most plausible is that this was internecine warfare, and that "overpopulation, land-use patterns, and an unstable climate caused the people to compete for available farmland" and other resources. The malnutrition suffered by the Crow Creek villagers was most likely common for people in that region during this time period. Because of this, there is a strong chance that another Initial Coalescent group or several groups in the region attacked the Crow Creek village for its arable land and resources. Reburial and further study Before the excavations could proceed, the Corps of Engineers and the University of South Dakota Archaeology Laboratory team consulted with the Crow Creek Sioux Reservation Tribal Council, as well as representatives of the Mandan and Arikara peoples, who now are based mostly on Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota. The researchers agreed to the tribal council request that the remains stay within South Dakota for the entire period of study and that, after study, the remains should be reburied on the Crow Creek site, the place where the families had lived and died. Particularly because of the scale of the reburial, the case attracted international attention. While Native American tribes had been requesting return of remains and artifacts held by museums and historic societies, this would be the largest reburial of remains. Some archeologists and human osteologists criticized the agreement at the time, "contending that new techniques would have allowed substantially more information to be gleaned from the remains if they had been curated for eventual restudy." At the request of the Arikara, the remains were placed in five burial vaults. In order to avoid disturbing the site, the vaults were buried in areas where earlier archeological excavations had taken place in the 1950s. The study took three years, and the reburial took place in late summer 1981. Several Christian ceremonies, a traditional Lakota ceremony, and a private Arikara ceremony were offered at the time. The reburial was controversial and one of the largest ever to have occurred in the United States. Some researchers thought the remains should have been preserved for more study. However, so much skeletal evidence was gathered that many studies were still made through the mid-1990s, based on measurements, photographs, and radiographs of the remains taken during those three years. New (21st century) analyses of the dates on the massacre and the occupational history of the site are also being made, which