This essay--a combination of authorial narrative and scholarly critique--examines a grassroots organization's (Friends of Historic Northport) campaign to preserve a site in west Alabama where a pivotal Choctaw-Upper Creek battle took place in 1785. The organization has faced opposition from city planners and business leaders intent on developing…

In north central Virginia there is a local tale--The Legend of Jump Mountain, which purports to explain the origins of the Hayes Creek Indian Burial Mound. A highly romantic legend, it immortalizes post colonial intertribal warfare during the early nineteenth century while ignoring the antiquity of the mound and the local descendants of its…

Negotiations over archaeological human remains have been complicated interactions spanning centuries of attempts to resolve differences of opinion with regard to the investigation, ownership, and disposition of early American Indian burials. Guilt, fear, power, politics, legitimacy, science, religion, and denial--all of these elements commonly…

In this article the authors revisit the earlier studies of the role and importance of elders and pursue various lines of evidence--biological, archaeological, and cross-cultural/ethnographic--to build the fundamental argument that elders and the knowledge they have acquired from their ancestors, through social learning, have played a key role in…

Provides an overview of the issues surrounding enactment of a Nebraska statute requiring public museums to repatriate American Indian skeletal remains and burial offerings to tribes for reburial. Focuses on the bitter dispute between the Nebraska State Historical Society and the Pawnee Tribe of Oklahoma (an indigenous Nebraska tribe). (SV)

A nondescript rock shelter in Texas provides the evidence for shamanism in Leslie Marmon Silko's novel, "Ceremony". There, archaeologists found identifiable images of antlered human figures and entheogenic plant substances, which are medicinal plants, associated with shamanistic practices.

This article seeks to present a continuing bibliography of research on Southern California Indians from the past 20 years, and sometimes beyond. The coverage reaches outside the variably defined bounds of Southern California so that it includes peripheral groups such as the Timbisha Shoshone of Death Valley and one or more groups in the Owens…