In 1968, a Louisiana prison guard unearthed over 100 skeletons and sacred objects at a grave site in West Feliciana Parish, exposing them to the light for the first time in centuries.

He kept the items, precious pieces of handmade Tunica pottery and traded European goods. Those could be sold.

He tossed the remains into the Mississippi River.

Out of 1.5 tons of recovered materials from the grave robbing, “the human remains could fit into a shoebox,” said Earl Barbry Jr., the historic preservation officer for the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana. “The guy that desecrated the graves really didn’t find any monetary value, so he just discarded the remains.”

There are more than 1,700 bodies and parts of bodies that, like the Tunica-Biloxi's ancestors, were disturbed and disinterred by archae

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