ombudsman
Posts: 240
Joined: 1/25/2009 From: Oklahoma Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: privvydigger great digs...I wonder do you ever find indian bones? Nearly all of that stuff is surface finds. A friend in western Colorado took me to a pueblo village site on private land where digging was allowed. We didn't find anything in particular that day, except shards, but there were bone fragments all around. At that time (years ago) I would have happily dug a gravesite to get the grave goods. Not now. I don't empathize with the Indian attitudes re. old graves, but I respect them. When we lived in N. Dakota, my best friend, on a geology field trip, visited an ancient Mandan village. He found a human skull weathering out of a stream bank. He brought it back and gave it to me. I had it for some years, not thinking too much about it. Then one day I found my daughter and a playmate (they were about 4 years old) playing with it on the carpet. It suddenly struck me that here was a person (so to speak) who had lived a life, a person perhaps far superior to me in one way or another (perhaps in all ways) and his/her skull was being played with by children. I called several tribes in N.D. and Minn., telling them that I had this skull and how would they like me to return it. Without exception, they showed no interest at all and suggested I bury it anywhere. I did.
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