American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Responding to a question directed to him by Francois Barbe Marbois, secretary of the French ligation in Philadelphia, regarding Indian monuments, Thomas Jefferson wrote of his investigations in opening an Indian burial mound, "I conjectured that in this barrow might have been a thousand skeletons." Although Jefferson may have been the first to dig into a burial mound, both Americans and Europeans were preoccupied with the study of racial differences between American Indians and Caucasians. The search for answers led, especially in the nineteenth century, to the collection of Indian remains and the development of American archaeology and physical anthropology. So any story about collecting Indian remains is also a narrative about these two sciences and the shifting, value-laden cultural context in which they developed. Historian of science Donna Haraway reminds us that physical anthropology is a political discourse about the body, with multiple representations; to a lesser extent, this description also may be attributed to archaeology. Accordingly, both physical anthropology and archaeology produce multiple narratives "adapted to engage in particular kinds of social struggles . . . ." Both fields create "contentious constituencies'' where, at times, certain stories or plots are privileged, while others are no longer acceptable.In recent writing, anthropologist Clifford Geertz holds similar views and acknowledges that anthropological stories-perhaps even text building itself-should be subjected to critical scrutiny. According to Geertz, the epistemological foundations of anthropology have been shaken “by a general loss of faith in received stories about the nature of representation,” and he speaks of “ethnological descriptions” as the ”describer’s descriptions, not those of the described.” The narratives produced by physical anthropology and archaeology also are the “describer’s descriptions” and are constructed out of the political and scientific discourse of an age. These narratives were considered necessary because the Indian had to be ”correctly” described and placed into the context of Western civilization. Such descriptions, however, reflected Western attitudes and Western conceptions of what it meant to be civilized. The gathering and interrogation of Indian remains-the work of nineteenth-century physical anthropology and archaeology- can be discussed only briefly here and focuses primarily on the gathering process.