Utah Archaeology 2002

The link between the fremont and modern tribes

S p e c i a l D i s c u s s i o n F e a t u re THE LINK BETWEEN THE FREMONT AND MODERN TRIBES Nancy J. Coulam, United States Bureau of Reclamation, Upper Colorado Region, 125 South State St., Salt Lake City, UT 84111 Steven R. Simms, Department of Sociology, Social Work, and Anthropology, Utah State University, Logan, UT 84322-0730 The lead article in this issue of Utah Archaeology "Fremont Basketry," by James Adovasio, David Pedler, and Jeff Illingworth, anchors a discussion with a dual purpose. The synthesis of decades of study directed at Fremont basketry will be useful for readers who seek understanding of the Fremont from as many vantages as possible. The article is clearly written and illustrated, and the frank exposition enables the perspective, prob­lem emphasis, and conclusions of the authors to be placed in the context of the literature on the Fremont. There is however, a second purpose for this publi­cation. The study of Fremont basketry is one of five reports prepared for the United States Bureau of Recla­mation as part of a comprehensive evaluation of the cultural affiliation of Fremont in relationship to modern Native American tribes. Reclamation is charged with this task under the Native American Graves Repatria­tion Act of 1990 (NAGPRA). The study of Fremont bas­ketry that appears here, as well as the other reports commissioned by Reclamation, illustrate that when it comes to human remains and cultural heritage, the past is with us in the present and some of the questions asked of scientists are shaped by current legal and po­litical climates. Adovasio, Pedler, and Illingworth's article is fol­lowed by a discussion. Catherine Fowler and Joyce Herold raise observations about the article and the rela­tionship between NAGPRA and anthropological study. The authors then take their opportunity to reply. Fi­nally, Forrest Cuch, Director of the Utah Division of Indian Affairs and Kevin Jones, State Archaeologist with the Utah Division of State History, were invited to contribute concluding insights from their unique van­tage within state government. That perspective is authored by Kevin Jones. NAGPRA AND COMPETING CLAIMS NAGPRA provides a legal basis by which federally recognized Indian tribes may obtain custody of cultural items under the control of federal agencies and muse­ums. When tribes claim items, it is generally based on "cultural affiliation" which NAGPRA defines as "a rela­tionship of shared group identity which can be reason­ably traced historically or prehistorically between a present-day Indian tribe...and an identifiable earlier group." [25 U.S.C. § 3001(2) (2003); 43 C.F.R. § 10.2(e) (2003)]. The Secretary of the Interior promulgated regula­tions implementing NAGPRA that agencies, museums, UTAH ARCHAEOLOGY 15(1)2002 pp. 1-4 UTAH ARCHAEOLOGY 2002 and tribes must follow if cultural affiliation is to be de­termined and cultural items repatriated. This is a multi-step process. The first step is consulting with Indian tribes to determine the basis for each tribe's claim to particular cultural items. For this step, the United States Bureau of Reclamation's Upper Colorado Region con­sulted with over 30 tribes regarding cultural items in its museum collections. Among Reclamation's collections are Native American human remains and funerary ob­jects classified by archaeologists as Fremont, specifi­cally the Great Salt Lake and Uinta variants defined by Marwitt(1970). Intensive consultations during the 1990s resulted in ten tribes claiming cultural affiliation with Fremont items under Reclamation's control. The claimant tribes include the Hopi Tribe, Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians, Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation, Paiute In­dian Tribe of Utah, Pueblo of Laguna, Pueblo of Nambe, Pueblo of Zia, Pueblo of Zuni, Skull Valley Band of Goshute, and Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation. At first, Reclamation (like other agencies) thought it could simply accept what has been called a "coalition claim," an interpretation that multiple tribes are equally related or affiliated with the cultural items. After watch­ing the Hopi Tribe and Pueblo of Zuni dispute with the National Park Service over such a claim for Chaco Can­yon cultural items, and after ongoing consultation with the claimant tribes, Reclamation realized that not only is it possible to separately evaluate the relationship be­tween Fremont and each of the individual claimant tribes, it is legally mandatory to do so. FREMONT AS AN IDENTIFIABLE GROUP Archaeologists refer to an artifact or site as "cul­turally affiliated" when it can be assigned to a particular temporal period, like Fremont or "the Lovelock Culture." But NAGPRA's definition of cultural affiliation means there must be a shared identity between a present-day Indian tribe and an earlier group. Identifying the Paleoindian period or phases as an "identifiable earlier group" proved impossible in the Kennewick Man case (Bonnichsen v. United States, 217 F. Supp. 2d 1116 (D. Or. 2002). While Fremont is not as temporally distant from the modern claimant tribes as Paleoindian, the task may be almost as difficult. Adovasio, Pedler, and Illingworth raise this issue when they note that ever since Morss (1931) coined the term Fremont for the prehistoric agriculturalists of cen­tral Utah, archaeologists have debated the nature, char­acteristics, origin(s), and fate(s) of this archaeological culture unit. The debate largely reflects changing re­search interests. From the 1930s to the 1970s, research­ers worked on classifying the Fremont in time and space, and separating them from the contemporary archaeo­logical culture units like Anasazi. From the 1980s to the present, an interest in using the archaeological record to explain the varied behaviors subsumed under the term Fremont has extended research to domains other than a concern with cultural labels and space-time sys-tematics (Madsen and Simms 1998). Regardless of this shift towards behavioral research, NAGPRA ensures that questions about the identity of normative cultural groups and traditions will remain relevant. NAGPRA, like all law, is based on the definition (and enforcement) of societal norms. To prove the existence of a normative group, NAGPRA requires two things: first, documentation of material culture items that are distinctive or definitive of the earlier group; and second, evidence that the earlier group is a biologically distinct population. Douglas Owsley, Richard Jantz, and physical anthropologist col­leagues agreed to work on the latter task, while James Adovasio was asked to synthesize his long-standing argument that basketry serves to identify and distin­guish the Fremont as an archaeological culture. Since the 1970s, Adovasio has argued that basket weaving is a complex behavior, necessarily transmitted across gen­erations of localized kinship groups. Due to this mode of transmission, basketry signifies ethnicity and cul­tural identity. If Adovasio is correct, then analysis of prehistoric basketry provides an ideal tool for delimit­ing the existence of the identifiable earlier groups from which modern tribal claimants may be descendants. SPECIAL DISCUSSION FEATURE: COULAM AND SIMMS Of course, basketry is only one tool, one material culture element, which may signify group membership. Aside from basketry, Adovasio and his colleagues con­clude, along with Madsen and Simms (1998), that Fre­mont lifeways, settlement and subsistence patterns, rock art, and artifact inventories do not lend themselves to a clear definition of a normative, archetypical Fremont culture that persisted through time. While Adovasio, Pedler, and II ling worth's article, along with the others commissioned by Reclamation, touch on some of the broader theoretical issues related to the formation, main­tenance, and creation of cultural identities, these stud­ies are designed to evaluate whether Fremont are an identifiable group for the purposes of NAGPRA compli­ance. In other words, the Fremont identity that is being constructed for NAGPRA purposes is produced within a specific legal context characterized by contestation, normative-thinking, and power relations. SHARED GROUP IDENTITIES If the assembled archaeological and biological evi­dence support the existence of Fremont as an earlier group for NAGPRA purposes, then the next step in the repatriation process is to consult with the modern claim­ant tribes and work backwards through time to docu­ment what defines their common identity with Fremont, or in the words of Bonnichsen v. United States, what legitimizes the present-day group's authority to repre­sent the interests of deceased tribal members. This step requires compilation of the "lines of evidence for cul­tural affiliation" which include archeology, geography, kinship, biology, anthropology, linguistics, folklore, oral tradition, history, or other information or expert opin­ion. Adovasio and his colleagues were asked to con­tribute to the archaeological line of evidence by demon­strating or refuting that the Fremont and the claimant tribes belong to the same basket weaving tradition. They conclude that there is no relationship between the Fre­mont and the basketry traditions of the claimant tribes. In addition to Adovasio, Pedler, and Illingworth's report, Michael Berry and Claudia Berry (2001) assessed chronometric evidence for shared group identities be­tween the Fremont and the claimant tribes. They con­clude the Fremont represent the northernmost expan­sion of Southwest agriculturalists and that Fremont is an identifiable earlier group for NAGPRA purposes from A.D. 600 to A.D. 1280. Like other Southwestern farmers, participants in the Fremont agricultural tradition moved south during the drought of A.D. 1280 to A.D. 1300. The Berrys argue that the Goshute, Paiute, Shoshone, and Ute migrated into the territories vacated by the Fre­mont, so these Numic speakers lack archaeological ties or descendant relationships with the Fremont. In this interpretation of the archaeological record, any or all of the Puebloan claimants, including the Hopi Tribe, the Pueblos of Zuni, Zia, Laguna, or Nambe, may have ab­sorbed immigrant Fremont farmers from their southward migrations. Nevertheless, specific linkages from the prehistoric Fremont to modern Puebloan tribes are not evidenced in the archaeological record; in fact, estab­lishing such linkages may not be theoretically or meth­odologically possible. T. J. Ferguson (2001) synthesized lines of evidence including geography, oral history, anthropology, and folklore. His interpretation of these data is that all ten tribes have a shared socio-cultural identity with the Fre­mont, but documentation of how the tribes conceive of or trace their relationship with the northern Fremont is currently only available for the Hopi Tribe, Northern Ute Tribe, and Pueblo of Zuni. Linguistically, the ten claimant tribes are speakers of Keresan, Tewa, Uto-Aztecan, and Zuni. The relation­ships between these language families and the Fremont were assessed by David Shaul (2001). The likelihood for shared language between the Fremont and these tribes depends on which linguistic method is applied. If age-area modeling is used, Shaul believes the North­western Shoshone and Northern Ute are the most likely descendants of the Fremont, but this is based on an assumption of continuity in the archaeological record, an assumption unsupported by the basketry and other archaeological evidence. If homeland studies are used, then Numic languages in general, along with Tanoan UTAH ARCHAEOLOGY 2002 and Keresan speakers are the most likely descendants of the Fremont. Biology is one of the more controversial lines of evidence for cultural affiliation. For nearly a century anthropologists have shown that race, language, and culture can vary independently of one another. There is little expectation among many anthropologists that biological variation will correspond with other ways of measuring group status because group identity is so plastic. Nevertheless, physical traits do vary and char­acteristics are passed on to descendants. For this rea­son, biology is one of NAGPRA's mandated lines of evidence. Evidence from mitochondrial DNA studies of the Fremont show them to be most strongly related to the Pueblos of Jemez and Zuni (Carlyle 2000). In addi­tion to this DNA evidence, craniometric data evaluating the biological relationships between modern tribes and the Fremont are currently being synthesized by Dou­glas Owsley, Richard Jantz, and their physical anthro­pological colleagues. lead to the same conclusion, the NAGPRA inventory process gives the tribes, agencies, and museums two options. The items could be retained until the requesting parties mutually agree upon the appropriate recipient, or the parties could await the promulgation of new regulations for the repatriation of culturally unidentifiable items. On the other hand, if the preponderance of the evidence leads to a conclusion that the Fremont are culturally identifiable, that same evidence may indicate the claim of one tribe appears truer than the claims of the others. APPLYING THE STANDARD OF PROOF: PREPONDERANCE OF THE EVIDENCE FOR FREMONT CULTURAL AFFILIATION Once documentation of the lines of evidence for cultural affiliation is compiled, the final steps in the re­patriation process consist of weighing the evidence, then transferring the cultural items to the affiliated tribe. The standard of proof that NAGPRA requires to evalu­ate the lines of evidence is a preponderance of the evi­dence. Following standard judicial guidance, prepon­derance of the evidence means proving the claim is more likely true than not true, more likely so than not so. In the case of the northern Fremont cultural items under Reclamation's control, this final step has not yet been taken. Based on the evidence provided by Adovasio, Pedler, and Illingworth, the Fremont is an identifiable earlier group, but a group that is culturally unidentifiable. If the other lines of evidence from linguistics, geography, biology, kinship, anthropology, folklore, oral tradition, or tribal history