Few scientific disciplines have been as ruinously politicized as archaeology. One might think the ancient past far removed from today’s squabbles. Does it matter which long-dead warrior walked these woods, which basket-laden woman once headed up that arroyo? A few people, driven by scientific curiosity, might want to pursue the clues, but the answers are purely “academic” in the sense that they have no obvious direct bearing on the world we live in today. Archaeologists pursue knowledge for knowledge’s sake. At least they used to.

Few scientific disciplines have been as ruinously politicized as archaeology.

Today archaeology meets several crosscurrents. Among them is the effort to pin down the causes of our own cultural collapse. In their analyses, many archaeologists are eager to implicate climate change or the profligate use of resources to score a point against the immoderation of modern capitalist economies. But an even stronger crosscurrent is the eagerness of many archaeologists to side with any purported descendants of ancient peoples and defer to their claims to ancestral property rights without pausing to question those claims.

In the United States, those archaeologists are under the spell of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (nagpra), the 1990 federal law which mandates that institutions receiving federal funding return “cultural items” to Indian tribes that are lineal descendants of those responsible for their existence. “Cultural items” includes skeletal remains.

nagprafirst attracted the notice of many Americans with the discovery