Module 2:
Lecture 2.1: Descendant communities in the United States:
- Who Owns the Past?
- At least 3 groups make claims
- What are the groups
- What is the basis of these claims
- Archaeologists
- Indians
- Relic Hunters and Collectors
- Moral claims
- The Role of the Law
- Do Other countries have these conflicts?
- Australia
- Aborignial groups abject to archaeolgoical groups on human remains
- Latin America
- Western Europe
- Who speaks for Tribes, Archaeolgists, and Relic Hunteres
- Tribes?
- Tribal Governments
- Native American Rights Fun
- Association on American Indian Affairs
- National Congress and American Indians
- Archaeologists
- Society for American Archaeology
- Relic Hunters
- ?
- Antique Tribal Art Dealers Association
- Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA)
- Two parts
- Museums
- Ongoing excavations and inadvertent discoveries
- Key definitions
- Native American
- Cultural Affiliation
- Indian Tribe
- Cultural Affiliation
- Relationship of shared group identity that can be reasonably traced between an
identifiable earlier gorup and a federally recognized tribe
- Identifiable earlier group
- Modern tribe
- Traceable relationship of shared group identity
- Identifiable Earlier Group
- How would we establish the existence and identity of these groups
- Archaeological Tratdions or “cultures”
- Anaszi, Hohokam, and Mogollon
- Chaco and Mimbres
- Native American Traditional Histories (oral traditions)
- Museum Collections (using NAGPRA)
- Are they in museums or universities or held by a Federal agency?
- No - NAGPRA does not apply
- Yes - are the items human remains, funerary items, sacred objects, or objects of
cultural patrimony?
- No - NAGPRA does not apply
- Yes - Are the items Native American?
- No - NAGPRA does not apply
- Yes- is there cultural affiliation with some tribe?
- Yes - Culturally Unidentifiable Human Remains (CUHR)
- No - Is there a claim from a culturally affiliated tribe?
- Yes - slaimant tribe determiens disposition
- No - museum holds items awaiting claim
- Inadvertent Discoveries Under NAGPRA
- Are remains Native American
- No - NAGPRA does not apply
- Yes - is it Federal or Indian land?
- No - NAGPRA does not apply
- Yes- Are there lineal Descendants?
- Yes - Repatriate to Lineal Descendants
- No - is it Indian land?
- Yes - repatriate to land-owning tribe
- No - Is their cultural Affiliation
- Yes - Repatriate to Culturally Afilliated Tribe
- No - Is it on an adjudicated land claim
- Yes - repatriate to Aboriginal Lands Tribe
- No - unclaimed Remains
- Kennewick Man
- Found during hydroplane race on Columbia River
- Falls under inadvertent discoveries
- 8500-year-old “Caucasoid” skeleton found
- Claimed by tribal consortium
- ACOE prepared to turn over the skeleton
- A group of physical anthropologists sued
- District and the Appeals Court - not “Native American”
- Remains not Repatriated
- Indians and Archaeologists
- Shared interests
- Anti-Looting
- Historic Preservation
- Land Claims, Water Rights
- History, broadly understood
- Conflict
- Repatriation?
- Archaeology?
- A lot depends on the history of interaction
- Be Sensitive to Language
- Traditional History
- Myth, Legend, Story, Oral Tradition, Oral History
- Abandonment
- Working Together - Lyman Lake
- Recorded and interpreted Rock Art
- Excavated a 14th C Pueblo
- Developed shared interpretation for the Park
Lecture 2.2: Preservation of Archaeological Sites:
- 5 Threats to Archaeology
- Threat 1 - Developmental Pressures
- Encroaching urban development at Giza, Egypt
- Threat 2 - Unsustainable tourism
- Damage caused by too many visitors
- Giza, Egypt
- Teotihuacan
- Threat 3 - Insufficient management
- Many visitors cause damage (destruction, graffiti)
- Afghanistan
- The government struggled to protect ruin from Taliban
- Threat 4 - War and conflict
- Recent wars in the middle east have taken a toll on archaeological sites
- Syria, Iraq
- Threat 5 - Looting
- Many sites have valuable objects
- Looting and the destruction of sites
- Destruction of sites to get artifacts
- The international market for ancient art
- Private collectors have big collections
- Many museums look the other way
- Looting in the U.S.
- Easily able to tell the difference between looting sites and Archaeological sites
- Who owns the past (or, Who controls archaeological sites and artifacts?
- Six categories
- Who owns the past?
- A1: commercial, private ownership
- A2: National patrimony (owned by nations)
- A3: Government organization (universities, Museums, agencies)
- Aztec Pulque cups on display at Smithsonian
- A4: other public institutions (museums, private universities)
- A5: Descendant communities
- A6: Other ethnic or social groups
- How should we view ancient art and artifacts?
- Art objects owned and enjoyed by wealthy collectors
- Art or scientific objects available for enjoyment by the public
- Scientific objects that provide evidence about ancient peoples
- The commercial antiquities market: auctions
- How much money is involved?
- Maya vase : 300,000 dollars
- Egyptian sculpture: 3,000,000 dollars
- Who are the looters?
- Mostly poor rural people in the developing world
- Sometimes organized crime is involved
- Should archaeologists study and publish objects in private collections?
- Pro:
- We gain new information about important objects
- We enlarge the sample of known objects
- Con:
- Research by scholars increases the commercial value of individual
objects (and types of objects)
- This stimulates further looting and contributes to the market for antiquities
- The trade-off between knowledge and site destruction
- Potential damage: higher prices; more looting
- Amount of useful knowledge provided by an object
- These get into a bar graph
- A Mimbres pot; Do not publish this
- A Maya vase with hieroglyphs: a tough decision???
- The Rosetta stone: do not ignore major breakthroughs
- Ethics Statement, Society for American Archaeology
- Stewardship
- Accountability
- Commercialization
- Public Education and Outreach
- Intellectual Property
- Public Reporting and Education
- Records and Preservation
- Training and Resources
Video 2.1: Archaeology of the Human Experience:
- New york times got many Politzer prizes
- One of them was for the photos taken from people on boats coming from Greece
(refugees)
- She wants to understand the conditions of people's lives in the past
- Human suffering
- Wrote a paper on human suffering but got completely rejected
- It's not just suffering now, its how can you get an experience more broadly
- United National Development Program
- In 94 they came up with 7 dimensions known as humans security
- Food
- Health
- Economic
- Community
- Environmental
- Political
- Personal
- Study how did this effect one of the 7 dimensions
- In the book, its got 4 components
- Understanding the conditions of life (what are people doing all day)
- Relating those conditions to socio-cultural things(how did it change over time)
- How did it change over time
- When we can get insights into what people actually felt
- She argues that we can get into conditions
- When you think of occupations what do you think of?
- How long someone has been at a site (e.x. these people occupied this place for
1000 years)
- She had to write in a way so that people were the subjects of her sentences
- People in Mese Verde moved to the Tawa in New Mexico
- Scott Ortman
- Scott used all seven dimensions
- He figured out ways to measure all of them
- For economic
- He used a measure of a ratio of what they call normal goods to necessary
goods
- He found that things were not very good before they left the Mesa Verde region,
over tie 50 years later all the things got better
- The main thing that got better was that Warfare was not there
- There was a lot of warfare in the Mesa Verde region
- They left because things were bad, when they left they were able to reinvent their
lives and society
- Mike Smith is researching the components of earlier societies and modern societies and
comparing them
- Elites have more access to stuff
- Poor people are pushed toward the worst parts
- Deb martin
- Bio-archaeologists
- Studies skeletons
- She's trying to understand the causes of violence in different settings and places
- Ex. Looking into what is it like to get hit in that part of the hard
- What were people's experiences of the injuries
- The main canals
- Absolutely enormous
- A lot of labor hours
- Dave abbot
- Data on pots
- Somehow the pots moved
- Her students are doing calculations on how many pots moved and how much they weigh
- There's an article describing all the things that would have contributed to smells
- What it is saying is that what life is like is a good topic for research
Video 2.2: The Role of Museums:
- Chip Colowell
- Museums host over 850 million visits each year
- Countries and people want their artifacts back
- U.S. museums have returned more than 1 million artifacts and 50,000 sets of
native American skeletons to the Native Americans
- Zunis
- Scriptures they created were used for protection
- They want their shrines back
- They were called war gods
- Native American graves were brutalized in order to just take their skeletons
- He worked with the Denver Museum of Nature and Science to give back native
American artifacts and rebury skeletons
- Repatriation is part of museums
- War gods represent a chance at a new beginning
- Hannah MasonMacklin
- Killmonger knew more about the Wakanda object that the curator
- Museums are built to show off wealth
- Objects in museums were stolen from other cultures
- She launched a museum in progress
- Used to decolonize the museum space
- Museums can be building blocks of social healing
Video 2.3: Undocumented Migrant Project
- Undocumented people have names and stories just like the rest of us
- Jason De Leon
- Anthropologist
- University of Michigan
- He's found people leave things behind by migrants
- He collects all the things that the migrants leave behind
- There was a girl who was a relative of Jose that was found dead by Jason
- A lot of people have these stories and some have disappeared through migration
- He wants the general public to think about the names and faces of the thousands
of individuals who have died during migration
