They Wanted To Know

	Archaeologists carefully excavating human remains from the Great Salt Wetlands to protect them from erosion and vandalism. Credit: Steven Simms, Utah State University

Every new discovery of ancient remains launches a very site-specific process. Because local land managers and nearby or affiliated tribes can vary widely in their feelings about how best to treat human remains, each instance is different. And sometimes the same instance changes over time. Take the example of a large number of skeletal remains that were discovered in wetlands near Utah's Great Salt Lake in 1988. Because of rising and falling water levels, human remains from 85 Fremont individuals were eroding out of the ground and exposed. "People were going out there with their three wheelers," says Joan Brenner Coltrain, an anthropologist who eventually studied the skeletons. "These bones were visible from the surface and people were basically collecting skulls and putting them on their mantels. I mean it was really not a good situation." Obviously something had to happen quickly. The Northwest Band of the Shoshoni Nation are the historic occupants of the area, so they were consulted about what should be done with the remains. Archaeologist Steven Simms says the tribe's desire was to not see things desecrated. "When push came to shove in this case," he says, "the Northwestern Band agreed to us removing them because they didn't want them left out there and subject to vandalism, or further destruction by mother nature."

Sequencing DNA fragments can reveal genetic relationships

All parties agreed that the remains were in too fragile a predicament to stay where they were. But once they were excavated, what should happen to them? Steven Simms knew they were sitting on the second largest sample of ancient bones ever discovered in the Great Basin of the United States, and as an archaeologist he recognized the "great scientific import of the discovery," he says. "We began consultations with the tribe to educate them as to what we could learn through DNA, the carbon isotope work, and so on. And the tribal council saw this as a benefit. They wanted to know." So the scientists got down to work and made some unique discoveries.

How Science Adds to the Story

A variety of analytical tools are available to scientists studying ancient human remains. They can perform cat scans on bones to figure out people's activity patterns when they were alive. That test has no negative repercussions for the ancient remains. Other kinds of tests are termed "destructive analysis" because they require a tiny sample of the bone that is then used up — usually less than a gram or so, about the size of the tip of a little finger. (Scientists prefer to use tiny bone fragments that are already broken.) DNA analysis and stable isotope dating fall into this category. The types of plants that you eat, the proportion of terrestrial or marine protein that you eat, how high on the food chain you eat, the age you were weaned, types of disease, periods of malnutrition — all this information is etched in the chemistry of your bones and teeth.

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