What ever happened to all those Native American bodies that died from disease/murder during early European?

it wasn't 400 years ago in my region, only about 80-100. My grandpa was 3 or 4 before he saw a white person for the first time.

I worked on this archaeological sight a couple of years ago. It was heart breaking, to see the stages of devastation. The first wave of disease that killed several people were buried much further away from the village (mostly elderly and small children), as was customary, with proper ceremonial gear/objects, etc. The more people died, however, the closer the burials came to the village (we assume this is due to weakened state of the survivors/lack of people to help move the bodies and do the necessary work). Eventually, people were buried in groups with only painted rocks to act as other ceremonial objects would have. Hard to explain why that is so sad...I guess because I was raised very traditionally and I know that whoever was burying the people must have felt like a failure for being unable to grant the people what they would have believed was a sufficient ceremony to help them on their spiritual journey...its akin to seeing ceremonial objects held on display at the smithsonian that I KNOW are only meant to be seen/touched by their owner and spouse/closes relative of their owner for the purpose of burning it upon the owners death...knowing that when those objects were taken, a person genuinely believed a piece of their life was being taken from them..hard to explain why thats so upsetting too. Maybe its just the all around knowing that the "dominant race" doesn't give a sh*t for all these people suffered on their behalf...A carved wooden whale toy was found in the grave of a small child, with little bite marks from where a baby had chewed on it. I don't know why it moved me so much, but it made me cry a lot. We normally do not touch graves, at all. But most of them had been previously dug up and used as back fill for a lumber mill (yes, they knew what it was and what they were doing) so we had to sift through a lot of that AND determine what else lay beneath the sand.

What this article doesn't tell you, is that the contractor working on the construction project KNEW there was a significant burial sight there, KNEW it was supposed to be protected by NAGPRA, and most of the employees (all non native, except for one, who was Alaskan Native) didn't give a sh*t, they saw it as another opportunity to earn money (i'd like to see how well people would take it if a native tribe decided to plow over colonial graves in new england). The Alaskan Native was the whistle blower and got fired from his job. All because he did the RIGHT thing. I wonder how many ancient native graves are discovered, and ignored?

Decomposition, dispersal, etc. You have to understand that only the tiniest fraction of bones survive. Sure, we find 10,000 year old bones, and 10 million year old fossils, and even 100 million year old fossils, etc, but that's one in a zillion that survive, with conditions having to be just exactly right. For the most part, the earth takes back her own. I mean, what happened to all the bones of all the animals that were killed, that died, that were eaten? And the trees? All decomposed. The earth is a vast place. 30 years after the Vietnam war, American teams were searching through the jungles of Vietnam for MIA soldiers' remains, so they could bring back what they could find, and confirm what happened to those people. I saw a documentary. In many cases, there was virtually nothing left of the AIRPLANE, let alone the pilot in it. Sometimes just a few bones, or a wedding ring, would be found.

Look in the Smithsonian. Yes, I'm serious. They have 34 thousand of them.

http://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/08/science/indians-...

The same as all other dead bodies that have walked on Earth, they decomposed and became part of Earth's soil.

Massive burials and decomposition. Plus, those graves were marked by settlers, no one is going to excavate a marked cemetary.

When people are diseased they are burnt to get rid of the diseases. If not, then they are in Native American burial grounds, which most people aren't allowed to dig up.

Its not worth the interest, and they were guven burials by surviving relatives ir neighboring tribes. But no one really cares, but 100000 year old bodies are a something.