Heritage Conservation and Recreation Services

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Heritage Conservation and Recreation Services was a division that was created within the United States Department of the Interior that subsumed these functions from the National Park Service. It was created by the Carter administration in the late 1970s. When the Reagan administration came to power in the early 1980s, this division was eliminated and the National Park Service once again performed these roles.

During its brief tenure, Heritage Conservation and Recreation Services was consistently short of money and other resources and was never granted a leading role that its proponents advocated. During this agency's existence, however, a remarkable number of publications and research on historic preservation issues were completed. To date, this level of productivity has not been matched by the National Park Service.

Within the HCRS was a "Policy on Disposition of Human Remains" that was a standard for other federal agencies that were also interested in studying the bones.

The policy was an early attempt at relieving tensions between Native Americans and the U.S. government. The HCRS called for the reburial of all remains that were in deliberate burials whose direct relation to modern relatives could be proven. Before the reburial, however, the U.S. government was permitted to study and document the remains.