Faculty Affairs and Academic Programs
Beth Scaffidi
Social Sciences; Public Policy; Public Affairs
Anthropology & Heritage Studies
UC Merced
Reassembling Looted and Lost Skeletons in Legacy Archaeological Collections: The Andean Paleomobility Unification Project for Repatriation (APU-R)
Human skeletons are vital archives of biocultural heritage, yet many Andean ancestors were collected under colonial conditions stripping them from context and descendant communities. Although repatriation is now recognized as an ethical priority, infrastructures and information needed to document and return these individuals remain limited. The Andean Paleomobility Unification Project for Repatriation (APU-R) leverages and updates my earlier isotopic synthesis of pre-Hispanic Andean mobility to facilitate repatriation for individuals in legacy collections with problematic provenience. Thousands of Andean skeletons in US, European, and Andean museums lack provenience due to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century collecting practices that privileged pathological crania as curiosities. Many collections contain mismatched or commingled elements, vague labels, or cannot be assigned to a region of origin, while the comparative isotopic and osteological data needed for provenience are absent for regions heavily affected by colonial extraction. APU-R addresses these challenges by inventorying and analyzing undocumented individuals at the Field Museum and Pitt Rivers Museum using non- and minimally-destructive osteological analysis, LIBS elemental profiling, and isotopic analysis, calibrated to my existing Andean baseline map. These methods will re-unite individuals within and across collections for repatriation while filling basic knowledge gaps about human lifeways at archaeological sites represented by these unstudied collections. Ultimately, APU-R establishes a scalable model for decolonial bioarchaeology, integrating scientific, archival, and collaborative database research.
