NAGPRA at 20: What Have the States Done to Expand Human Remains Protections?

Abstract

This year marks the beginning of the third decade since the enactment of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). Since 1990, many of the states have enacted laws in response to NAGPRA. This article reviews the state-level responses to human burial sites protection post-NAGPRA, with a particular focus on Louisiana. This review shows how some states have managed to craft human remains protection laws that are more expansive than NAGPRA in many ways, including both human remains protections and archaeological site protections. These latter protections, as this review demonstrates, must often be cobbled together from a hodgepodge of common and civil law traditions, traditional cemetery protections, and the state-level NAGPRA analogues. The end result, in some jurisdictions, is comprehensive archaeological site protection that did not exist in the pre-NAGPRA world.

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