"We don't believe in cremation."
Posted on 01/29/2006 8:30:05 PM PST by Tyche
ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Inupiats in Barrow want the Smithsonian Institution to return dozens of human skeletal remains unearthed in northern Alaska.
The American Museum of Natural History refuses to give up the remains of 85 individuals, saying they came from a group of Arctic people who predated the ancestors of the modern-day Inupiat.
The Washington D.C.-based institution believes those remains, excavated in the early 20th century, belong to the ancient Birnirk culture, whose descendants apparently left Alaska to resettle in Greenland and Canada around 1,000 A.D.
The Smithsonian said the remains, excavated from four sites, are more likely related to the Inuit people of Greenland or Canada.
After the Birnirk vanished from northern Alaska, no one lived on the North Slope for about 400 years until new people, the Thule culture that became today's modern Inupiat, moved in from the south, said Eric Hollinger, a repatriation case officer with the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.
Hollinger said the Smithsonian based its information on studies collected from more than 20 reports done between 1916 and 1990. The museum also conducted computer-analyzed studies comparing the shape of Birnirk skulls with those from other excavated skulls that were only a few hundred years old.
The Birnirk skulls are too tall and narrow to be related to Barrow residents, Hollinger said.
But representatives with Barrow Native organizations believe the remains are their ancestors and should be laid to rest.
"I don't buy (the museum's) argument. Who else could they be culturally affiliated with?" said Jana Harcharek, former head of the Arctic Slope Regional Corp.'s cultural commission.
Owen Mason, a geological archaeologist and research associate for the University of Colorado who specializes in the Birnirk culture, said the Smithsonian's argument is valid in some ways but has flaws.
For one thing, the Smithsonian bases most of its information on research done more than 80 years ago using questionable and outdated methods. And while the museum did conduct new skull measurements, it didn't do any new radiocarbon tests. Radiocarbon dating can often be skewed by several hundred years.
Mason said the first Birnirk site, a national historic landmark, is near a lagoon a few miles outside Barrow. The homes discovered there were occupied for hundreds of years by both the Thule and the earlier Birnirk going back to 500 A.D.
"That really bolsters Barrow's argument," he said. "People often don't live in the same house (unless they're related)," Mason said.
Even today, Inupiat oral tradition knows Birnirk as the birthplace of the first people, said Mason, who lives in Anchorage.
The most important Birnirk find is Kugusugaruk, about 20 miles southwest of Barrow. More than 80 burials and dozens of funerary objects, preserved in the frozen structures, were discovered there between 1917 and 1919.
But the site was excavated by William B. Van Valin, a Barrow schoolteacher who had little training in archaeology, Mason said.
The Smithsonian is holding the skeletal remains of 53 individuals excavated by Van Valin and bases part of its argument on Van Valin's work, Mason said.
Anne Jensen, senior scientist with the Ukpeagvik Inupiat Corp. in Barrow, said the Smithsonian's theory does not make sense.
"You don't find huge gaps in the archaeological sites. You do get pauses, but that doesn't mean everyone had left the whole coast," Jensen said.
As for the skulls, she said the Smithsonian is using a too-small sample.
Jensen said the Barrow village corporation wants to avoid a lawsuit and hopes to compare the DNA of local residents with the Birnirk remains.
Hollinger said the Smithsonian's argument isn't perfect and the museum is open to new findings, although it already has enough evidence to meet the requirements of federal law.
ping
If they are that old they belong in a museum.
this is all a bunch of pc claptrap
For someone employed in A CULTURAL capacity ("cultural commission"), this is an incredibly limited statement as to perspective, awareness, scope.
There are pockets of people on the planet even today who can't seem to understand -- or refuse to -- that the planet has been peopled by nomadic people for a longer while than is their contemporary history. People have settled areas, moved on or died out, and others have migrated in. Then they've either moved on or died out. But later peoples have again then moved into those once populated but now barren areas. And on and on.
Interesting suggestion as to those skulls, however, being "longer and taller" than this current group of people who are laying claim to them. Longer and thinner skulls certainly suggest people from Northern Europe, Northern Asia, compared with Southern Asian who are undoubtedly the ancestors of this current claim-laying group (being described as having "moved in from the south" which would indicate they were of Asian descend moving upward from South/Central America along the coast after temperatures were warmed). Some people need to read more. Let science explore the skeletal remains and arrive at some conclusions when/as possible but there's no harm done in studying them. I can't see why it would be objectionable (to study the skeletal remains), given their age and distinction.
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Just cremate. No more worrying about somebody digging up your corpse.
LOL!
And put grave diggers out of business.....
As if I were going to worry about that...
Truth is often at odds with political correctness.
Political correctness is generally synonymous with "big lie".
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