.

“If these materials were (reburied), we would lose the chance to use these techniques,” said Douglas H. Ubelaker, curator of anthropology for the Smithsonian.

The state’s archeologists wanted to reserve the right to conduct destructive analysis, but now they say they won’t do it, Rogers said.

When both sides try to step away from the immediate battle, they see the larger war the same way--as the age-old conflict between science and religion.