CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- After 70 years of study, the bones of nearly 2,000 American Indians have been returned to their descendants for burial in New Mexico.
Harvard University handed over the remains Tuesday in the largest and perhaps most scientifically significant transfer under a 1990 federal law that requires the return of Indian artifacts."It is a great joy," said Ruben Sando, a lieutenant governor of Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico. "I am very, very grateful."
The bones -- as well as objects to be returned from Phillips Academy in Andover next week -- were taken from excavations in the upper Pecos Valley in New Mexico by archaeologist Alfred Kidder between 1915 and 1929.
Together, they represent the foundation of scientific knowledge about the early cultures of the American Southwest, according to James Bradley, director of the Peabody Andover museum.
A century before Kidder began digging, Pecos Pueblo maintained a thriving trading center that interacted with the Plains Indians, other Pueblos and Spanish communities.
Eventually, disease and warfare decimated the Pecos Pueblo, and the Indians moved to the Jemez Pueblo in 1838. Jemez is now a small community of scattered adobe houses about 50 miles north of Albuquerque, N.M.
Kidder traveled to the Southwest to try out a new archaeological technique he'd learned at Harvard called stratigraphic excavation. He uncovered a number of sites and found thousands of objects and remains dating from the late-12th to the mid-19th century.
Scientists at Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology analyzed the remains in one of the first systematic studies of a population ever conducted.
The bones were important for research into nutrition, trauma and disease, particularly osteoporosis, according to the museum.
After the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act took effect in 1990, Bradley initiated the repatriation of the remains.
"We sent them a letter and said, 'We have a lot of your stuff,' " Bradley said. "They said, 'We know. Let's talk.' "
A ceremony Tuesday included solemn prayers, speeches, the symbolic transfer of a Pueblo bowl and the signing of a memorandum of repatriation of 1,912 human remains from the Pecos Valley in the care of the museum.
A similar return occurred last year, when the University of Nebraska returned 1,700 remains to various tribes, a move criticized by some scholars as detrimental to further research.
Descendants at the Jemez Pueblo planned a burial ceremony on Saturday in the Pecos Monument National Park.