{"id":73,"date":"2003-12-02T23:24:00","date_gmt":"2003-12-02T23:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=73"},"modified":"2011-08-24T14:36:15","modified_gmt":"2011-08-24T20:36:15","slug":"73","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=73","title":{"rendered":"Dem Bones"},"content":{"rendered":"

American archaeologists have had more a decade’s experience with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). It has also been misapplied, I believe, as in the case of Kennewick Man<\/a>. Although that skeleton may have been proto-Polynesian rather than European, Steve McNallen of the Asatru Folk Assembly<\/a> filed a brief in the court case over who got the skeleton under NAGPRA’s rules. Mattias Gardell (see 29 November post<\/a> ) makes an interesting point: We know that Norse people visited North America, but if a Norse cemetery were discovered in, say, Maine, a literal reading of NAGPRA would require those bones to be handed over the nearest federally recognized American Indian tribe as “ancestral remains.”<\/p>\n

Now similar legal issues could be on the horizon in Europe, as discussed in two stories on Spiked Online, “Battle of the Bones”<\/a> and “Burying the Evidence.”<\/a><\/p>\n

“So far as governments are concerned, repatriation strategies have become part of the way in which they attempt to connect with what they perceive as fragmented, divided societies. In the USA and Australia, the apparent failure to integrate indigenous populations had became a particular cause for concern by the 1980s, and with no new solutions to integration on the horizon, the issue became how best to build a relationship – any relationship – with these separate, impoverished groups of people came to the fore.<\/p>\n

“Repatriation, in this context, represented a symbolic reversal of conquest – a giving back of what had been taken, a recognition of the value of indigenous culture at the highest levels of government, and an attempt to create, not one national identity, but a new ‘pluricultural’ ideal” (“Battle of the Bones”).<\/p>\n

(Thanks to Arts and Letters Daily<\/a> for sending me down this track.)<\/p>\n

British Pagan are increasingly positioning themselves as “indigenous religion” and taking an active interest in the management of prehistoric Pagan archaeological sites, so these controversies will only increase.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

American archaeologists have had more a decade’s experience with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). It has also been misapplied, I believe, as in the case of Kennewick Man. Although that skeleton may have been proto-Polynesian rather than European, Steve McNallen of the Asatru Folk Assembly filed a brief in the court […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[20,76],"class_list":["post-73","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-archaeology","tag-asatru"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s6xQTg-73","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":12142,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=12142","url_meta":{"origin":73,"position":0},"title":"Great Review for Calico’s “Being Viking”","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 31, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"I was happy to see Being Vking: Heathenism in Contemporary America get a good review in Reading Religion, which is the American Academy of Religion's online book-review site. Michael Strmiska (currently teaching in Latvia) writes, Being Viking deserves great praise and wide readership as an extremely detailed and well-researched historical\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/viking-200x300.png?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":111,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=111","url_meta":{"origin":73,"position":1},"title":"Kennewick Man Update","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 8, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"The saga of Kennewick Man, the 9,200-year-old Caucasoid (which is not the same as \"Caucasian\"!) skeleton found in Washington state in 1996, continues. An federal appeals court panel has ruled in favor of reseachers who want to continue to study his remains, now stored at the University of Washington, and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"archaeology\"","block_context":{"text":"archaeology","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=archaeology"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7767,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=7767","url_meta":{"origin":73,"position":2},"title":"New E-book on Germanic Paganism","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 10, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Norse Revival:Transformations of Germanic Neopaganism, a new book by Stefanie von Schnurbein (Humboldt University, Berlin) appears to be available as a free download from Brill. (Yes, I am using the words free and Brill in the same sentence.) Norse Revival examines international Germanic Neopaganism (Asatru). It investigates its origins in\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Asatru\"","block_context":{"text":"Asatru","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=asatru"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/booksandjournals.brillonline.com\/upload\/9789004294356.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":11332,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=11332","url_meta":{"origin":73,"position":3},"title":"From Viking Re-enactor to Practitioner","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 25, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"At the BBC, a short video with a man who started doing re-enactments and ended up adopting Norse religion. Fighting with the Wuffa Viking and Saxon Re-enactment Society, he did not expect that his hobby of more than three years would help him find his own belief through Norse mythology.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Asatru\"","block_context":{"text":"Asatru","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=asatru"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/wuffa.png?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/wuffa.png?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/wuffa.png?resize=525%2C300 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":1037,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1037","url_meta":{"origin":73,"position":4},"title":"Denver Post Discovers Local Pagans","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"June 26, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Denver's Pagan community is featured in The Denver Post According to chatter on the local listservs, the \"leaving a bottle of whiskey\" bit was the reporter's misunderstanding.Not surprisingly, Colorado's hard-working Wiccan chaplains were completely ignored in this Post article, which seems to suggest that only the Middle Eastern Monotheisms\u2122 can\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Colorado\"","block_context":{"text":"Colorado","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=colorado"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7986,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=7986","url_meta":{"origin":73,"position":5},"title":"Not Ainu or Polynesian, Scientists Say of Kennewick Man","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 28, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Kennewick Man, the roughly 9,000-year-old skeleton found twenty years in Washington state was the subject of a long court battle between physical anthropologists and archaeologists who wanted to study him and contemporary tribes who wanted to claim him under NAGPRA rules. Suspiciously, the Corps of Engineers dumped rock and gravel\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"archaeology\"","block_context":{"text":"archaeology","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=archaeology"},"img":{"alt_text":"One reconstruction gave him a thick beard (Int. Business Times).","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/kennewick-man1-300x220.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=73"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3173,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions\/3173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=73"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=73"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=73"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}