Past, Present, and Future of Archaeological Legacies: Reassessing the Chavez Pass Burial Collections for NAGPRA Repatriation

Summary

A recently completed NAGPRA documentation project for the Chavez Pass Burial Collections at Arizona State University facilitated a multi-faceted reassessment of the expansive collections of the site, originally recovered from 1976 through 1982 by ASU archaeologists. In the reassessment, teams of physical anthropologists and archaeologist used original site records, maps, specimen logs, museum catalogs, photographs and reports to reexamine contextual identification of burials and associated funerary objects. The USDA Forest Service Southwest Regional Office and Coconino National Forest provided funding for the NAGPRA documentation over a four year period. Results of this recent documentation effort, utilizing current state-of-the-art methodologies, allowed careful reassessment and more realistic estimations of both numbers of individual and associated funerary objects for the repatriation. Thorough documentation of the burial collections has provided extensive data for use by the Forest Service, the Hopi and Zuni Tribes who received the collection, and for future researchers.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Pueblos at the Passageway: A Reassessment of Burial Collections From Nuvakwewtaqa, Chavez Pass, Arizona   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage