Museums are now reburying both 12,000-year-old human skeletons and presenting creation myths as factual history—while critical research on the first people in the American Southwest has largely ground to a halt courtesy of progressive politics. So argues anthropologist Dr. Elizabeth Weiss in a recent report examining an alarming ideological shift in her field, The Reburial of the Southwest: Closing Off Native History and Archaeology.
What began as a narrow effort under the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) to return clearly affiliated sacred items to American Indian tribes has expanded dramatically. Because of regulatory updates to the law in 2023, remains that predate any modern tribe by thousands of years are being pulled from museum collections. Everyday commercial objects from the 20th century are now treated as cultural patrimony requiring reburial. Museums classify even recent debris—such as spark plugs and bottle caps—found at ancient sites as funerary objects. Basic archaeological research in Arizona has effectively stopped, with no recent studies drawing on Native remains from the state.
Even more perplexing: the same progressive framework pushing these policies has introduced sex discrimination into curation and fieldwork. Some major research institutions now bar menstruating women from handling remains or artifacts under the banner of “culturally appropriate care,” adopting taboos promoted by tribal activists. These restrictions emerged from universities and museums aligned with progressive causes that otherwise present themselves as champions of women’s rights and equality. Weiss notes that the rules were only reversed at her own institution after she applied legal pressure under Title IX, a federal law prohibiting sex discrimination.
This contradiction reveals a deeper pattern. Progressive ideology that claims to oppose discrimination and defend science readily imposes religious-style restrictions and shuts down empirical inquiry when those goals conflict with identity-based claims. The result is not only the loss of data on early American diet, disease and migration, but also the quiet acceptance of sex-based barriers in academic spaces that would be loudly condemned in any other context. Weiss argues that these incoherent outcomes stem from academia’s postmodern skepticism of objective truth and the decolonization narratives that flow from it.
Join professor Elizabeth Weiss, Dr. Liza Lockwood and Cam English on this episode of Facts & Fallacies as they examine the social justice movement’s impact on anthropology.
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Dr. Elizabeth Weiss is a physical anthropologist and Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at San Jose State University. Follow her on X @EWeissUnburied
Dr. Liza Lockwood is a medical toxicologist and the medical affairs lead at Bayer Crop Science. Follow her on X @DrLizaMD
Cameron J. English is the executive vice president at the American Council on Science and Health. Follow him on X @camjenglish
