In 1999, people from the Pueblo of Jemez walked toward Pecos. The journey retraced a route their Pecos ancestors had taken away from the old pueblo in 1838. At the same time, the remains of nearly two thousand ancestors and nearly one thousand objects were being brought west from museums that had held them for generations. The two journeys met near the place from which the ancestors had been taken. The National Park Service’s oral-history podcast preserves the memories of Jemez participants, museum staff, and park workers who carried out the return.
This is an archaeology story, but no new object had to be dug up to make it consequential. The decisive work involved identifying people in collections, consulting descendants, arranging transport, walking, and reburial. Archaeological records helped trace what had been removed. Legal authority under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, made a return possible. Jemez people determined what bringing the ancestors home should mean. A museum inventory that once made the remains available for study became part of a different task: finding who had the right to decide their care.
Pecos is often presented as an old set of walls east of Santa Fe. The park’s account of the Pueblo gives it the name P’aékilâ, “place above the water,” used by descendants. It was a center of trade and culture at the meeting of routes and waters. Its history reaches beyond the museum era and beyond the Spanish mission walls many visitors notice first. The 1999 return cannot be understood if the site is treated as an abandoned archaeological specimen whose people disappeared. Descendants live at Jemez and elsewhere. For them, Pecos is part of an ongoing story.
Before the museum boxes
The Pecos community occupied a powerful place in the upper valley. Water from the Pecos River and Glorieta Creek, a pass through the mountains, and routes among Pueblo communities and plains peoples helped make it a center of travel and exchange. Spanish invasion, colonial rule, disease, conflict, changing trade, and pressure on agricultural land altered that world. A short account cannot reduce every change to one cause. What matters for the later repatriation is that the place had people and descendants, not merely a long sequence of deposits.
In 1838, the last residents of the old Pecos Pueblo went to live with their Towa-speaking kin at the Pueblo of Jemez. The NPS ancestral-sites interpretation describes pressures on fields, drought, epidemics, and movement to other pueblos. It also describes continuing ceremonial connections to Pecos. Departure from a house does not end a community’s relation to it. The choice to return ancestors to Pecos more than a century later drew on that continuity.
The park now tells visitors that Pecos descendants at Jemez speak Towa, consult on park decisions, and return for events. Its “People of Pecos” page directs readers to Jemez accounts of their own history. This is a shift from the older museum habit of placing ancestral peoples entirely in the past tense. It also gives the 1999 walk a different meaning. People did not reenact a vanished culture for an audience. They followed a family and community history back to a place that had continued to matter.
The landscape itself helps carry that continuity. The walls of the pueblo, the mission church, the fields, and the route through Glorieta Pass record different chapters of a shared place. No one feature can stand in for the others. A visitor who focuses only on the Spanish mission may miss the older center of trade; a visitor who sees only an archaeological mound may miss centuries of colonial change; a visitor who calls the village “abandoned” may miss a feast-day return by descendants. The park’s present interpretation asks readers to see movement between Pecos and Jemez as part of the community’s life, not as a final disappearance at one site.
That history shaped the question of authority. A museum could know how a collection was cataloged, which excavator sent it east, and whether an accession number matched a field record. It could not decide alone what the ancestors’ return should look like or what cultural responsibilities Jemez people recognized. A land manager could offer a protected place for reburial; it could not replace the descendants. The repatriation required these institutions to work together while accepting that their expertise and authority were different.
The excavation that changed Southwestern archaeology
Beginning in the 1910s, archaeologist Alfred Vincent Kidder directed long-term work at Pecos. The National Park Service biography dates his research and excavations from 1914 to 1929 and describes them as an influential multidisciplinary project. Changes in pottery through layers at Pecos helped build a relative chronology for the Southwest. The method made the site famous to generations of archaeologists. It also involved removing large amounts of material, including ancestors.
The park’s repatriation podcast explains how material traveled to two institutions whose similar names can confuse the record: the Peabody museum at Phillips Academy in Andover and the Peabody Museum at Harvard. Kidder worked under Andover; an association with Harvard anthropologist Ernest Hooton led to the transfer of human remains to Harvard beginning in 1919, and later field seasons sent them there directly. The distinction between institutions matters because repatriation required identifying where people and objects had ended up, not just saying vaguely that “the museum” held them.
Research value and harm both belong in this history. Pecos excavation did contribute to archaeological knowledge. That achievement did not erase the loss felt by descendants when ancestors were taken far away. The podcast includes participants who describe the removal as a disruption of community, not an ordinary transfer of specimens. An honest article can describe why Kidder’s methods were influential and why the treatment of the dead had to change. It need not choose one sentence and suppress the other.
The old scientific framing called human beings “remains” and numbered them as a collection. Legal documents still use that language. In the NPS oral histories, participants often say “ancestors” or “individuals” to keep their humanity audible. Language alone cannot repair a removal, but it can reveal whose standpoint organizes the story. If a visitor hears only that “1,922 specimens” changed custody, the return sounds like an inventory adjustment. If the visitor hears that descendants welcomed ancestors home, the same paperwork becomes part of a human event.
Finding people in a collection
A repatriation of this scale did not happen because a single box carried a perfect label. It took years of inventories, records, consultation, and travel. The NPS podcast follows Jemez representatives who went to museums to examine holdings and identify items. They worked with limited resources and had to arrange money for travel. Museum staff held accession information; Jemez people brought cultural knowledge and direct connection. The work was not a ceremonial signature added after the institutions had already decided everything. It changed what was identified and returned.
The podcast reports that 1,922 individuals came from the Harvard Peabody, with additional individuals and items from Andover, the state of New Mexico, and the National Park Service. The episode overview rounds the total to almost 2,000 ancestors and nearly 1,000 objects. These numbers are large enough to be difficult to picture. They should not be turned into spectacle. Each accession was tied to an individual life and to institutional decisions that placed that person in storage far from Pecos. The magnitude shows how an accepted research practice can accumulate consequences over decades.
There were complex questions of affiliation. Pecos had been a trade center, so not every person buried there would necessarily have been born into exactly the same community. The podcast says consultation led to a decision to return the excavated individuals to Jemez for reburial at Pecos. That is a particular negotiated decision in a particular case. It is not a rule that a writer should impose on another site. The point is that descendants and other affiliated nations had to be involved in resolving questions that a museum’s old labels could not settle by themselves.
The park’s account also makes clear that it was not the largest holder. A later park manager remembered only a small number of ancestors and cultural items in the park’s own collection. This detail matters because public attention often falls on the most visible institution, the national park, while much of the material was in eastern museums. Repatriation required cooperation across institutions with different holdings and obligations. It also required the park to think about what responsibility it had to the place after the return, not only about what it owned.
Law opened a door; people walked through it
NAGPRA, enacted in 1990, provides processes for inventories, consultation, and repatriation involving Native American ancestors and certain cultural items held by covered museums and federal agencies. The current National NAGPRA Program guidance emphasizes consultation in determining cultural affiliation. The law gave the Pecos return an enforceable framework, but it did not arrange the walk, prepare meals, find travel money, or decide how community members would accompany their ancestors. Those acts came from people.
The NPS podcast names Jemez leaders and organizers, including Governor Raymond Gachupin and George Toya, and records the work of museum and park staff. It describes a three-day walk of about 106 miles from Jemez toward Pecos, with support from people in Cochiti, at the Santa Fe Indian School, and near Pecos. Food, water, lodging, transport, and coordination were all necessary. The practical labor gives the event its shape. A return measured only in legal notices would miss the community that made the journey possible.
The transport of the ancestors also required care. Representatives traveled with the load bringing them west. Supporters helped cover costs. The return culminated in reburial near the ancestors’ original resting place in what is now Pecos National Historical Park. The exact protected location is not a destination for readers and is not identified here. The park’s account describes continuing protection and Jemez involvement in access. Respect for that decision is part of accurately telling the story: a public history does not have to publish a sensitive place to establish that the return happened.
The work crossed different forms of distance. Museum staff could hand over records in a northeastern building, but the return still required packing, travel, decisions about handling, and a place prepared in New Mexico. Jemez representatives could identify a community relationship that old accession cards did not express, yet those cards helped find people across collections. The park could protect land, but it needed to understand the meaning of the return from descendants. The story resists a simple handoff between one “owner” and another. It was a series of acts in which each participant had to recognize the limits of their own authority.
The reburial was not simply an ending to an old controversy. It changed relationships among Jemez, museums, and the park. Podcast participants describe difficult conversations, trust built through work, and the possibility of collaborating afterward. No one should flatten that into a universally happy resolution. The loss was real, and other ancestors and objects remain in collections elsewhere. Yet the Pecos return demonstrates that institutions can do more than acknowledge historical harm in a label. They can change custody, practice, and decision making.
The meaning of “discovery” changes
Kidder’s excavations are often narrated as discoveries: layers of pottery helped establish chronology, and a great Pueblo yielded evidence about a region. The 1999 event asks a different question. What did researchers fail to recognize when they saw ancestral graves primarily as data? The answer is not that archaeological observation has no value. It is that a scientific conclusion did not confer exclusive authority over people taken from their community. A discovery about pottery sequence and a duty to return ancestors can both be true.
The distinction also reaches current fieldwork. If a person unexpectedly encounters possible human remains or protected cultural items on federal or tribal land, NPS NAGPRA guidance calls for immediate reporting to the appropriate official and protection from further disturbance. Procedures differ with the land and circumstances; private and state land have their own laws. The example of Pecos should not be reduced to a generic “call a museum” instruction. The proper authorities include the land manager and tribes with a connection to the place. An interested bystander does not become the decision maker by being first to notice something.
In a museum, discovery may mean finding an old field note that identifies a person or links an object to a sensitive context. It may mean recognizing that a previous determination needs consultation and correction. Institutions have to preserve records, but they also have to be willing to act on them. The Pecos collection’s old documentation helped people identify what was removed. It was useful precisely because it could be turned toward a purpose different from the one for which the excavation originally gathered it.
The story also asks writers to reconsider the phrase “abandoned ruin.” Pecos families left the old village in 1838, but the community did not vanish, and the place did not lose its living relationships. A public article that says only “ancient ruins discovered by Kidder” would erase the Jemez people whose ancestors came from Pecos and whose representatives returned in 1999. The better story begins with the place and its people, then treats the excavations and return as chapters in a continuing history.
A walk beside a truck
The image at the heart of the NPS oral history is a community walking while a truck carried ancestors west. The two forms of movement belonged to one return. A truck was necessary for safe transport across a long distance. The walk restored a route that connected Pecos and Jemez in memory and practice. Neither cancels the other. The practical and the ceremonial, the legal and the familial, met in the same undertaking.
A descendant participant in the podcast remembers how many people contributed food and help along the way. That recollection keeps the event from becoming a simple story of a law passed in Washington and implemented by professional staff. Tribal organizers, donors, hosts, drivers, museum workers, and park staff each did work. Their roles differed. The community’s purpose gave the labor direction. A longform history should allow room for those meals and miles instead of leaping from a notice in the Federal Register to a completed reburial.
The account is also unusually rich because multiple perspectives were recorded. A museum worker can explain accession history. A Jemez participant can explain the preparation for the walk. A park manager can explain site protection afterward. None is a substitute for the others. The NPS podcast’s format lets listeners hear points of agreement and difference, and it offers a model for telling archaeology stories with more than the excavator’s voice. This article paraphrases the public record; it does not present itself as a direct interview with participants.
The return changed what a visitor at Pecos could understand. The old walls still show architecture. Pottery layers still matter to Southwestern chronology. The mission still belongs to a history of colonization and religious change. But the fact that descendants came back for their ancestors prevents any of those features from being the entire account. Pecos is not solely an object of study or a backdrop for someone else’s discovery. It is P’aékilâ in a living landscape of relations.
What remains to be done
One large repatriation does not settle the question of every collection. NAGPRA’s scope, regulations, inventories, and consultation practices continue to develop. The National Park Service’s current guidance is the right starting point for current procedures, not a twenty-seven-year-old newspaper description of how the 1999 case worked. Laws set obligations; institutions still have to trace holdings, communicate honestly, and make room for tribal decisions. A public writer should date legal descriptions and avoid using Pecos as a shortcut for every jurisdiction or every cultural item.
There is a research lesson in the return, too. The old Pecos pottery sequence is still taught because layered deposits offered a way to order material from other Southwestern sites. But field notes and museum catalogs have another duty once people in them are recognized as ancestors. Their accuracy can help locate, identify, and return. The same pencil marks that supported a chronology may reveal an excavation context that requires renewed consultation. Good records do not excuse a past decision; they make it possible to face that decision precisely. Poor records leave descendants and institutions with more uncertainty and more labor.
The protected reburial place is also a reminder that public access is not the only public good. Visitors can learn that the return occurred, hear Jemez and park participants describe it, and understand why it matters without being shown an exact spot. Protection of the ancestors and respect for Jemez authority are part of the historical evidence about what happened afterward. A “discovery story” that insists on revealing every location would repeat the premise that outsiders’ curiosity outranks the community’s relationship to its dead.
At Pecos, an archive of objects and field records helped archaeologists build a chronology. The same archive later helped descendants bring ancestors home. Neither fact makes the earlier removal harmless, and the return does not erase the knowledge gained. What changed was who could direct the future of the people and objects in the collection. The walk in 1999 made that change visible across the landscape. It is the clearest answer this series can give to the question of who has authority in archaeology: first look for the people whose history and ancestors are involved, and listen when they tell us what care requires.
Sources and further reading
- NPS, Hollowed to Hallowed Ground: The 1999 Pecos Repatriation: multi-episode oral history and transcripts with Jemez, museum, and park participants.
- NPS, “Pecos Pueblo”: P’aékilâ and the Pueblo’s setting.
- NPS, “People of Pecos”: descendant connections and present consultation.
- NPS, “Alfred Vincent Kidder”: excavation history and later return.
- NPS, “Ancestral Sites Tour: Epilogue”: the 1838 movement to Jemez and continuing connections.
- National NAGPRA Program: current federal process and guidance.
Continue with Mesa Verde’s living descendant communities or return to the Gila cliff dwellings. The site’s Treasure Research Guide discusses why a land label alone never establishes authority to disturb a place.