SALT LAKE CITY — Forensic tests have uncovered no link between a skull found in a Utah pawnshop and the brutal 1857 massacre of a wagon- train party that crossed through the state.
The remains are those of an adult Asian male, possibly of Vietnamese ancestry, Idaho state archaeologist Ken Reid said Wednesday.
Sugar City, Idaho, resident Jeff Webb found the skull in 1982 on the shelves of a Salt Lake City pawnshop, which claimed to have acquired it from an estate sale. A note in the box said the artifact was from a female victim of the Mountain Meadows massacre, an 1857 attack by a Mormon militia and church members on an Arkansas wagon train that left 120 men, women and children dead.
Webb kept the skull for decades but turned it over for testing earlier this year after contacting historians at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The church got the skull into Reid’s hands and notified three massacre-descendant groups.
A purported bullet hole on the back of the skull was also found to be post-mortem damage, not an injury that may have caused death.
The skull also lacked any evidence of damage from animals or exposure to weather, as was seen in other remains from Mountain Meadows.
“This skull did not lie exposed at the surface for two years,” Reid said.
The findings are in a report from Dr. Margaret Streeter, a forensic anthropologist at Boise State University and one of two Idaho scientists who examined the skull.
Four eyehole screws that connect the jaw bone to the cranium suggest the specimen may have been used as an anatomical model, Streeter found.
“As it turns out, before synthetic skeletons became widely available for teaching purposes, skeletons used in anatomy classes often came from Asia,” Reid said. “That’s probably how this guy ended up in Salt Lake City.”
