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Protecting Ancient Human Remains: A Tale of Three Sites
Siouxland Sand and Gravel site.
American Indian sites in Iowa, particularly burial Inadvertent discoveries of human remains at three U.S. Highway 34 crisscrosses east-west through the
mounds, drew the early interest of antiquar- locations in the Loess Hills in the early 1970s pro- southern Loess Hills. In the early 1970s, archaeologi-
ians and would-be archaeologists, and before the pelled Iowa to become the first state in the Nation cal investigations conducted in tandem with road
close of the 19th century looting and exploration to provide legal protection for all human remains construction near Glenwood encountered several
had destroyed many. By the 1960s the practice of regardless of age or origin found on public or private burial sites. Although the remains of Euroamerican
exhibiting human skeletal remains in museums ran land, and for the reburial of native Indian remains. settlers disinterred from one pioneer cemetery were
headlong into American Indian activism. Protecting This offered a model for legal changes in other states, quickly reburied, those of an American Indian found
the physical remains and the spirits of the ancestors ultimately presaging the 1990 passage of the federal in the same site were boxed up and shipped to a
represented both a sacred trust and a challenge in Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation lab for study. Outraged over this unequal treatment,
the pursuit of equal rights and self-determination for Act (NAGPRA). Maria Pear-
American Indian people. son (Running
Moccasins), a
Yankton Sioux,
appealed to
Iowa’s Gov-
ernor Robert
Ray. His sup-
port, and the
overwhelming
consensus
among the
Iowa public
that Native American remains should be treated in
the same fashion as those of non-Indians, led the
Iowa legislature in 1976 to pass a protective burial
law.
At the Siouxland Sand and Gravel site (13WD402)
north of Sioux City, quarry operators in 1972 acci-
dentally unearthed human burials. American Indian
Movement activists, local museum officials, law
enforcement, and archaeologists converged on the
28 University of Iowa Office of the State Archaeologist
