ABSTRACT
The Bay Area Rapid Transit train leaves people off one block from the seventeen cemeteries that make up the 'San Francisco Necropolis' in Colma. California. Nestled between highways, shopping malls, and suburban neighborhoods are the dead of the city by the bay. The two scientists Dr. C. Edward Hitchcock and Professor Harris Hawthorne Wilder had a common interest: collecting human and material artifacts from Native American graves in the vicinity of their respective institutions. For these two men it was not bones for bones sake alone. They measured and recorded what they collected as an exercise in what they considered a scholarly investigation. New boxes with metal inventory tags accommodated the bones, and a large communal tombstone marked the new site. It took well over a year to settle all the legal and practical issues associated with this accidental discovery.
