Although the last archaeological excavations at Gathright were
finished twenty years ago, and all field notes, photos, and artifacts
stored for safe keeping at JMU, the work associated with our time in
Bath County is not finished. In 1990, Congress passed NAGPRA (Native
American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act), requiring all
facilities that receive Federal funding and that hold Native American
remains to inventory these and the artifacts that were excavated in
context with them. The text of the NAGPRA legislation can be found
at http://web.cast.uark.edu/other/nps/nagpra/nagpra.dat/lgm003.html.
The results of the inventory are published in the Congressional
Record. Federally-recognized Native tribes who can demonstrate a
cultural affiliation with the remains and grave goods are allowed to
request these for reburial.

Many of you will recall that we excavated human burials at several
sites in the Gathright project area. While some of these were in
such bad condition that they were not removed from the field, others
were brought back to JMU for further analysis and storage. By the
time NAGRPA was passed, Gathright was considered an 'orphan project'
by the Army Corps, as the property had been turned over to the Forest
Service. For several years, the Army Corps and the Forest Service
discussed which agency was responsible for the Gathright NAGPRA
inventory; this was finally settled in 1998 when the Army Corps,
which is responsible for all Department of Defense properties and has
a huge backlog of inventories, agreed to include the Gathright
inventory in its work plan. Since that time, we have been visited
twice by physical anthropologists from the Army Corps' St. Louis
District office, and the inventory was carried out in October 1999.
All diaries, field forms, maps, photographs, and any other
documentation we could find were included in this inventory, as were
artifacts excavated with the burials.

What's next in the saga of the Gathright burials? The NAGPRA
inventory should appear in the Congressional Record later this year
or early next year (2000-2001), and Native tribes will have a comment
period during which they can request the remains and artifacts for
reburial, based on cultural affiliation between the living and the
dead. Their requests will go before the NAGPRA committee, which is
composed of Native Americans, archaeologists, cultural
anthropologists, and historians. This committee will ultimately
decide whether any of those requests should be honored.

What is not so clear cut in this case is the establishment of
'cultural affiliation.' Think back to your anthropology classes and
your archaeology textbooks -- maps showing the distribution of Native
American tribes often depict western Virginia and West Virginia as
inhabited by "poorly known tribes of the interior." At present, no
documentary sources have been found which NAME the Native people who
lived in the Gathright area at the time of European settlement; in
fact, the abandonment of the region is one of the great mysteries of
archaeology in the Middle Atlantic. Add to that the fact that the
burials are associated with sites dating to A.D. 1200-1500, making
the demonstration of cultural affiliation even more difficult. Add
to that the fact that there are currently no Federally-recognized
Native tribes in Virginia (there are eight state-recognized tribes),
and the task becomes practically impossible. The NAGPRA committee
has begun to consider the requests of non-Federally recognized
tribes; whether any of the Virginia tribes will come forward for the
Gathright remains is not known. We will keep you updated on this
important issue.