Before the excavations could proceed, there was consultation by the Corps of Engineers and the University of South Dakota Archaeology Laboratory team with the Crow Creek Sioux Reservation Tribal Council, as well as representatives of the Mandan and Arikara peoples, who now live mostly on a 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 given 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."