The communities descended from those remains were rarely considered to have meaningful rights over how that analysis was conducted or what was done with the remains afterward.

The intellectual framework that justified this treatment was one in which scientific knowledge was understood as universal and therefore as standing above the particular claims of specific communities — an understanding that is now widely recognized as having served particular cultural and institutional interests rather than being as neutral as it claimed.

NAGPRA represented a legislative correction to this framework, but legislation changes practice slowly and imperfectly.

The debates over the Kennewick Man remains, which played out in parallel with the early decades of ancient American DNA research, showed how difficult the transition from specimen-centered to community-centered treatment of ancient remains could be even within a legal framework explicitly designed to mandate that transition.