A man hunting rabbits in Millard County a decade ago came across several small navy blue glass beads that led him to a baby's grave. The hunter gathered some bones and skull fragments eroding out of a sand dune and handed them to police in nearby Fillmore.

The 1999 find triggered an inquiry by state antiquities officials who used the beads, which turned out to be made in Italy, to date the grave to the late 19th century and put to rest a complicated repatriation.

In late May, the child's remains were returned to the Kanosh band of the Southern Paiute, the first successful repatriation under a 17-year-old Utah law designed to ensure that American Indian remains are handled with dignity.

"It went unchallenged, so it lays the groundwork for future repatriations," said Forrest Cuch, director of the Utah Division of Indian Affairs, of this particular case.

Ancient burial sites dot Utah, inhabited by Indians for centuries before the 1847 arrival of Mormon pioneers. For decades, early anthropologists disinterred American Indian remains and deposited them in museums in the eastern United States. The practice may have been conducted in the name of science, but many regarded it as grave desecration.

A 1991 federal law, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), and a 1992 Utah version, established procedures for handling bones and related burial artifacts on federal and state lands, identifying their tribal

affiliation and repatriation, if possible. Under the federal law, remains have been repatriated many times, most recently when the Southern Paiute's Kaibab band accepted 19th century remains excavated by federal lawmen at Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in April 2008.

The handling of those remains -- treated as evidence in a crime, rather than a historic burial -- drew fire from the monument's own archaeologist and state officials. Officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Bureau of Land Management declined to reveal why the site was treated as a crime scene, citing an ongoing investigation.

But the vast majority of Indian remains come from private land, according to assistant state archaeologist Ronald Rood. And until the law was expanded in 2007, the state's NAGPRA law didn't apply to those finds, which accumulated at the Utah Division of State History and in police evidence lockers.

Repatriating remains is complex and expensive, requiring archaeological work and scientific analysis. In some cases cultural affiliation can't be determined because the remains are too deteriorated or their context has been destroyed. And tribes often are not interested in repatriation, Cuch said. In those cases, the remains are placed in a vault in Emigration Canyon. Some 60 individual remains, some as old as 7,000 years, are interred there now.

In recent years, dozens of American Indian remains have been handed over to the state, many of them from home building and landscaping projects on private land and thus subject to the amended law, Rood said.

The Millard County find, which occurred on private land, was the first repatriation under state law. Rood led a team of scientists to check out the site in 2000. Their hope was to leave the remains in place, in accordance with the preferences of Utah's five tribes.

"Unfortunately, with the ongoing erosion of the sand dune where the burial was located and the continued use of the area by cattle, we concluded the burial would continue to erode and be ultimately destroyed," Rood wrote in his 2007 report.

The team carefully excavated the grave and found the articulated skeleton of a child, later determined to be about 1 year of age at death, along with a shallow bowl and cup, both made of tin, some buttons and 52 glass beads, according to the report. A disintegrating mat or cradle board made of willow branches lay under the skeleton.

The child's age made it impossible to pinpoint his or her gender or even ancestry, but the context strongly suggested the baby was American Indian, according to Rood's report. The best clue for dating the remains turned out to be the glass beads that initially caught the hunter's eye. The nearly identical navy-blue beads, which had likely been strung in a necklace worn by the baby at burial, were quarter-inch lengths cut from a tube drawn from a globe of molten glass.

An analysis by archaeological sleuths determined the beads were produced in Venice, Italy, between 1851 and 1869.

The Southern Paiute submitted a claim on behalf of the Kanosh band because it is headquartered only 16 miles to the south of the grave site, said Dorena Martineau, the tribe's cultural resources director. The state honored the claim and Rood delivered the remains and artifacts to the band on May 24.

"They were really happy to get the baby back," said Martineau, who serves on the state's Native American Remains Committee. "It's sad to think these remains are shoved in a box and put in the basement."

Tribal spiritual leaders led an all-night ceremony in late May while interring the child's remains in the Kanosh cemetery, Martineau said.

bmaffly@sltrib.com