Bury my bones at Wounded Knee

The next step for California's Native American Heritage Commission (created by Jerry Brown as a state-supported lobby) was to prevent future archaelogy from going forward except under the paid supervision of Indian "monitors." Legislation was passed requiring notification of the local coroner in the event that any fragment of human bone was encountered, regardless of the context of the find. Coroners, of course, consider archaeological remains to be a distraction from their job. However, the new code requires the coroner to notify the Native American Heritage Commission in Sacramento, which body will then decide (on no scientific basis whatever) who the "most likely descendants" may be, and those politically designated Indians will have authority to decide what is to be done with the archaeological finds. The legislation has been extended to include not just human bones, but all objects found anywhere nearby, and in some cases to all objects found in the ancient site, on the grounds that everything in such a context is sacred.

Conflict of Special Interests

THIS SET of laws proved to be neither intelligent nor functional, and it soon came into conflict with another set of regulations requiring environmental-impact reports on ancient sites scheduled for destruction in the building of reservoirs, freeways, or subdivisions. Such projects are generally done under serious time constraints--the project supervisor wants the archaeologist to get in, do his work, and get out as fast as possible. But if the archaeologist encounters a small fragment of human bone in a gopher mound, all work stops until the coroner and the politicians in Sacramento decide what is to be done. The coroner does not respond immediately, if at all. In one case, a deputy assistant coroner responded to an archaelogist's telephone call with "We don't want that s---, honey!" If the word does get to Sacramento, the Native American Heritage Commission also does not always respond immediately and sometimes does not respond at all. Meanwhile, thousands of dollars a day may be lost in construction delays, whatever research is needed cannot be conducted, and the intent of cultural-resource laws--to identify and study significant ancient remains--is completely thwarted. This puts the archaelogist between a rock and a hard place: if he fulfills his professional obligation to report and preserve his evidence, he is subject to prosecution; if he conceals his evidence, he is violating his code of ethics as a scholar and faces serious sanctions from his professional organizations.

Archaeology as Felony

THIS CONFLICT was brought home to David Van Horn, a PhD contract archaeologist who was used by the attorney general of California for collecting two broken grinding stones, found in a cairn of rocks piled over a grave. The bones were duly reported and deposited in a museum, but the local Indians claimed that the broken grinding stones were mortuary offerings and therefore had to be given up for reburial. Van Horn, as the archaeologist who was on the spot and knew the context, claimed that the grinding stones were merely among the the miscellaneous rocks piled over the grave, and that they were neither ritual objects nor mortuary offerings. This case of the "sacred metates" dragged through the courts, with the taxpayers paying the state prosecutors and the archaeologist defending himself at his own expense. Eventually the state won the case. The sacred metates, deposited for safekeeping in a museum, have now been there for over a year past the end of the court proceedings, without any Indian expressing any interest in reclaiming them for appropriate funeral ceremonies.