Research at Spirit Eye Cave did not take the course I envisioned. In the 1950s and 1960s, this cave, located on a private ranch in West Texas, was a pay-to-dig site. It was extensively dug, all too common with the vast tracts of private land that typify Texas. Initially, the goal of my research was to salvage any information about when the cave was occupied, and to examine the perishable collections. As I conducted my fieldwork I researched the archived history and was shocked to find collectors had removed multiple Indigenous ancestors, but their current whereabouts were unknown. This halted fieldwork, as I examined state and federal burial and excavation laws and if they applied retroactively, and located and contacted collectors whose names were associated with the cave. I relocated many of the collector’s collections and the ancestors. During this process, my co-author Xoxi Nayapiltzin, and I found results that brought the past into the present in unforeseen ways.

As we describe in the paper, currently we are trying to return the Spirit Eye Cave ancestors to co-author Xoxi Nayapiltzin. We have made formal claims, and the process is still circulating through institutions and channels. We hope the matter is resolved by this spring, but it may take longer given the unique aspects of the case.

Since publication our work with the collectors has not made much progress. Phone calls have been made and pleasantries exchanged, but I cannot get a commitment for face-to-face meetings. This situation is also true for the collectors who have yet to donate (which will be centralized at a federally recognized curation facility at the end of the project) the artifacts removed from Spirit Eye Cave. The restrictions created by the pandemic have greatly affected our current efforts, coordinating and working with the collectors in this cave. Despite the complexities, I hope our article illustrates the importance of working at a site like Spirit Eye Cave for future archaeologists.

The associated article – A Complicated History Collaboration with Collectors to Recover and Repatriate Indigenous Human Remains Removed from Spirit Eye Cave by Bryon Schroeder and Xoxi Nayapiltzin – is free to read until the end of May 2022.