Sixty-seven ancient Menominee ancestors and nearly 4,000 reassociated funerary objects are coming home after being unceremoniously stolen from their resting places by Western archeologists in the 1960s, Menominee tribal officials announced this month.
The ancestors were taken from the Riverside Cemetery site near the Menominee River in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula between 1961 and 1963 during a joint excavation led by anthropologists Robert Retzenthaler for the Milwaukee Public Museum and Robert Hrushka for the Oshkosh Public Museum.
The multicomponent site around the cemetery dates from the Late Archaic starting from 3,000 BC to the Mississippian time periods ending about 500 years ago. The main cemetery areas are from the Early Woodland Transition from between 1,000 BC to 100 BC…