Under the watchful eyes of observers and a 24-hour security detail, UNLV anthropology professor Vicki Cassman methodically examines the bone fragments of a dead man. Only this is no crime scene investigation, it’s the Burke Museum of Natural History at the University of Washington.

The object of her scrutiny is the 9,200-year-old Kennewick Man. In 1998, Cassman was tapped by the Mandatory Center of Expertise for the Curation and Management of Archaeological Collections of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as one of two members from the American Institute of Conservation to oversee the curation and preservation of those valuable skeletal remains.

Kennewick Man has sparked a custody battle between the federal government, several Native American tribes who want to claim him, and several scholars who want to carry out extensive studies of him. It’s Cassman’s job, along with colleague Nancy Odegaard of the University of Arizona, to ensure that while Kennewick Man’s ultimate fate is determined in the courts, the fine balance between scholarly inquiry and respect for the dead is maintained.

As an archaeologist and a conservator, Cassman is no stranger to the often competing interests regarding access and preservation of human remains. But it was her experience with the Kennewick case that finally brought the issue into sharp focus.

At the outset of the project, she encountered curatorial practices that were in conflict with the spirit of the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, the legislation requiring museums and federal agencies to return certain Native American cultural items, including human remains, to lineal descendants.

“When we first saw him, he was housed in a very crude masonite box with bits and pieces in brown paper bags,” Cassman says. “The whole experience was a real eye-opener into how little information there is out there about proper curation. It also made me realize that stewardship ethics in anthropology are in need of a little updating.”

Although the repatriation act does not explicitly call for the revision of curatorial practices, Cassman and her colleagues say the legislation has forced professionals in the field to pay closer attention to how remains are handled. Cassman says the condition in which the remains of Kennewick Man were kept was typical and illustrative of the need for change in her profession.

“Human remains are in this very odd place where they’re sometimes a specimen and yet they are still an individual — a sacred thing,” says Cassman, who initially became interested in the issue while studying funerary objects in northern Chile. “As a result, they’ve never quite received the same amount of curation scrutiny that, say, paintings, textiles, or other artifacts have.”

In an effort to change that reality, Cassman has developed a human remains box that meets the concerns and standards set by all interested parties, including scientists, museum managers, and Native Americans. She and a group of graduate students designed the box to be 31 inches by 24 inches by 6 inches. It allows the bones to be arranged to closely resemble the human form — a concern common among many tribes — while remaining easily identifiable and accessible — a concern among physical anthropologists. Although they met both those requirements in the design, Cassman says the box will likely evolve as additional issues arise.

“We plan to continue the intercultural and interdisciplinary negotiations and further modify design,” Cassman says.

As for now, the boxes are being produced by Hollinger Co. They were used to store UNLV’s own collection of human remains in preparation for a move into a storage facility in the new Wright Hall.

In addition, Cassman is completing one of the first comprehensive source books on the preservation of human remains. Co-edited by Cassman, Odegaard, and Joseph Powell of the University of New Mexico, the book brings together the expertise of scholars on topics such as care and handling, health concerns, field methods, storage, documentation, and museum display of human remains. It also provides an overview of state, federal, and international laws, as well as a discussion on the needs for an updated code of ethics.

While she knows she can’t remedy each of the conflicts that arise, Cassman says that the recent developments in her career have strengthened her resolve to at least reconcile some of them. “I hope some of what I’m doing will challenge conservators to work in a new way,” says Cassman. “In the past, conservators have been seen as roadblocks to certain kinds of research, but our mission now is to find ways for people to carry out their work while minimizing the impact on the objects of study.”