From wire and correspondent reports

CODY - In the summer of 1941, a work crew digging a sewer line in Yellowstone National Park came across the skeletal remains of a man and a scattering of burial objects, including two dog skulls, a chert knife and sharpened points.

Fifteen years later, remains of two other people were found nearby. This time it was a buried woman and an infant along with a dog.

For decades, the carefully preserved remains were kept in a Yellowstone storage room. They were simply pieces of history never directly tied to any of the American Indian tribes that roamed the area for thousands of years.

But thanks to a federal law passed in 1990 and years of research, the remains - dated to the late prehistoric period - have been connected to tribes in Wyoming and Idaho.

This month, the Eastern Shoshone Tribe of the Wind River Indian Reservation and the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes of the Fort Hall Indian Reservation are taking legal possession of their buried ancestors' bones.

The process of returning burial remains to the Indian tribes is the first of its kind in Yellowstone, said Rosemary Sucec, the park's cultural anthropologist.

It's also an important reminder that people were in Yellowstone long before explorers of European descent stumbled onto it.

"It graphically portrays human beings were on this landscape," Sucec said. "There's been 10,000 years of continuous indigenous occupation."

The remains include:

* One man, 35 to 45 years old, found in 1941 during a construction project.

* One woman, 40 to 50 years old, found in 1956 during a construction project.

* One infant, age and sex unknown, found near the woman.

Although no radiocarbon dating was done, studies of the remains and funerary objects, as well as study of graveside dirt and rocks, indicate the remains could date from 400 A.D. to 1803 - just before the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

While the woman and child were not buried with artifacts, the man was found with 105 funerary objects, including an antler fragment, one chert drill, one chert knife, two chert flacks, two dog skulls, one granite pounding stone, one obsidian flake, one projectile point and 95 other stones. Not included are items now missing n three small projectile points, 10 worked scrapers and 200 to 300 stone flakes.

Sucec said two kinds of physical evidence pointed to the Shoshone-Bannock tribes. The first was that only three tribal groups buried dogs with humans, and secondly, the short, stocky physical stature of the adults was more characteristic of Shoshoneans, rather than the taller Mountain Crow, who also buried dogs with people.

Add in oral traditions of regional tribes and historical records from fur trappers and Yellowstone naturalists, and it becomes ever more likely that the remains were Shoshonean, Sucec said. Stories told by the Shoshone, the Salish and Nez Perce indicate a history of rendezvous gatherings in the Fishing Bridge area, but the Nez Perce never practiced burying dogs with humans. Not enough is known about Salish practices to say whether that happened, she said.

"It was the preponderance of evidence," she said.

The return of the Yellowstone remains was nudged along by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. The act requires federal agencies to look through their collections and identify sacred or cultural objects, burial items and remains and attempt to return them to American Indian tribes.

Reunion with the past

In conducting their research, park officials invited tribal officials to Yellowstone to examine the location and the objects and to hear their stories.

The sessions made it easier to imagine that the area around Fishing Bridge was a popular stopping point for tribes, a place for marriages and ceremonies, games, hunting and socializing, Sucec said. Some tribes used Yellowstone as a rendezvous site for trade. Others sent their young men to the land of geysers and smoke as a rite of passage to manhood.

"It was fascinating to see people who had never been to Yellowstone, see the landscape that lived in their oral traditions," Sucec said. "It was very much a reunion with their past."

Everyone seemed to come away with something, she said.

"It's not just what we learn about the park, but it's renewing that connection with them and them renewing their relationship with the park," Sucec said.

Tribal representatives looked at American Indian collection items in Yellowstone, providing new insights into how some items were made or used, what colors and patterns meant.

And through it all were the three human remains that were waiting for a final resting place.

Richard Ferris, a tribal judge for the Eastern Shoshone, said the tribe will probably ask that the three remains be reinterred somewhere else in Yellowstone, rather than have the remains buried outside the park.

"That's what we did when a Rock Springs gravel pit operation uncovered a grave of one of our people," Ferris said.

He still needs to visit with some tribal elders to see whether a ceremony or prayer would be appropriate when the skeletal remains are reinterred - all of which will take time.

Ferris's counterpart with the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, Claudeo Broncho, indicated the remains won't be reinterred on the Fort Hall reservation.

"Our people used to roam free over this land. Why would we want to bring our ancestors back to a reservation where we were forced to live?" he said.

Sucec estimated that final burial of the three remains could be any time between this spring and fall.

And there's one more set of human remains that needs to go through the whole process - a skull that was donated to Yellowstone National Park by a former U.S. senator. There's little or no information about the origin of the skull, only a belief that it is that of an American Indian.