I organize spiders better than this
Berkeley has a bit of an unsavory reputation as the premiere grave-robbing institution in the US. They’ve got an impressive collection of looted remains.
More than three decades ago, Congress ordered museums, universities and government agencies that receive federal funding to publicly report any human remains in their collections that they believed to be Native American and then return them to tribal nations.
UC Berkeley has been slow to do so. The university estimates that it still holds the remains of 9,000 Indigenous people in the campus’ Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology — more than any other U.S. institution bound by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, according to a ProPublica analysis of federal data.
Tim White, the esteemed anthropologist, was in charge of repatriation decisions for many years, and basically stonewalled the process.
White said the collection did not need to be reported under NAGPRA because there is no way to determine the origin of the bones — and therefore the law does not apply.
The collection has exposed deep rifts at UC Berkeley, pitting a prominent professor who said he’s done nothing wrong against university administrators who have apologized to tribes for not sharing information about the remains sooner.
I’m looking at this as someone who is sympathetic to both educational and research needs, and I have to ask: why do you want these old bones anyway, Berkeley? They’re used to teach anthropology students, and I can understand why you want variations represented — one old mounted skeleton is not enough — but why do you need thousands of specimens for teaching the basics, and why do you need Native American skeletons shoveled out of their graves by the thousands? This makes no sense. It’s more like maintaining a dragon’s hoard then an actual, useful teaching collection. That’s especially clear when the collection is described.
By then, the teaching collection that anthropology professors used had grown to thousands of bones and teeth that White said in his report to university administrators had been commingled with others donated by amateur gravediggers, dentists, anatomists, physicians, law enforcement and biological supply companies.
The remains were unceremoniously sorted by body part so students could study them. A jumble of teeth. A drawer of clavicles. Separate bins for skulls. For decades, anthropologists added to the collection, used it in their classes and then passed it along to the professors who came after them, White said.
What use is an old bone if you know nothing of its provenance? What can you learn from a bucket of teeth?
For a moment I assumed that this would have been a massive, well-curated collection, where scientists can do research on comparative anatomy and variation. But no? This collection is just a pile of bones that professors have been letting students play with for decades. This is particularly appalling when various cultures have been begging to have the bones returned, and when the law is telling UC Berkeley to return them.
Recourse under the law was limited, leaving tribal nations to file formal challenges with the federal NAGPRA Review Committee, an advisory group whose members represent tribal, scientific and museum organizations. It can only offer recommendations in response to disputes.
In the first challenge following the passage of the law, in February 1993 the Hui Mālama I Nā Kūpuna O Hawai’i Nei, a Native Hawaiian organization, took a dispute over repatriation of two ancestral remains before the federal committee. The remains had been donated to UC Berkeley in 1935, at which time a museum curator classified them as Polynesian. White disagreed.
Addressing the committee, White introduced himself as “the individual who is responsible for the skeletal collections at Berkeley.” He argued the remains might not be Native Hawaiian and could belong to victims of shipwrecks, drownings or crimes. They should be preserved for study, he added, making an analogy to UC Berkeley’s library book collection, where historians access volumes for years as their understanding evolves.
White is admitting that they don’t know whose bones they have…then what use are they? His excuse for keeping them is that they might not be Polynesian, but could be from shipwreck victims. That is not a defense. That’s an admission that they have a hodge-podge, a confusing grab-bag of bones scooped up off of Pacific islands, and they don’t know what they’ve got…except that they’re going to keep them.
I’m trying hard to view this mess from the perspective of a college professor, but I’m not seeing it, and Tim White’s arguments for hanging on to these bones reads like a confession that Berkeley has been careless and sloppy. And White keeps stuffing his foot in his mouth!
In August 2020, White reported the contents of the collection he taught with to university administrators.
White told ProPublica and NBC News that given the lack of documentation, it would be impossible to determine if they were Native American, much less say which tribe they should be returned to.
“There’s nobody on this planet who can sit down and tell you what the cultural affiliation of this lower jaw is, or that lower jaw is. Nobody can do that,” he said.
It’s just the weirdest defense: our bookkeeping is so bad and ignorance is so great that we have no idea whose remains these are, therefore we ought to be allowed to keep them. To me, this is an argument that the whole collection ought to be shoveled out and given to people who would treat the bones with real respect. Berkeley seems to have a history of disgraceful disrespect and exploitation, and doesn’t deserve to be custodians of those dead people.
What can you learn from a bucket of teeth?
Teeth often retain DNA. So you can learn a lot from any individual tooth. You can also do isotope analysis of a tooth and tell where the person who grew the tooth lived.
But the best thing you can learn from a tooth is the social value of respectfully returning it to its descendants for ritual disposal.
The victorians had a nasty habit of grabbing anything that was not nailed down, and justifying that by saying “obviously these savages don’t want it, because it’s not nailed down.”(hiding the clawhammer)
I think this is what I’d like to see happen:
– Sever Tim White’s authority over the whole collection, and maybe sever him from the school entirely.
– At Berkeley’s expense, create a team of anthropologists to study each item in the collection to try to source them and also evaluate the potential scientific value of each item. Ensure that this team is majority indigenous.
– As both reparation and to help form the team, Berkeley must create and fully fund an anthropology program for indigenous people to get doctorates.
– As items are cataloged, a committee paid for by Berkeley would decide what to do with each item, with the intent that the vast majority of items will be respectfully repatriated to the proper indigenous community at Berkeley’s expense. This committee should be well represented by both qualified scientists and indigenous culture experts, and also must be majority indigenous.
This will be expensive and take a long time, but Berkeley spent a lot of time and money creating the problem in the first place.
In a past life I worked in a lab which at one stage was collected to a geology museum. When the bean counting neanderthals decided to close it I got the sad job of overseeing the closure and recovery of the research and economic mineral collections into a wider set of department collections. While I was very familiar with the actual museum collections and new of some Australian aboriginal remains I was surprised to find out just how much was in the collection. I could certainly see no real reason to keep them. The oldest skeletal remains were about 6,000 years old and the rest much younger with some as recent as the 1930s. The first thing I did was approach my supervisors with the advice that they should be returned to the aboriginal community. This didn’t happen immediately because the traditional owners wanted to be sure they were returned to the right part of tribal country so provenance had to be sorted out. Fortunately we kept good records but it still took a few years. In the course of going through archival material I came across letters from overseas expeditions into out back Australia and at least one from the US and another from Germany had collected aboriginal remains one as recently as the 1920s. The only real controversy we had over return of remains were those of Mungo Man and Mungo woman, two burials dated at around 40,000 years ad are the oldest known Australian aboriginal remains. The controversy was not only because of their age but because the government agency involved wanted to keep the reburial site secret so didn’t properly consult with or involve the aboriginal community to allow the necessary burial rituals to be performed. One thing I learned from dealing with the aboriginal people involved is the deep significance and reverence they hold for ancestral remains. Berkeley should do the right thing.
@Marcus Ranum
Yes, but if you have no idea from where and when you got that tooth, any DNA information you may get from it is of very limited use.
If you use DNA or isotope data to infer a propable origin, then the only information you have gained is one that you could have had much more trustworthy and cheaply if you had properly labeled and curated your collection in the first place.
“Gosh, I know my house is full of stolen money and valuable things…but I’ve stolen from so many people over such a long time that there’s no possible way of determining who’s the rightful owner of what, and I never kept any records, so I’ll just keep it all forever.” Has any ordinary thief or burglar got off using that excuse?
@Raging Bee
Some comedian did a sketch about that – James Acaster, I think. The british museum: things that aren’t british. “Sure we could return the things but we’re not done looking at them yet.”
Is this an Onion headline?
“there is no way to determine the origin of the bones” says Professor whose job it is to determine origins of bones
@Raging Bee, I dunno, it’s worked well for the US and really well for the Swiss, who still have abandoned spoils that the Nazis took there.
Now, if everything that was stolen in the past was repatriated, we’d have a lot of museums that are empty and just waiting to be turned into Amazon warehouses.
If it was a hundred or more years ago, a bucket of old teeth might tell us things we didn’t know. It isn’t a hundred or more years ago.
moarscienceplz @ # 2: … a team of anthropologists to study each item … a committee paid for by Berkeley would decide what to do with each item… well represented by both qualified scientists and indigenous culture experts, and also must be majority indigenous.
Surely a team of psychics found from local classified advertising could provide answers with greater confidence at at lower cost (at least until word got out). UC Berkeley could also add an imprimatur of science by establishing a professorship of necromancy, though it might take a while to decide whether that should reside in the schools of medicine or religion.
anthrosciguy @ # 9: … a bucket of old teeth might tell us things we didn’t know.
I read some years back about skeletons (and artifacts) recovered from an English shipwreck of (I think) the 1300s.
Among other things, they found the teeth were all in fine condition – not just well-preserved, but healthy. Even penniless sailors needed much less dental care in a culture untouched by refined sugar.
“There’s nobody on this planet who can sit down and tell you what the cultural affiliation of this lower jaw is, or that lower jaw is. Nobody can do that,” he said.
Liar, liar, pants on fire. I note he uses weasel words like culture to deflect from the fact that his collection is used to teach Anthropology students how to determine racial ethnicity via morphology.
Teeth and jaws are absolutely distinctive parts of human anatomy, and sorting them out by racial origin would be quite easy for a trained forensic anthropologist.
If it was true that you can’t determine racial ethnicity from skeletons, there wouldn’t be any reason to have the collection in the first place.
The fact that these remains have been separated into boxes of jaws or clavicles is proof that Berkeley has terrible curation, in addition to employing a proudly racist Mr White.
Intact full skeletons are useful teaching tools, disarticulated remains are not useful, which is anthropology 101.
Unfortunately, testing a tooth for DNA destroys the tooth, but I’m quite sure I could easily determine race, age, and sex from a mandible and its teeth just by looking and measuring.
The full skull would be better, but I only require a quadrant of the dentition to accurately determine those basic morphological traits. (And I’m not a forensic anthropologist)
What others have said above, plus,…
3-D scan ’em, and 3-D print ’em.
If the DNA and isotope profiles can be of use, then do that.
Then move ’em on along, using NAGPRA guidelines.
Further fighting yields nothing of value.
At the very least this admission means the UC Berkeley anthro department should not receive any newly acquired artefacts of any nature so long as it is run by this team of wilfully incompetent and culturally dangerous curators.
@Tethys
No, just no. I have worked with palaeopathologists, you can’t really do this reliably. Far too much individual variation
Nope. Often it’s hard enough to tell the sex of an individual if you have the entire skeleton, telling it from a mandible alone is usually right out, since there’s far too much individual variation. And since “race” is not a biological concept that’s out too. Which leaves age, which can be done by tooth abrasion, but it helps to know the diet and circumstances of that person. A diet of bread ruins your teeth much faster than a diet of meat.
Although, I don’t particularly care what happens to my body when I die, I can understand other people’s and cultures desire to commemorate their dead.
There is a Tony Hillerman detective story (Maybe “Thief of Time,” not sure) where some indigenous activists make the point by shipping an anthropologist a box of bones to study which includes the bone’s provenance for completeness: the anthropologist’s grandparents’ grave in Vermont.
Lasius
As they have a large data set of remains, there really isn’t any issue with individual variability.
I can in fact determine race(broadly), approximate age, and sex with over 90% accuracy from just a quadrant of the dentition/jaws, though the full skull is preferred for obvious reasons. Diet is a factor that is taken into account for tooth wear, but it’s not the sole criteria to determine an approximate age via skeletal morphology.
There are only three race categories that grade into each other, and it would be an excellent teaching exercise for Berkeley anthropology students to sort those remains back into as many complete skeletons as possible so they can be returned.
Race is obviously a much broader category than individual tribes, but Pacific Islander is fairly distinguishable from the Native Americans of pre-colonial California.
Then you’re much better than the professionals from the papers I have read who never got better than around 70% from mandibles alone, and that is with only adult individuals from a small geographical area.
That doesn’t mean anything. Yes, you can have highly significant differences between groups, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you can reliably assign specific individuals.
The fuck? Are we doing 18th century pseudoscience again?
Maybe, if you know only these two groups are present. But mix in ten other groups of remains and assignment becomes almost impossible.
Morphology is current science, and it is likely that I’ve worked with far more models of human jaws and teeth than most Anthropologists.
I did specify that determining anything reliably requires intact dentition and both jaws. There are always exceptions that would require a DNA analysis, but 90% would not need more than visual inspection to determine sex, age, race.
Forensics and Anthropology certainly seem to think that race can be determined from remains, and the slight variations in anatomy that are present on skeletons.
what doing the right thing looks like. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-03-15/awabakal-ancestral-remains-to-be-returned-to-country/102093946
I can’t believe they were that sloppy with provenance and bookkeeping…every specimen we had in our animal collection at UK was numbered and logged in…it’s true that shit happens, but not on such a monumental scale. What use is a specimen if you don’t know where it was collected, when and under what circumstances? Can’t publish a paper on that, lol…Or if archaeology/anthropology, what layer was it collected in…for dating purposes etc. What a bunch of dolts.
I suspect that the morphological “we can tell them apart” theory comes from the various groups with Denisovan, Neanderthal and a third unidentified homo subspecies that interbred with three distinct groups by region.
Which is… Not exceptionally precise, to put it nicely. That’s like seeing a larger occipital bun and assuming negroid features, when one doesn’t have any other part of the body and that can be enlarged in other ethnic groups for a number of reasons.
While I’m far from being an SME in such fields, the last time I looked, that’s really on the fringe of forensic anthropology, being generous.
There are some ethnic clues, but they’re far from universal even within said groups and far from singularly distinctive.
Tooth wear is a possible indicator, if one has an idea of diet, but enamel thickness is also someone suggestive as well.
But, realistically, lacking DNA and its distinctive migration related tracks, the only real thing one can get from disarticulated and mixed skeletal remains and a box of teeth is solid support for what species is mixed inside of the box. It’s not as if there’s a box of eyes and one can identify mine by the lens serial numbers!
So, I’m with PZ’s viewpoint, curation was shoddy and utterly uncaring and incompetent.
Problem:
You are presented with a box of mixed phalanges.
You poor bastard.
I suspect most of the collection is old and from days when people were less careful. It also wouldn’t surprise me that the 1906 earthquake messed things ups.
I understand that my local university repatriated the vast majority of its collection even before the NAGPRA passed (over 1,000). It still has a few; however, these are apparently waiting for someone with a good claim and in the meantime are stored in restricted space. Sometimes new human remains are uncovered on university land. In such cases the university archaeologist works with the local police. If it is a relatively new the police handle it; if it is older, the remains are handled over to the local Ohlone (who btw are still fighting to regain the federal recognition stripped from them by the federal government nearly 100 years ago).
@ Tethy 19
https://bioanth.org/about/position-statements/aapa-statement-race-and-racism-2019/
I wish people would stop labelling morphological differences between human populations as racial differences. Doing so is in my opinion inherently racist.
If they have a lot of teeth, they should grind them down and sell the powder as “rinoceros horn” to help pay for the classification of the rest of the remains. Then return said remains.
-The single exception to returning remains would be items of an age compareable to Mungo Man. With a time distance of several millennia there is little or no connection to existing groups of people.
Maybe the Kung! people in Namibia are linear descendants of any 40,000 year old remains you might find there, but even that is doubtful.
In regard to remains of such an age, I would be more interested in teeth from the Australian extinct megafauna as there may be some well-preserved DNA in them.
So if you are going to explore caves at Nullarbor plain, keep an eye open.
lasius, spot on. I became aware of this nonsense, albeit in a different target, when working in medicine. There are some strong associations with some ethnic groups with genetic mutations of major medical significance that could impact my areas of emergency military medicine. Wonderful things, such as G6PD deficiency or pseudocholinesterase deficiency, as examples, where for the former, certain drugs or even fava beans (hence, the term favism for the reaction) cause red blood cells to rupture or in the latter, some skeletal muscle relaxant drugs used to paralyze a patient for surgery or some procedures, such as intubation, would last abnormally longer than normal to a level potentially hazardous to life.
Kind of a bad thing removing an endotracheal tube and ventilation from a patient before they can breathe again.
While these are to a fair extent associated with specific ethnic groups, that isn’t exclusively true (there are around 6 polymorphisms known just for pseudocholinesterase deficiency), adding in the bullshit of race, that unnecessarily and pseudiscientifically complicates the risk analysis and medicine is and should remain evidence based, with zero pseudoscience.
And as important to life such polymorphisms are, the after life care of remains is critical to the psychological wellbeing of families and communities – especially those who experienced oppression due to racism and bias in the past, as ignoring that prolongs their continued psychological trauma and perpetuates the myths we’re trying so hard to dispel with scientific proofs of the falsehood of such previous views.
OT: Wow, just wow. DeStupidass now wants minorities to sit at the back of the bank.
‘During a conversation with Erin Burnett on CNN’s Erin Burnett Outfront Tuesday, Blankfein reacted to a quote from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Andy Kessler.
Desantis blamed the bank’s collapse on its concern with “DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] and politics.”
Kessler, meanwhile, wrote, “In its proxy statement, SVB notes that besides 91% of their board being independent and 45% women, they also have “1 Black,” “1 LGBTQ+” and “2 Veterans.” I’m not saying 12 white men would have avoided this mess, but the company may have been distracted by diversity demands.” ‘
…
‘When Burnett asked again if the bank collapsed because it was focused on placing a black person or a gay person on its board, Blankfein responded:
“I’m not an expert in mass psychology, but I think that’s very unlikely and I think frankly it’s a bit laughable.” ‘
~CNN
Talk about shouting the quiet part out loud!
Oh, some proposed state laws now propose execution of women who miscarry for reasons that “are their own fault”. You know, falling down stairs, not taking prenatal vitamins, getting beaten by the father…
Pence outdid himself, to score a point on the transportation secretary, he belittled paternity leave (apparently, that’s maternity now, those effete men who want time off with their new children) and post-partum depression.
Yeah, they’ll start a civil war yet. I’m now fine with that, as long as I get the nukes.
Given my dislike of loud noises, the explosives will be upgraded to Nitrowhisperin.