K8Carleton

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Hello, K8Carleton, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Ian and I work with Wiki Education; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.

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If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 14:37, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Moundville Archaeological Site Human Remains Controversy

I am working on this for my student class project.

In accordance with the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), institutions such as universities and museums are required to document any discovered human remains and return them to the appropriate indigenous tribes. However, there is debate surrounding if modern tribes have a substantial claim to the human remains found at American excavation sites .

In the case of Moundville, currently 7 tribes are laying claim to the 5,892 human remains that have been excavated there. Those tribes being:

• The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma • The Chickasaw Nation • The Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana • The Muscogee (also known as the Creek) Nation • The Alabama-Quassarte Tribal Town • The Seminole Nation of Oklahoma • The Seminole Tribe of Florida

All of the tribes claim that they are culturally and/or linguistically descended from the culture that lived in Moundville . Therefore, the tribes want to have custody of the artifacts and human remains that were excavated in Moundville returned to them, where they will then decide what to do with them. Often times, the remains are ceremonially reburied according to the respective tribe's traditions. Many believe that the exhumation of the graves to be unethical and disrespectful. However, having autonomy of the human remains does not mean that research on the remains will not be allowed, as many research institutions claim. However, many institutions hold onto the artifacts, claiming that the tribes mentioned are not culturally and linguistically similar enough to the culture that inhabited Moundville, and that the remains may be crucial for future research.