scholarly journals Dance of the Dead: A Legal Tango for Control of Native American Skeletal Remains

1990 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 115 ◽  
Author(s):  
John E. Peterson
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Skeletal Remains ◽  
The Dead

Working for the Living and the Dead

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Soren Blau
Keyword(s):  
Forensic Science ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Human Identification ◽  
Skeletal Remains ◽  
Personal Identification ◽  
The Political ◽  
Missing Persons ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Timor Leste ◽  
The Dead

Forensic science and medicine play a critical role in human identification, with the underlying premise being that ‘the truth’ can be empirically and objectively obtained. This chapter explores some of the approaches to exhumation and identification undertaken in Timor-Leste and discusses some of the complexities associated with scientific reason and the notion of the construction of ‘forensic truth’. The difficulty of establishing personal identification from skeletal remains in Timor-Leste is discussed in the context of large numbers of missing persons, the fact that atrocities took place in multiple locations over a 24-year period, and the fact that there is limited local forensic capacity. In addition, the ways in which the process of identification is understood is discussed in light of different notions of ‘truth’, highlighting the political, social, and ethical complexities at play.

A Bronze Age battlefield? Weapons and trauma in the Tollense Valley, north-eastern Germany

Antiquity ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 85 (328) ◽  
pp. 417-433 ◽  
Author(s):  
Detlef Jantzen ◽  
Ute Brinker ◽  
Jörg Orschiedt ◽  
Jan Heinemeier ◽  
Jürgen Piek ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Skeletal Remains ◽  
Human Skeletal Remains ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Eastern Germany ◽  
North Eastern ◽  
Braided Streams ◽  
The Dead

Chance discoveries of weapons, horse bones and human skeletal remains along the banks of the River Tollense led to a campaign of research which has identified them as the debris from a Bronze Age battle. The resources of war included horses, arrowheads and wooden clubs, and the dead had suffered blows indicating face-to-face combat. This surprisingly modern and decidedly vicious struggle took place over the swampy braided streams of the river in an area of settled, possibly coveted, territory. Washed along by the current, the bodies and weapons came to rest on a single alluvial surface.

Salvaging the Symbol in Muriel Rukeyser's The Book of the Dead

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 323-346
Author(s):  
Bryn Tales
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Ancient Egypt ◽  
Class Action ◽  
Asiatic Society ◽  
Historical Materialist ◽  
Hydroelectric Dam ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Book Of The Dead ◽  
Poetic Response

The essay seeks to set the framework by which we may appraise the efficacy of the salvaging strategies employed by Muriel Rukeyser's poetic response to the Hawk's Nest Tunnel Disaster in West Virginia in her collection, The Book of the Dead (1938). In seeking to reclaim the lost experiences and objects of exploited miners, Rukeyser's project to salvage their anonymous suffering at the hands of capitalist greed places her as an artist within the historical materialist tradition outlined in Walter Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History (1942). The Book of the Dead explores the legacy of European capitalism's displacement of the Native-American ‘Asiatic’ society as delineated by Marx in the Grundrisse (1939). It is argued that Rukeyser aims to salvage the signs and materials of industrial conflict, such as the insurrectionary figure of John Brown, in order to begin to create the ‘always-unfinished symbol’ against the misappropriating machinations of capitalism, continuing the work of poets such as Herman Melville. The essay argues that Rukeyser's symbolic framework which aims to spur the subjective worker to action through imagination invokes a ‘Hydraulic state’, as in ancient Egypt, inspiring a quasi-religious submission to the higher unity of the hydroelectric dam and those who died creating it. Finally, we explore the implications where this spur to collective working-class action depends upon the consciousness of the human conduit: the irony at the heart of Marxist autonomy.

scholarly journals Following The Milky Way Path of Souls

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
William F. Romain
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Computer Simulations ◽  
Mississippi River ◽  
Milky Way ◽  
American City ◽  
East Side ◽  
Cardinal Directions ◽  
Night Sky ◽  
The Dead

Cahokia was a major Native American city on the east side of the Mississippi River, across from the modern-day city of St. Louis, Missouri. Cahokia flourished from c.1050 AD to c.1250. In this paper archaeoastronomic and ethnohistoric data along with computer simulations are used to explore the idea that the Cahokia site axis and the Rattlesnake Causeway were intentionally aligned to the Milky Way. It is proposed that this alignment accounts for the peculiar 5° offset of the site from the cardinal directions. Following Sarah Baires, it is suggested that Rattlesnake Causeway was a terrestrial metaphor for the Milky Way Path of Souls used by the deceased to cross to the Land of the Dead. Rattlesnake Mound at the end of the Causeway is suggested as a portal to the Path of Souls. According to ethnohistoric accounts, the Land of the Dead was guarded by a Great Serpent – suggested here as visible in the night sky as either the constellation Serpens or that of Scorpius.

scholarly journals Florida Bioarchaeology: Past, Present, and Future

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shevan Wilkin ◽  
Kristina Killgrove
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Time Scale ◽  
Human Remains ◽  
Skeletal Remains ◽  
Research Topic ◽  
The State ◽  
Human Skeletal Remains ◽  
Modern Methods ◽  
General Field ◽  
Future Work

In an effort to situate the bioarchaeology of Florida within the general field, we synthesize in this article past and current research and offer prospection for future work with human remains in the state. We first detail the beginnings of archaeology in Florida, and the initial public and governmental interests regarding the area’s past occupants. Next, it is essential to consider regional and taphonomic issues in preservation of human skeletal remains and then summarize the time scale of bioarchaeological work. Past and present research programs in Florida bioarchaeology are then discussed in depth by research topic, including questions asked and methods used. Where possible, we note the location at which skeletal collections are currently stored. The future of Florida bioarchaeological study in an era following the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) is also explored, including how new alliances between tribes and researchers can open a path to utilizing modern methods on previously excavated ancestral materials and new collections.

Conquered Landscape in the American West

Linguaculture ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 2011 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Irina Chirica
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
American West ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
The West ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Western Expansion ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Future Policy ◽  
Historic Significance

AbstractThe paper traces the history of “conquered landscape” back to the original European colonists and the Puritans. We discuss the contribution of Thomas Jefferson as an architect of Western expansion through the purchase of the Louisiana territory and the mapping of future policy regarding the settling of Western territory. We cover the major moments in the settling of the West and their historic significance. We discuss Frederick Jackson Turner’s concept of the West as “a succession of frontiers” versus revisionist historian Patricia Nelson Limerick’s concept of conquest and conquered territory. The second part of the paper deals with the Native American view of the land, with reference to Paula Gunn Allen’s ideas and Leslie Marmon Silko’s novels Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead. Silko juxtaposes two different kinds of space, Native American versus federal space. The Native American and Anglo-American views of nature are contrasted and explained, with the discussion of aspects of native removal, reterritorialization and misrepresentation.

Cosmovisions

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joni Adamson
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Significant Influence ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Native American Studies ◽  
Indigenous Literature ◽  
Transnational American Studies ◽  
Slow Violence ◽  
The Dead

This article examines the issue of environmental justice and cosmovision in transnational American studies and indigenous literature. It contends that Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera had significant influence on the politicized multiculturalism in foundational American Studies texts and early ecocriticism. It also argues that these works served as the bases for the concepts of “traffic in toxins” and “slow violence” and that they also contributed in redefining the questions that shape Native American studies and its relation to American Studies.

scholarly journals The repatriation of the Palaeoamericans: Kennewick Man/the Ancient One and the end of a non-Indian ancient North America

BJHS Themes ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 79-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANN M. KAKALIOURAS
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Native American ◽  
North America ◽  
American Indian ◽  
The United States ◽  
Skeletal Remains ◽  
American People ◽  
Family Tree ◽  
Human Skeletal Remains ◽  
Genetic Results

AbstractThis article considers the repatriation of some the most ancient human skeletal remains from the United States as two sorts of ending: their end as objects of scientific study, and their end as ancient non-American Indian settlers of North America. In the 1990s, some prominent physical anthropologists and archaeologists began replacing ‘Palaeoindian’ with the new category of ‘Palaeoamerican’ to characterize the western hemisphere's earliest inhabitants. Kennewick Man/the Ancient One, a nearly nine-thousand-year-old skeleton, convinced some anthropologists that contemporary Native American people (descendants of Palaeoindians) were not biologically related to the very first American colonists. The concept of the Palaeoamerican therefore denied Native American people their long-held status as the original inhabitants of the Americas. New genetic results, however, have contradicted the craniometric interpretations that led to these perceptions, placing the most ancient American skeletons firmly back in the American Indian family tree. This article describes the story of Kennewick Man/the Ancient One, the most famous ‘Palaeoamerican’; explores how repatriation has been a common end for many North American collections (Palaeoindians included); and enumerates what kind of ending repatriation may represent materially and ethically for anthropological science.

Personhood and Re-Embodiment in Osteological Practice

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
John McClelland ◽  
Jessica I. Cerezo-Román
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Medical Profession ◽  
The Body ◽  
Cultural Resources ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Scientific Authority ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Or Groups ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Dead

The repatriation movement in the USA has had a profound impact on how human remains are viewed by osteologists and archaeologists. Federal repatriation legislation, including the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA, PL 101–610; 25 U.S.C. 3001 et seq., 1990) and the National Museum of the American Indian Act (NMAIA, PL 101–185; 20 U.S.C 80q et seq., 1989) have led museums to transfer control of collections to affiliated descendant communities. Similar laws have been enacted in the states (e.g. A.R.S. §41–844, §41–865 [Arizona]; Cal. Health and Saf. Code, §8010, et seq. [California]; La. R.S. 8:671, et seq. [Louisiana]; Me. R.S. 13:1371– A [Maine]), with some preceding federal action and others a response to it (Seidemann 2010). Ancestral skeletal remains and objects were once regarded as cultural resources under the authoritative control of scientists (Colwell- Chanthaphonh 2009: 6–12). The struggle for the rights of indigenous people and others to determine disposition of ancestral remains challenged scientific authority and led to self-reflection on the part of the profession. Osteologists and archaeologists were reminded that they are dealing with deceased persons and that their actions are socially constructed manipulations of the dead, not unlike the work of other mortuary practitioners. This work is inextricably concerned with reconstructing identities. This involves both an effort to characterize the identities of past individuals or groups in life and to transform the dead anew, creating new identities for a variety of audiences. The process of identity reconstruction may be considered a re-embodiment of the person and that process is what this chapter is about. We illustrate this discussion with a case study of the analysis and repatriation of individuals exhumed from the Alameda-Stone Cemetery, Tucson, Arizona, USA. We use this example to show how individual and community identities are formed, neglected, transformed, and reconstructed in a large multicultural burial assemblage. The human body is universally regarded as an aesthetic object and an inseparable component of personal identity, but its value as an object of scientific inquiry is perhaps uniquely emphasized in Western thought. Once restricted to science and the medical profession, interest in the materiality of the body has now found a much broader audience.

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