Research Training Program

Melanie Moanike'ala Mann
University of Hawai`i Manoa
Honolulu, HI

Stephen Ousley, Ph.D.
Supervising Scientist
Department of Anthropology

"I will always reflect on this experience and know that someone believed in me and saw the potential for me to succeed"

In 1990, Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which mandated the return of American Indian human remains currently housed in federally funded museums, institutions and agencies to proper tribal representatives. This research centers on the need for museums involved in repatriation to be able to distinguish between Native American remains and those from other groups, especially Euro-Americans and African-Americans. Traditional craniometrics (skull measurements) perform reasonably well on undamaged complete specimens, but often museums are faced with the challenge of determining ancestry from fragmentary and partial remains. The utilization of non-traditional craniometrics involves the use of landmarks to calculate coordinate data that are useful in developing discriminant functions based on both complete and incomplete remains. Using a three-dimensional digitizer, landmark coordinates from skulls of 19th century African Americans and American Whites from the Terry Collection at the NMNH were taken to identify the best inter-landmark distances to distinguish between 19th century Native Americans, African Americans, and American White populations. Seventy-eight landmark coordinates were identified with 3,003 possible inter-landmark distances. The best coordinate landmarks were identified through the use of stepwise discriminant function analysis. The analysis suggested that facial and vault landmark coordinates provide the best discriminate functions between Indian and Non-Indian populations with 96% accuracy. Further examination also demonstrated that landmark coordinates on a single isolated occipital bone can easily discriminate Indian and Non-Indian populations with up to 88% accuracy.