Establishing Cultural Affinity through Multiple Lines of Evidence

Summary

Repatriation and reburial efforts following the 2006-2008 excavation of the Alameda-Stone cemetery—a multiethnic, historical-period cemetery in downtown Tucson, Arizona—required a determination of cultural affinity for all human remains recovered from the civilian section. Goldstein played a key role in developing for the project a transparent and objective biocultural approach to determining cultural affinity that overcame problems encountered by previous projects in assessing cultural affinity. The approach relied on the equal weighting and assessment of three lines of evidence: contextual (i.e., archaeological evidence for mortuary treatment and social identity), osteological (i.e., the physical characteristics of the skeleton), and historical evidence (i.e., research into how the cemetery was used and the cultural traditions and identities of the people buried there). For each individual, the three lines of evidence were carefully reviewed and compared and a likelihood statement based on the distribution of all three lines of evidence was made (highly likely, multiple affinities, or culturally indeterminate). This model approach led to the identification of cultural affinity for nearly fifty percent of the 1,202 individuals recovered from the Alameda-Stone cemetery and successfully met the requirements of the stakeholder groups that claimed remains from the cemetery and Pima County, the project sponsor.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21393