The history of archaeological treatment of Indigenous remains in the United States is a history of dispossession that mirrors, in miniature, the broader dispossession of land and sovereignty.

The people excavating ancient burials were operating within a cultural framework that treated Indigenous people and their ancestors as objects of scientific interest rather than as human beings with communities and traditions worthy of respect.

NAGPRA was an attempt to correct that history.

Its application at Buckeye Knoll was both legally defensible and scientifically costly.

There is no clean resolution to this tension.

It persists.