Compliance with NAGPRA is now dominating the Peabody Museum's budget.

"Repatriation is now the primary focus of activities in the museum, meaning that other worthy activities including collection care are not being met as they should be," said Lawrence J. Flynn, assistant director of the Peabody Museum.

The Peabody Museum originally estimated that it had about 800,000 Native American artifacts in its collection and estimated that compiling an inventory would take about five years, according to Isaac.

However, the estimate was based on an approximation based on the number of collections, Isaac said. The museum actually found as it inventoried the items that it had about eight million pieces in its collection, she said.

In order to process this larger project, the museum now has seven or eight full-time employees working on the NAGPRA project as well as other museum staff, Isaac said.

Peabody Museum Director David Pilbeam said just over one-third of the total staff was working on the NAGPRA project.

This year, Harvard has given $250,000 to fund the NAGPRA project which brings its total over the last five years to just more than $1 million, according to Peabody Museum documents.

While the museum had originally estimated that the inventory project would be completed by 1995, Isaac said she expected the full inventory would take at least five to ten more years.

The Peabody Museum has applied for a five year extension of the deadline on the NAGPRA inventory, which they are likely to get because the law allows for extensions as long as a museum can demonstrate that it has made a "good faith effort" towards its inventory project.

But future University funding of the project remains in question.

"Major issues are raised by the probable non-continuance of support from the president's office," an internal document reads.

"At the moment, a very large fraction of the support for the program comes from special funds from the central administration who have been extremely generous," Pilbeam said. "Their support cannot continue indefinitely in the future."

"There are likely to be some impacts on our ability to perform other museum activities that I think are important," he said. "I am not optimistic because resources are scarce and it is difficult to raise money for the museum."

Pilbeam said if the funding from the University was cut, he would probably decrease the size of the repatriation effort, but if he had to maintain the current pace of the repatriation effort, he would have to cut back on the museum's other activities.

"If I had to shift them, we would do less publication or have less staff to deal with the use of collection for teaching or for faculty research or visitors' research," he said.