WASHINGTON -- The University of Arkansas Museums Collection possesses roughly 7 million objects, including at least 345 sets of American Indian human remains, most of them kept for decades in cardboard boxes.
Now, with the help of federal dollars, museum workers will study the bones and consult with Indian tribes about the best way to handle the fragments.
The National Park Service has awarded $58,632 to the University of Arkansas System to assist with the project. It was one of four grants totaling $287,785 that were announced Thursday.
Similar grants totaling $1.6 million were unveiled in July.
The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 requires federally funded colleges and museums to complete an inventory of any Indian cultural items that they possesses, including human remains, funerary objects and sacred objects.
Those lists are published in the Federal Register, the federal government's official daily journal. Indian tribes are entitled to reclaim items that belonged to their ancestors.
University of Arkansas officials will consult with leaders of three Oklahoma-based tribes about the items in its collection: The Osage, who lived in Northwest Arkansas; the Caddo, who inhabited southwest Arkansas; and the Quapaw, who dwelt in eastern Arkansas.
The grant money will be used for documentation, consultation and repatriation of the objects, federal officials said.
The university will also place them in "culturally appropriate storage," the Park Service said.
Officials with the Osage Nation declined to discuss the grant. Leaders from the other two tribes did not respond to requests for comment.
The items aren't on public display.
The University of Arkansas Museum closed its exhibit hall in 2003, part of a cost-cutting plan. But it has retained its vast collection, which is stored roughly 2 miles north of campus.
The UA Museums Collection has been submitting the mandatory government reports for two decades, according to the National Park Service database.
However, an additional 144 sets of human remains have been discovered in the collection since the previous reports were completed, according to the grant proposal.
"Most of them are from excavations that were carried out in the 1930s," said Curator of Collections Mary Suter in an interview.
All 345 sets of human remains will also be measured and recorded in a standardized osteological database by an osteologist, an expert who studies bones.
The act's provisions affect other Arkansas entities.
Similar reports have also been filed over the years by or on behalf of the Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism, Toltec Mounds Archeological State Park, the Highway and Transportation Department, the Arkansas State University Museum, and the Arkansas Archeological Survey.
The Archeological Survey, in fact, just completed a similar two-and-a-half-year study last week.
"We get some human remains on a regular basis, some from our own research, sometimes [from] private citizens," said Ann Early, the state archaeologist and an official with the Arkansas Archeological Survey.
The remains are often centuries old and vary widely.
It can be "a tooth, one bone or an entire skeleton," Early said.
Suter said the grant is good news.
"We've been needing to do this project, and we're really glad to get the funds so that we can," she said.
Metro on 10/03/2016