Research Training Program

Jessica Seebauer
State University of New York at Geneseo
Geneseo, New York

Dr. Steve Ousley, Ph.D.
Supervising Scientist
Department of Anthropology

"Only through total immersion in the scientific community can an aspiring scientist realize her potential as a researcher."

Testing Biological vs. Archival Affiliation: A Morphometric Approach to Repatriation

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990 mandates the repatriation (return) of Native American human remains currently housed in federally-funded agencies, museums, and institutions to proper tribal representatives upon request. The Smithsonian Institution, home of the largest skeletal collection in the world, has a Repatriation Office devoted to the documentation, analysis, and return of Indian remains – a process involving information from accession files, archaeological data, and other miscellaneous archival records to ensure repatriation of skeletal material to the correct tribes. However, reliance on museum records as the sole source of information regarding tribal affiliation can result in the misclassification of remains; in many cases, museum specimens can be poorly documented or misdocumented. Thus, it has become increasingly obvious that museums should use biological data—such as craniometrics—as a check against museum documents, to verify that the remains are actually affiliated to the tribes indicated. Previous research has demonstrated that digitizing three-dimensional landmarks is successful in discriminating between Native American, African-American, and European-American populations with up to 96% accuracy. This research centers on the morphometric discrimination between Native American populations and East Asian populations. This discrimination is more challenging because Native Americans are morphologically more similar to East Asians (due to a more recent common ancestor), and are therefore more likely to be misclassified as Asian than either “white” or “black” (and vice versa). Using a three-dimensional digitizer, landmark coordinates were collected from over 350 skulls of East Asian and South Pacific individuals in the NMNH collections to identify the best interlandmark distances (ILD’s) to distinguish between many groups having similar morphologies. Eighty-six landmark coordinates were identified yielding 3,655 possible interlandmark distances. The best coordinate landmarks were identified using stepwise discriminant function analysis. The analysis suggested that Type 1 landmarks (points where two bones join) provide the best discriminate functions for separation of Native American and Asiatic populations with 95% accuracy. Morphometric data collection and analysis like this is important because the presence of human remains excavated in American soil does not always indicate Native American affiliation, a point illustrated by Chinese cannery cemeteries in Alaska.

This research was supported by a grant from the Smithsonian Women's Committee.

Letter of Gratitude