The First Americans

by James Adovasio

  Throughout all this, Kennewick Man went from being a Caucasian (whatever that is!) to being Caucasoid, an even more nebulous term that includes a lot of people from the subcontinent of India all the way into Europe, not to mention some outlying groups such as the aboriginal dwellers in Japan called the Ainu. Later it seemed he was closer to the Ainu or maybe Polynesians than to anything else—provisionally, of course, and always subject to further analysis. Meanwhile, the skeleton was locked up in a vault in a local university until a federal judge decided between the Umatillas and the archaeologists. That this was a highly sensitive matter goes without saying. That it turned into an appalling mess is also quite evident.

  In my opinion, many archaeologists remain at least passively opposed to the provisions of NAGPRA, while some are actually actively opposed. This attitude is clearly part of the background of the bizarre events surrounding Kennewick Man, and the events since his discovery have, if anything, solidified any anti-NAGPRA sentiment that existed.

  Kennewick Man's skull was found by college students during hydroplane races on the Columbia River near Kennewick. The police were notified, and they called the coroner, who in turn called a private anthropological consultant, who in due course returned to the site and found a large number of bones that had been associated with the skull. It was soon apparent to the consultant, James Chatters, that this was not a white settler, as he had first thought. There appeared to be a remnant of a stone spear point lodged in his hip, a point that had not been manufactured locally for some four or five thousand years. It also turned out that the man, who had been about five feet nine and maybe forty-five years old when he died, had been a healthy, well-nourished youth but had subsequently suffered various injuries, some of which had been quite debilitating. One of these was a crushing blow to his ribs that had left one arm almost useless. Another was, of course, the spear point in his pelvis, also largely healed. One tough guy, he was also, Chatters was convinced, not a Native American, or at least not like modern Native Americans.

  At a press conference, Chatters may or may not have used the word“Caucasian” to describe his find—most likely he said Caucasoid—but he also said the skeleton resembled nothing as closely as a “premodern European.” Within days, the local paper's report had exploded Kennewick Man into national fame, bruiting the notion that Europeans had predated American Indians on this continent.

  One of the first things Chatters had done in inspecting the skeleton (which he was allowed to take to his home lab until the Army Corps of Engineers demanded it back) was to send a small finger bone off to the University of California at Riverside to be carbon-dated. The lab there obliged Chatters with the date in a mere seventy-two hours: the skeleton appeared to be 8,400 years old. Later changed to 9,300 years, that date made Kennewick Man one of the handful of truly ancient sets of human remains found in North America, though not the oldest.

  Another of these ancient Americans was the Spirit Cave Mummy, which also appeared on the cover of a newsmagazine (Newsweek in April 1999). He was discovered as long ago as 1940 in a rockshelter east of Carson City, Nevada, and was thought at the time to have died about 3,000 years ago. Laid to rest in a shallow grave dug into a rockshelter, he had been buried with twined rabbit fur robes and quite sophisticated plaited textiles. Now dated by Riverside to more than 9400 B.P., he is the oldest naturally mummified body in North America, and his remains reside in the Nevada State Museum. When attention was again brought to him, the Northern Paiute tribe claimed him under NAGPRA, and then so did the Fallon Paiute Shoshones.

  Back in the late 1960s, when I was doing my dissertation research on prehistoric basketry, I had the opportunity to spend some time at the Nevada State Museum. Although I examined and reanalyzed most of the basketry collection, I did not have the chance to examine the Spirit Cave materials firsthand. Nonetheless, based on the fact that by 1999 I had analyzed or reanalyzed most of the prehistoric basketry in western North America, I was asked by one of the attorneys for the Fallon Paiute if I would be willing to testify that as evidenced by the associated perishables, specifically the plaited mats and the twined robes, the Spirit Cave mummy was part of the population that was ancestral to the tribe. I said I couldn't because according to what I knew he wasn't, but the attorneys asked me to be a consultant anyway.

  After studying all of the pertinent technical literature on the Spirit Cave basketry and textile remains produced by my friends and colleagues Kay Fowler of the University of Nevada at Reno, and Amy Dansie, then of the Nevada State Museum, I concluded that, as I had suspected, there was no stylistic connection between the perishable fiber artifact traditions of the Spirit Cave individual and those of the Paiutes. The techniques were in fact distinct. As I later explained to a reporter from The Washington Post, based on my analysis “there is no practical possibility that he [i.e., Spirit Cave Man] is the lineal genetic ancestor of any contemporary Great Basin group.” Drawing upon this and other evidence, the Bureau of Land Management eventually decided to reject the Paiutes' claim because of their failure to demonstrate affiliation. This is what should have happened with Kennewick Man (and may yet ultimately happen).

  The Army Corps of Engineers has subsequently announced its intention to repatriate the remains to the Umatillas, which triggered a lawsuit by eight leading anthropological scholars, led alphabetically by Robson Bonnichsen of Oregon State University—hence the name of the case, Bonnichsen et al. v. The United States of America. The et al. included Vance Haynes; Dennis Stanford, head of the Smithsonian's anthropology department; D. Gentry Steele of Texas A & M; C. Loring Brace of the University of Michigan; George W. Gill of the University of Wyoming; and two men who probably knew as much about skull types as anyone in the country, Douglas Owsley of the Smithsonian's physical anthropology staff and his mentor, Richard Jantz of the University of Tennessee. These two were in the process of developing the world's largest computer database of ancient human skeletal materials in the world. Basically, this consists of nearly thirty specific measurements of skulls, work first begun by the physical anthropologist William W. Howells back in the thirties and forties. By comparing skulls with these measurements, one can assign a given skull to a particular population, such as Pacific Islanders, since each separate population generally shares certain salient skull shape features. Yet it is of course important to remember that individuals within such a population may have a varying degree of the group's general characteristics.

  In any case, the Bonnichsen suit was brought for technical violations by the government of both NAGPRA and of federal laws governing administrative procedure; it sought injunctive relief (the skeleton was now sequesteredand off limits to further examination) for harm done to the plaintiffs by the deprivation of their right, as professional anthropologists, to pursue their profession. At least indirectly, the issue of science versus religion hung over the case like a shroud.

  Meanwhile, the Interior Department released a report by a panel of scientists that said that Kennewick Man could not be linked either to any modern American Indian tribes or to Europeans. This agreed with Chatters's assessment that he had stood out “from modern American Indians, especially those who occupied Northwestern North America in later pre-history.” He was, the panel observed, morphologically closer to the Ainu of Japan or to Polynesians, the latter having arrived in the South Pacific much later than Kennewick Man had patrolled the Columbia River. Joseph Powell, a member of the panel and a physical anthropologist at the University of New Mexico, said that Kennewick Man “fits into an emerging pattern that these earlier American people are not like the modern people of today.” Two scenarios are possible, he said, if it turns out that Kennewick Man is in fact not distantly related to American Indians: people from his period in the late Pleistocene were wiped out at some point and left no descendants, or they had features from all over the Pacific rim that have simply changed and diversified over time.

  The Indians, on the other hand, stated that all humans from earlier times in
the New World were ancestral, that Kennewick Man was included, and that to use any invasive procedures such as taking DNA samples from him would be a sacrilege. Indeed, the only nonsacrilegious act would be to reinter his remains as soon as possible.

  Incomprehensibly to us scientists, in a move that was crassly political, the former secretary of the interior, Bruce Babbitt, sided with the Umatillas and ordered the Kennewick remains returned despite the lack of any tangible indications of affiliation. Indeed, the claim was to be honored based not on hard criteria but rather on the highly questionable grounds of oral tradition or, more simply, a fictive or mythic relationship. Needless to say, this unfortunate ruling was not to be the last word, and the aggrieved scientists continued to battle out the issue in federal court.

  Even with the skeleton out of the picture, though, there were still many things that could have been learned about him through studying the site where he had been found. But soon after he was found, the corps passedalong the order to stabilize the site, and in a matter of days, it was covered with some forty-five tons of coarse cement blocks and planted with willow trees and hawthorn.

  While Kennewick Man lay imprisoned in storage and the millstones of justice ground imperceptibly on, I was invited by the lawyers for the eight archaeologists to visit what remained of the site and arrived there in early March. I spent a day or two locally, talking with the principals involved, and then visited the site, where I was utterly appalled. Over the years I have been directly involved in designing and implementing site stabilization efforts for the Army Corps of Engineers at the Paintsville Lake Reservoir area in Kentucky, the Bluestone Reservoir area of West Virginia, and the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway of Mississippi. Because of the precise geoarchaeological protocols I developed at Meadowcroft and expanded and refined in hundreds of other sites here and abroad, over the past fifteen years I have served as an expert witness in all of the federal prosecutions of cases involved with the Archaeological Resources Protection Act in which forensic geoarchaeology was needed. In short, I believe I can speak aboutthe techniques of stabilizing an archaeological site. And what happened to the Kennewick site was such a travesty that it had to be deliberate destruction.

  “Stabilized” deposits at Kennewick, Washington. The horizontal features are coconut logs added by the Army Corps of Engineers to stabilize a putatively eroding riverbank.

  In the first place, you can tell from looking at it on the ground and in aerial photographs that the riverbanks nearby had not significantly eroded since the discovery; nothing really needed to be done to preserve the site, at least for the short term. Nevertheless the corps dumped coarse, heavy riprap and biodegradable “logs” on the site and then planted willow trees and, more recently, hawthorn, which have long roots that will, of course, destroy the integrity of the layers below, turning any macro- or microstratigraphy into gibberish. If they were convinced that the site might be washed away, which is highly unlikely, they could have built a rock berm around the beach or used brush piles, tires, or even a material known as geofabric to protect against wave action, or even just planted grass—none of which measures would have compromised the site. In addition, they permitted no further useful archaeological work to be done at the site, such as cutting a continuous face across the entire exposed bank or digging trenches away from the river toward the highway. Unless further human remains were found, no such work would have involved any further invoking of NAGPRA. Instead, all microstata, as well as any artifacts or ecofacts, are now forever dumb, voiceless, and irretrievable. In my view, what the corps did was ethically irresponsible, morally bankrupt, and profoundly stupid.

  Sadly, like many less celebrated NAGPRA claims, this entire affair has been characterized by a great deal of poor judgment throughout, not to mention a plethora of accusations of incompetence, innuendos about wrongdoing (including alleged thefts of skeletal parts), and, worst of all, a sharp polarization between archaeologists who favor NAGPRA and those who are adamantly opposed to it. Let me be perfectly clear here: I am personally sympathetic to the return of Native American remains to claimants who can demonstrate direct lineal affinity genetically or culturally—that is, through undeniable artifactual continuities, congruent settlement patterns, or indeed any other tangible indications of relatedness. However, I am utterly opposed to the return of unaffiliated material to any claimants whatsoever or to the return of items to claimants based on oral traditions of affiliation unsupported by evidence. Unlike my colleague David Hurst Thomas of the American Museum of Natural History, I feel no need to payfor the sins of my insensitive archaeological or anthropological ancestors— who often did treat Native Americans and their remains in a cavalier or even callous manner—by supporting the return of any remains or artifacts claimed by any Native Americans, simply because it is now seen as the politically correct thing to do. In fact, it is precisely the reverse of the proper course of action. Even in cases of demonstrated affiliation, I strongly encourage claimants to allow the study of skeletal or artifactual remains before they are returned.

  It need not have happened this way, and I can say with some confidence that it would not have happened this way in my own state of Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, which oversees the protection and preservation of the archaeological and historical patrimony of the commonwealth, has developed a very positive relationship with resident and formerly resident Native Americans and has encouraged a productive and positive interchange between that community and the state's archaeologists. As a result, the relatively few NAGPRA claims within the state have been generally free of rancor, and, if such a thing is possible, a few potentially contentious situations have actually been—dare I say it—almost humorous.

  Eleven years ago, a mine operator expanding his gravel quarry near the shore of Lake Erie encountered a large late Woodland ossuary in which a number of Native Americans had been collectively interred. I was called in as a consultant by the mine owner and the state of Pennsylvania, and I immediately contacted the cultural affairs officer of the closest resident Native American group, the Seneca Nation, in nearby New York. I inquired whether the tribe was interested in these remains and whether it would like to send an observer to the planned excavations. In return I was asked about the circumstances of the mass burial and was ultimately told in no uncertain terms, “Senecas don't practice secondary burial in mass graves. These remains you discovered are probably Erie. We killed those guys, and we don't want their bones.” They did allow that if we insisted, they would take them for reburial, but they did not object to their study, asking only that proper and respectful protocols be observed.

  Similarly, in a more recent case, the Senecas asked for the return of remains found in a solitary disturbed burial in a house construction project, but only after they had been fully studied. The Senecas clearly believe it isboth useful and appropriate to know more about their ancestors or others who lived in their ancestral territories, and both the tribe and the archaeo-logical community have benefited by the knowledge generated by this reasonable attitude.

  However, in the case of Kennewick Man, nobody involved locally acted properly, in my opinion. Some of the archaeologists went off the mark with their exuberant Europeanoid claims, inflaming the Native Americans, who, not surprisingly, made a wholly unsupportable claim of cultural and biological affiliation. At that remove in time, there is simply no reasonable way to make such a claim. The NAGPRA law is very vague on this, allowing claims on religious and traditional grounds rather than any actual information. While the eight anthropologists' suit was on other grounds, NAGPRA is almost certain to fail a constitutional challenge someday down the pike, on the basis of the First Amendment clause about the establishment of religion. Indeed, if it were not Native Americans claiming religious reasons for not allowing scientific investigation but, say, Southern Baptists or Muslims, there would not be the slightest hesitancy to throw the claims out as absurdly unconstitutional. In the case of Kennewick Man, the governmen
t bent over backward to accommodate the claim of the Umatillas for reasons that were chiefly political and/or politically correct. To my mind, destruction of the site by the corps is comparable to the blowing up of the Buddhist statues in Afghanistan by the Taliban fanatics. In all, a huge and bitter legacy has now been inherited by all sides to this dispute.

  What light has all this controversy shed so far on the question of who the first Americans were and how and when they got here? That Kennewick Man looks practically nothing like any contemporary Indian people is not, on the whole, a very great surprise. None among the handful of skeletal remains from this time period looks much like contemporary Indians either; they tend to look more like southern Asians, it seems. This fits fairly well with what has been surmised from linguistics and mtDNA analysis about the origins of the people who settled the Western Hemisphere—that people in southern Asia spread out south and north as long as 40,000 years ago or more and probably arrived in the Americas at various times over thousands of years. As Owsley and Jantz have pointed out, this Pacific affinity among our oldest skeletons is a pretty good match for themtDNA haplogroup B, which is common in the Pacific and southern North America, but not in northeastern Siberia or northwestern North America. If Kennewick Man's remains are ever returned for further scientific investigation, it would be quite a stunning surprise if he did not turn out to be one of the four common Asian and Native American haplogroups.

  In fact, Kennewick Man's chief value might have been what we could have learned about how he lived his life from artifacts and ecofacts in the site where he was found. Was he interred by companions, or did he die alone? Was he a fisherman? If so, and it seems he may have been, how did he fish? Did he spear salmon, net them, or pluck them out of the water with his bare hands? Was it salmon-spawning season when he died? Of course all of these questions have been rendered unanswerable now.