A TRUE ARCHAEOLOGICAL MYSTERY

TRUE STORY:  In 1958, a backhoe operator scraped up three human skulls while leveling the ground for the construction of employee housing at Fort Union National Monument, north of Las Vegas, New Mexico. Each skull had a bullet hole in the forehead. When the government archaeologist finished his excavations, he had uncovered the skeletons of four young males, all executed after being badly beaten, buried in a shallow grave, and their stories lost to history. 
 

TRUE STORY: In April 1863, Brig. Gen. James H. Carleton, Commanding the U.S. Army in New Mexico, wrote a letter to the Adjutant General of the United States in Washington, D.C., asking if he had the authority to execute four New Mexico Volunteers for desertion. An act passed by the U.S. Congress on July 17, 1862 had clearly given him authority to pass a death sentence for this high crime, but he wanted clarification that he could proceed with the execution without review by the President of the United States. The context of the letter suggests that the four men, one white man and three Hispanics, had already been executed.
 
TRUE STORY: In 2006, the National Park Service, under the auspices of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, turned over four sets of human remains to the Jicarilla Apache tribe. All four bodies had been recovered from a mass burial found at Fort Union National Monument in April 1958. This was done under the recommendation of a graduate student hired by the National Park Service, despite the fact that no DNA studies had been undertaken, no history studies were conducted, and on the spurious fact that three of the skeletons had shovel-shaped incisors, a morphological characteristic common to many Hispanics. This, also despite the fact that all anthropologists who had  examined the human remains had stated that one set was not Native American; and that two sets only had Native American ancestry, a trait of every Hispanic person in the American Southwest today. In fact, only one set of remains could unequivocably be classed as Native American, or assigned to a Native American tribe; and its claim by the Jicarilla Apache was probably inaccurate.

On-Going Research:
During its formal Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation (NAGPRA) Study between 1995 and 2005, the National Park Service and its contractors dismissed  any connected between the Carleton letter and the four bodies it found in 1958. Dr. Spude and forensic anthropologist Doug Scott, Ph.D. are voluntarily conducting the historic investigations that the government failed to do. In the process, they are making some surprising discoveries about ethnicity in the New Mexico volunteers of the 1860's; the frequency of desertion during the Civil War (an offense that could draw a sentence of execution); and the way in which the government does or does not consult appropriate authorities when doing its NAGPRA Studies.

Most importantly, the National Park Service did not do any study of the numerous historic and military records available at the time, and they ignored the fact that three of the five anthropologists who examined the skeletal remains found two sets of remains were probably not Native American. One set was Caucasian, and the other most assuredly of mixed race, or Hispanic. Dr. Spude has discovered that Native Americans, mostly of the Pueblo tribes (not Apache) often joined as members of the New Mexico Volunteers. These soldiers, executed as soldiers, not as "hostiles," were in all likelihood, military criminals.

A formal, peer-reviewed scientific study is forth-coming in 2009 or 2010 by Drs. Spude and Scott.

If you have any questions, please contact Catherine at
 
montdawn@msn.com