Since the 1990s and the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), museums, laboratories and universities have focused their efforts on documenting their collections of Native American human remains before materials are returned to descendants. The field of physical anthropology was forward-thinking and created a set of standards to record basic information so skeletal data could be collected and stored for use by future researchers. The Smithsonian Institution (SI) falls under a different statute, the National Museum of the American Indian Act (NMAIA), which was implemented in 1989, although Smithsonian policies now closely mirror the NAGPRA. Enactment of the NMAIA necessitated construction of a computerized database to store and manage data curated by the Institution. To date, scholars have used the osteological database for comparative purposes, but not as a primary focus of research. Using the SI’s relational database and a subset of the data collected from the Institution’s Native American collections, this research assesses the accessibility of the SI osteological data, functionality of the SI relational database management system, and the quality of data previously collected by the SI Repatriation Osteology Laboratory. The proposed research also aims to accomplish a geographic and temporally expansive analysis of violence using a large dataset of Arikara-related skeletal materials curated at the museum. The SI database provided large-scale, time-space distributional data for use in a macro-regional and -temporal analysis. Utilization of archival databases to address anthropological research questions allows us to identify patterns that only become visible in samples larger and more widely geographically and temporally distributed than can be collected by any single individual or at one point in time (Steckel et al. 2002). Increasing the temporal and geographic range of samples can increase the breadth of understanding of the deep human past by allowing researchers to see changes through time and space, as well as interpersonal interactions between, and not only within, a single population. The present research provides evidence that violence in the Arikara tribe was a long-standing cultural tradition that pre-dated European contact. While injuries tended to accumulate with age in both sexes, different patterns of injury occurred between males and females. The patterns of injury suggest that intertribal raiding was the most common method of warfare practiced in both the Pre-Contact and Post-Contact periods. Instead of contact with Euro-Americans perpetuating and increasing the frequency of intertribal raiding, there appears to be a continuance of long-standing violent engagements from the proto-historic through the early historic period. A general lack of evidence of high mortality in Young Adult males (contrasted with other sex and age groups) and the low frequency of perimortem trauma were also consistent with small-scale raiding as the primary form of aggressive intertribal interactions in the Middle Missouri River Basin.
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