On a ridge outside Morgantown, W.Va., work has stopped on a shopping mall while archaeologists excavate human remains found last month in an area where a group of Monongahela Indians once lived.

The remains are orphans, in a sense. There is no modern-day Monongahela tribe, and clear traces of the group disappear from the archaeological record before the arrival of European settlers.

Under a 1990 federal law governing the disposition of Native American remains, the status of such "unaffiliated" discoveries is left unclear.

That has left the door open for controversy over whether remains -- and artifacts associated with burial -- are valid objects of scientific study or are sacred and belong solely to the descendants of the dead or those who serve as custodians for them.

Should remains always be treated as sacred, or are there some that fall outside a specific culture's domain and become part of a larger cultural heritage?

Addressing the issue, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, finding in favor of a group of scientists, ruled this year that the 9,300-year-old remains of a man found in Washington state had no direct link to four tribes seeking to gain custody, including the Umatilla, who live in the area where the remains were found.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which controlled the federal land on which the remains were found, in 1996, planned to repatriate the Kennewick Man remains to the Umatilla. But eight anthropologists filed suit, arguing that Kennewick Man was not related to any modern tribal groups and saw the Indians' intention to rebury the remains without studying them as throwing away a rare opportunity.

"There's a whole book of information [in Kennewick Man's bones]. To put him back in the ground is like burning a rare book so we'll learn nothing," said Rob Bonnichsen, one of the eight plaintiffs.

That was not how many Native Americans saw it.

"Some scientists say that if this individual is not studied further, we, as Indians, will be destroying evidence of our own history," said Armand Minthorn, an Umatilla tribal leader.

"We already know our history. It is passed on to us through our elders and through our religious practices. Scientists have dug up and studied American Indians for decades. We view this practice as desecration of the body and a violation of our most deeply held religious beliefs."

The fact that whites -- whether it was soldiers in the 19th century or scientists in the 20th -- saw Indian burials as trophies or specimens rather than objects deserving of respect was just one more way that Indians were subjugated and treated as less than human, Native Americans have argued.

More than three decades ago, the Yankton Sioux wife of an Iowa highway engineer learned that a graveyard with white and Indian burials had been found during a construction project.

The white remains were put in caskets for reburial. The remains of an Indian woman and child were boxed and taken for study. The incident prompted Maria "Running Moccasins" Pearson to found a movement for repatriation of remains of Native Americans that eventually resulted in a federal law mandating procedures for handling human remains in collections as well as those found during excavations.

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, passed in 1990, requires federal agencies and museums and institutions that receive federal funds to provide information about Native American remains and cultural items to Indian tribes, and, if they get a valid request, return the objects to them.

Many archaeologists say burials are treated with great respect, and that they are repositories of valuable information.

James Richardson, an archaeologist and curator of anthropology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, pointed out that Revolutionary War and Civil War battlefields had been excavated and the remains of whites studied, so it isn't just Native American remains that are analyzed. Nonetheless, most of the bones and funerary objects in museum and private collections in this country are Native American.

The Repatriation Act set out a time line for inventorying various types of items. Institutions throughout the country have sent lists of items to the federal government and to tribes that might have links to them. Tribal representatives meet with museum officials and discuss which items should be repatriated.

The process has been slow, but the remains of more than 27,000 individuals have been repatriated since the passage of the Repatriation Act, along with thousands of sacred and funerary objects.

The sticking point, everyone agrees, is when there aren't clear ties between federally recognized tribes or other modern groups and burial remains or objects.

The Repatriation Act covers "unaffiliated" remains to a point, said Steve Warfel, senior curator of archaeology at the State Museum of Pennsylvania. It requires that such remains and associated objects be inventoried.

But there are no set procedures for deciding what to do with them, because no detailed regulations on handling unaffiliated remains were written into the law, said Paula Malloy, of the National NAGPRA Program in Washington, D.C.

Draft regulations have been written and will be reviewed by the Department of the Interior and offered for a public-comment period, Malloy said.

Meantime, some museums and other institutions contacted tribes that might hold cultural links with materials they have, and, in many cases, went ahead with repatriation. Such a procedure is under way in Morgantown in connection with the burials there.

Though the Monongahela are one of the cultures that sometimes are described as having "disappeared," they didn't just vanish.

"The descendants of the people who lived in that village are here, they are living," said Lora Lamarre, senior archaeologist in the West Virginia Division of Culture and History's Historic Preservation Section.

"Saying there is no record of what happened to them is different from saying they disappeared from Earth. They could have moved and assimilated into another group," she said. "We have no evidence of a cataclysmic illness that impacted the population. We can't document that something like that happened."

Susan Pierce, deputy state historic preservation officer in West Virginia, said Cherokee, Shawnee and Iroquois tribes are "interested and choose to participate in disposition of remains" of Monongahela people. So when archaeologists found part of a skull and some other fragments the week of Oct. 17, and three more burials the next week, those tribes were contacted.

Because the Pittsburgh Division of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued the permit for the project, it is the agency handling the matter.

Fred Pozzuto, project manager for the permits and regulatory branch of Pittsburgh District of the Corps, said the tribes usually decide among themselves which will be the lead tribes for discussion about disposition of remains.

The Corps was doing the same thing with Kennewick Man when the group of anthropologists stepped in to stop repatriation.

Some argue that the remains should be treated as sacred regardless of whether a connection can be established.

"Sacred human remains are not artifacts. They are what they are -- sacred -- and they are our ancestral remains, and they need to be treated as such," said Minthorn, the Umatilla tribal leader.

"What would white people say if we held a bunch of their bodies?" said Steve Brady, president of the Northern Cheyenne Sand Creek Massacre Descendants, who has worked for more than a decade to get remains from a Colorado massacre returned for burial. "What if we put them through all kinds of legal bureaucracy to get to those human remains?"

He said remains never pass into a broader cultural legacy.

"These are people; they must be reinterred. The sooner the better."

But many groups are willing to have objects and remains studied, even if they eventually want custody of them for reburial, said Joe Watkins, a Choctaw archaeologist and a professor at the University of New Mexico.

"There are tribes that are very involved with research on remains," he said.

The Wichita of Oklahoma have been involved in analysis of remains, and in fact worked with one of the plaintiffs in the Kennewick case, Watkins said. The differences in views about burial research extend worldwide, Watkins said.

"Orthodox Jews in Israel say no human remains should ever be excavated or studied," he said. Native groups in Australia believe they, not scientists, have a right to remains found.

But many religious groups that feel strongly about the sacredness of burial grounds and respect due to remains nevertheless are open to scientific study.

"The Catholic Church believes a cemetery is a sacred space," said the Rev. Ron Lengwin, spokesman for the Pittsburgh Catholic Diocese. But in the case of ancient burials discovered inadvertently or in archaeological excavations, he said, "An archaeologist could examine the bones, but afterward they must be treated with respect and would be reburied."

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(The Associated Press contributed to this story. Lillian Thomas can be reached at or 412-263-3566.)