Pueblo Bonito's richest crypt held one maternal line for 330 years, and scientists sequenced it without asking the Pueblo tribes

In 1896 an American Museum of Natural History expedition dug Room 33 at Pueblo Bonito, a crypt of about two by two metres. On a prepared floor lay a man in his 40s who had died from a blow to the head. He wore more than 11,200 turquoise and 3,300 shell beads, the richest burial known in the American Southwest, with Pacific abalone shells and a conch trumpet. A second man with more than 5,800 turquoise pieces lay above a sand layer under a plank floor, and 12 more people were added over time. The remains went to New York. In 2017 Douglas Kennett and colleagues reported in Nature Communications that nine of them shared one mitochondrial genome. Nuclear DNA showed a mother and daughter and a grandmother and grandson. The line held the crypt for about 330 years, from AD 800 to 1130. The museum, which legally controls the remains, approved the destructive sampling. Pueblo tribes, which claim Chaco ancestry, and the Diné were not consulted before the work, according to tribal officials and later reviews. Headlines read "Girl Power." Acoma official Theresa Pasqual said, "We could have told you that." Hopi cultural preservation director Stewart Koyiyumptewa asked why the scientists did not ask the tribes. In 2021 anthropologists called the study a case study in an ethical crisis in ancient-DNA research. The remains are still held by the museum^†.