The team that investigated Buckeye Knoll — centered at Coastal Environments Inc., the consulting archaeology firm that conducted the excavations under contract to the Army Corps of Engineers — worked under the pressure of an engineering project timeline and the increasingly complicated legal and political environment of the repatriation debate.

Bob Ricklis, the lead archaeologist, produced analyses and reports that documented the extraordinary nature of the site even as negotiations over the fate of the remains were ongoing.

The physical anthropologists who analyzed the skeletal populations from both sites — working from the bones directly, measuring and observing the biological evidence encoded in the remains — faced the knowledge that their access to the materials was finite and might end abruptly.

Their work had to balance thoroughness with speed, detail with the constraints of time and access.