Not Who We Thought: Reassessing “Non-forensic” Cases in Oklahoma

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

As of August 2024, there are 25,093 missing persons in The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs), including 886 potential Missing or Murdered Indigenous People (MMIP). Most individuals (23,270) were last seen more than 2 years ago and, if found, may be represented by completely skeletonized remains. Both the Oklahoma Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) and the State Archaeologist at the Oklahoma Archeological Survey (OAS) have responsibilities under the state’s unmarked burials statute, which includes provisions to evaluate the forensic significance of inadvertently discovered remains. Some skeletal cases have no associated context or are otherwise equivocal. The OCME has implemented robust practices to assess new cases, but questions remain about legacy cases held by OCME and other agencies—including OAS—that were previously deemed “historic” or “archaeological.” In the past year, systematic review and testing of 43 of these cases resulted in re-classification of six individuals as modern and the identification of one Tribal member—missing since the 1980s. The authors share these results to raise awareness of this issue among others similarly engaged with the evaluation of human remains that are found outside their original depositional context. ***This presentation will contain some images of human remains.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53216