Bones Are Returned to Indian Tribe

The bones of nearly 2,000 American Indians were handed over to a New Mexico tribe by Harvard University for proper burial. It was the largest transfer under the 1990 federal law that requires the return of Indian artifacts, the university said. The bones and other artifacts were excavated from the site of an abandoned Pueblo Indian community in the upper Pecos Valley of New Mexico between 1915 and 1929. For 70 years, scientists pored over the bones in one of the first systematic studies of a population. The bones were important for research into nutrition, trauma and disease, particularly osteoporosis. The Pueblo of Jemez tribe received them in a ceremony at the university in Cambridge, Mass.