Under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), museums must offer Native American human remains to tribal authorities upon request. Because museum records can be incomplete or incorrect, physical anthropologists must also use biological data - morphometrics - as a check against museum documents to verify that the remains are indeed of Native American ancestry. This is extremely important, as the presence of white individuals has been detected among Native American remains slated for repatriation (Ousley et al. 2000).

Interlandmark distances (ILDs) of cranial landmarks have proven useful for distinguishing Native Americans from African-Americans and European-Americans (Mann and Ousley, 2001). But what about distinguishing Native Americans from Asians? This distinction is more challenging because anthropologists have traditionally grouped Native Americans and Asians into "Mongoloids" because of shared features such as a "flat, moonlike face, nasal overgrowth, and zygomatic (cheekbone) projection" (Bass, 1995). This research focuses on the morphometric distinction between Native American and Asian populations. The practical application of this research was demonstrated on a sample of probable Chinese excavated in Alaska by an amateur archaeologist.

Materials and Methods

Using a Polhemus 3D digitizer, landmark coordinates were collected from over 350 Asian individuals in the NMNH collection. Eighty-six landmark coordinates were identified, yielding 3655 ILDs. These data were combined with Native American landmark data from the NMNH Repatriation database. The best ILDs using Type 1 Landmarks (unambiguously defined points where sutures meet) to discriminate among groups were identified using stepwise discriminant function analysis (DFA). Data from males and females were combined by converting ILDs to Z scores based on sex-specific means.

Errors in the Archives?

THE KARLUK CASE STUDY

NMNH records indicate that skeletons of Chinese were excavated in 1931 from the site of the Karluk fish cannery (KFC) cemetery on Kodiak Island, Alaska. Were they really Chinese immigrants who worked in the Alaskan canneries during salmon season? Who made this determination and should we trust it?

Mrs. Laura Jones, the wife of the Karluk cannery superintendent, excavated the remains and mailed them to Dr. Ales Hrdlicka, curator of Physical Anthropology. Jones told Hrdlicka that the remains were Chinese, a point that he never questioned. However, Jones did not have a background in anthropology, and she based her assumption on sketchy cannery history and the presence of a "pig tail" on one of the men.

Before testing the ancestry of the Karluk crania, we needed to digitize known Chinese in the collections. However, while recording data to test the Chinese heritage of the Karluk remains, we discovered an outlier (225011) among other Chinese. A DFA of Chinese and 19th century American Whites classifies this individual very strongly as White, though he is labeled "Chinese".
When we performed a DFA for Chinese and Alaskan groups, we found that the Karluk remains are very likely Chinese.

Though Jones' designation of ancestry is correct, many human remains, like the Karluk remains, are inadequately documented with respect to ancestry.

This demonstrates that anthropologists must keep a high index of suspicion when evaluating the cultural affiliation of human remains, especially within the context of repatriation. Testing biological affinity against museum records provides a surer method of assigning or confirming ancestry.

Asian and North American Dendrogram

Clustered using centroid linkage and Euclidean distance (D squares)

The dendrogram details the relative relationships between Asians and North Americans. The East Asian group includes Chinese, Japanese, and Siberian Buriat and Chukchi individuals. Note how the East Asians are morphologically most similar to Alaskan natives than to the Mongolians, another Asian group. The Mongolians are quite divergent from the other populations.

Discriminant Function Analysis:

Analyzes all variables simultaneously, maximizes the differences among population groups, and determines the best variables by which to discriminate among different populations. In this study, the best variables to distinguish between populations centered around the zygomatic (Figure 5 from Woo, 1937).

Results

• The Karluk remains are different from Alaskan Eskimos, Indians, Aleuts, and Koniags, and are very similar to East Asian groups such as Chinese and Japanese. Therefore, it is far more likely that the Karluk remains are indeed Chinese.
  
• From a total of 233 ILDs, Stepwise DFA identified the 16 distances which were best at discriminating among Asian and Native American populations. These ILDs centered around the interorbital and zygomatic region, a finding consistent with Woo (1937), who demonstrated the value of the zygomatic in differentiating populations.
  
• DFA showed that Native Americans and Asians can be distinguished easily, and that Mongolians are especially divergent from East Asians and Native Americans; thus, the grouping and label "Mongoloid" makes little sense, as Brace (2000) also concluded.
  
• A 2-way DFA separated Native Americans from Asiatic individuals 94% correctly. Individuals that were misclassified include the Chukchi and Alaskan Eskimos, perhaps representing a later migration to the New World or more recent gene flow across the Bering Strait.
  
• A 4-way DFA of Africa, Europe, Asia, and North America correctly assigned population 94% correctly when jacknifed (Figure 4).

Conclusions

The Nearest-Neighbor Analysis demonstrates that the three "racial" categories are poorly defined - the current system of grouping Native Americans and Asians in the same "race" category (Mongoloid) is erroneous as the two groups are clearly distinctive from each other. That the Asian and North American individuals who tended to misclassify as each other were the Chukchi from Russia and the Eskimos and Indians from Alaska supports the theory that this area is where gene flow between the continents took place more recently.

Also, it has become increasingly obvious that physical anthropologists must test biological data against museum documents to verify that the remains are actually affiliated to the tribes indicated in the records. Interlandmark distance analysis with discriminant functions provides a reliable and easy way to discriminate between closely-related and morphologically-similar groups of people. This study shows that interorbital and zygomatic ILD's are the best at discriminating between Asiatic and Native American individuals with up to a 95% accuracy.

References

- Bass, W.M. (1995) Human Osteology: A Laboratory and Field Manual (4th Edition).

- Brace, C. Loring. A Four-Letter Word Called "Race". Internet document. www.multiracialmultiracial.com/abolitionist/word/brace.htm

-- Jones, Laura (1931). Letters. Hrdlicka collection, Box 35. National Anthropological Archives.

-- Mann, MM and SD Ousley (2000). Utilization of Nontraditional Craniometrics to Distinguish Among 19th Century Museum Populations.

- Miller, E, EB Jones, and AW Willcox (1997). The Chinese Cemetery at Karluk, Kodiak Island Alaska: A biological interpretation of immigrant life at the Karluk Cannery. AJPA.

- Ousley, SD, and WT Billeck (2001). Assessing Tribal Identity in the Plains using Nontraditional Craniometrics (Interlandmark Distances).

- Ousley, SD, DW Owsley, and D Mulhern (2000). Lost and Found in the Museum: Repatriation, Ancestry, Ethnicity, and History. Poster presented at the 68th Annual Meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, San Antonio, TX

- Woo, TL (1937). A Biometric Study of the Human Malar Bone.

Acknowledgements

This research could not have been possible without the gracious help of Jane Beck, Betsy Bruemmer, Beth Eubanks, Erica B. Jones, Kim Neutzling, and the rest of the repatriation team. Thank you.

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