SALT LAKE CITY — Forensic tests have uncovered no link between a skull found in a Utah pawn shop 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 pawn shop, 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 in Reid’s hands and notified three massacre descendant organizations.

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 remains from Mountain Meadows accidentally unearthed during a construction project in 1999.

“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. A series of measurements and data collected from both examinations initially suggested the skull could have been from a European female, but other attributes pointed to an Asian male. Quantitative measures submitted to a University of Tennessee database indicated probable Vietnamese origin, Reid said.

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.”

Reid said the skull is not being returned to Webb, but will instead go to Mountain Meadows Massacre Descendants, an Omaha, Ark.-based descendant group. A telephone message left for Patty Norris, the group’s president, was not immediately returned Wednesday.

Webb also did not immediately return a call from The Associated Press on Wednesday.

Only 17 children survived the Sept. 11, 1857 assault on the Baker-Fancher wagon train in the rolling meadow 35 miles northwest of St. George, which was often used as a stopover by California-bound pioneers on the Old Spanish Trail. After a five-day siege, the Arkansans forged a truce with a local Mormon church leader and laid down their weapons, only to be slaughtered as they were being led out of the meadow on foot.

The bodies of the dead went unburied for nearly two years and some bones were known to have been taken from the meadow as souvenirs.

The Mormon church had historically denied or downplayed its role in the killings, but in 2007 expressed its regret.