ABSTRACT
Recent controversy surrounding the exhumation and reburial of indigenous human skeletons in the United States and Australia has called into question the relationship between archaeologists and contemporary native peoples. This in turn has led some archaeologists to deny the existence of a continuous native cultural tradition linking living people with the remains of the past, upon which indigenous claims for control of those remains frequently rest. The debate has raised a number of issues concerning the connections between archaeological theory, research methods and politics.
