Abstract A major issue that American archaeologists have faced since the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990 is how to deal with the return/loss of significant portions of museum collections to descendant groups. By “deal with” the authors are not referring to the process of identifying descendant groups or the actual transfer of collections, one case for which is well documented in the essays in the present issue. Rather, this essay focuses on how the repatriation process should be viewed more broadly as helping reform American anthropological archaeology.
Cook et al. (Wed,) studied this question.