Museums have also been adapting to a newer world, but one that's been brought about by the Internet and changes in how Americans spend their leisure time. These relationships, then, differ from region to region just as institutions and Native groups differ from place to place in the United States. Its an astonishing story when you look back on it allalmost unimaginable, said one of the dramas central players, forensic anthropologist Douglas Owsley of the Smithsonian Institutions National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Now, Owsley and about 60 other scientists are telling the story in unprecedented detail. For example: Have students review these documents and work in study teams to outline the facts of the case. 60 See Sommer, Marianne, Population-genetic trees, maps, and narratives of the great human diasporas, History of the Human Sciences (2015) 28(5), pp. In the second scenario, Kennewick Man could be a direct ancestor of the Colville, and over time, an influx of DNA from other groups could have made that connection hard to distinguish. The Story of Kennewick Man - The Archaeological Conservancy See the response from Stojanowski, Christopher M. and Buikstra, Jane E., Biodistance analysis, a biocultural enterprise: a rejoinder to Armelagos and Van Gerven, American Anthropologist (2004) 106(2), pp. Neither man had any inkling that they had just spotted one of the best-preserved ancient skeletons ever discovered in North America. Many Native peoples were aware of specific remains and artefacts in certain museums, but the extent of these collections was literally unknown before NAGPRA's passage. Examine the discovery of Kennewick Man and what this ancient skeleton suggests about the earliest inhabitants of North America. The series is being held at Hotel Santa Fe at 6 pm on Mondays. Fundamentally, then, disparate genetic results from a few rare and well-publicized cases do not immediately challenge craniometry's claim to the distant past. Note, for example, the emphasis on law and other sources of social authoritythe ties of homeland, treaty rights, religious doctrines, cultural traditions, tribal policies and procedures, federal statutes, oral history. Across the United States, many repatriations and reburials have happened since, and in 2010 new regulations that allow for the repatriation of culturally unidentifiable remains were appended to NAGPRA, signalling more repatriations to come.Footnote 21 For academics and museum workers, repatriation has challenged the mandate codified or uncodified that researchers should always work to preserve the surviving materials of the past for perpetual study.Footnote 22 For Native peoples, too, repatriation and reburial have been a trying process. At the time of this writing, all three of these ancient skeletons, previously embroiled in controversy over their status as Native American, have been repatriated and even reburied because of their genetic relatedness to contemporary Native people.Footnote 52 In 2015, after the genetic results were released, Armand Minthorn of the Umatilla tribe noted, Our belief [that Kennewick Man is Native American] was only reconfirmed by Dr. Eske Willerslev And the DNA results said, very clearly, that Kennewick Man is Native American. Geneticists do not prioritize the dead the way craniometrists do. These are a few of the places where some of the rarest archaeological finds in the continental United States have been put to rest for a second time. New Season Prophetic Prayers and Declarations [NSPPD] || 3rd - Facebook See MoreSee Less. See also Richard C. Paddock, Native Americans say Berkeley is no place for their ancestors, Los Angeles Times, 13 January 2008, at www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-13-me-bones13-story.html. Begay, Rene L ), Repatriation and the Restoration of Blackfoot Cultural Confidence, Edmonton, Alberta: Athabasca University Press, 2015CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Tweedy, Ann M., Drawing Back Culture: The Makah Struggle for Repatriation, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002Google Scholar. . The men called the police, who surmised that what they saw was not the scene of a crime. It is perhaps the most influential example of how the NAGPRA laws affect anthropologists and the complications that can come with the lack of clarity in those laws. Now turn to the scientific point of view in the Kennewick Man controversy, as expressed in the "Claims for the Remains", available at the PBS documentary website, "Mystery of the First Americans" with links to essays by eight scientists. An archaeologist later convinced her to send a sample from the remains to Willerslev's lab, and later they both faced critique from the tribes because they were not adequately consulted about the genome sequencing beforehand. 45 On the cranial position of Kennewick Man see Owsley, Douglas W. and Jantz, Richard L., Kennewick Man: a kin? The Ancient One, Kennewick Man | Burke Museum Craniometrical schemes have often only confirmed a lack of connection because of differences in morphology, even if skeletal individuals were excavated from Native people's ancestral lands. (At the website's homepage, click on "Yup'ik Masks" for the exhibit. The Kennewick Man: Discovery & Controversy | Study.com Privacy Statement Against this background, have students analyze the Native American point of view in the Kennewick Man controversy, as expressed in the Umatilla position paper, "Human Remains Should Be Reburied.". Two possible scenarios emerge from the analysis. NAGPRA states that human remains either must be directly culturally affiliated with a living federally recognized Native American tribe or nation, or be affiliated with a non-federally recognized tribe or nation who can marshal the support of a federally recognized group to sponsor their repatriation claim. Archeologists and other scientists whose work involves native peoples have made cooperationnot confrontationtheir goal in research. Archaeologists, anthropologists and museum workers also share a responsibility to not treat repatriation as charity, benevolence or appeasement. A study of Kennewick Man's bones could reveal what he ate, what he drank, how he hunted, and, of course, his DNA all clues that could ultimately tell the story of where he, and his forebears, came from and how they got here. As I have attempted to make clear in this article, though, material ends and ephemeral or cultural ends do not always travel the same trajectories. Advertising Notice We can now get information out of shorter pieces of DNA, and given the very degraded DNA in Kennewick Man, thats absolutely key for addressing these questions, says Morten Rasmussen, a geneticist and co-author on the study. What is at risk for Native Americans when such truths are contradicted by scientific fact. 187188. "Kennewick Man" is the skeletal remains of a middle-aged man found on the banks of Washington's Columbia River in 1996. 58 The affective ties produced by genetics, specifically the perception of the extraordinary authority of genetics over matters of kinship, is also worthy of interrogation. Some of my colleagues have switched their specializations from the United States to other countries where repatriation is not practised, but the field of North American archaeology remains incredibly active. Kennewick Man/the Ancient One, a nearly nine-thousand-year-old skeleton, convinced some anthropologists that contemporary Native American people (descendants of Palaeo indians) were not biologically related to the very first American colonists. However, the way in which population relationships are figured in genetic disciplines (including palaeogenomics) claims something that craniometry could never obtain: genealogy. Meet the Kennewick Man, explore the dispute about the skeleton, examine the larger. Open Privacy Options 2 In the United States, archaeologists are researchers who excavate and interpret the material cultural remains of the past, while biological anthropologists are those who focus on the human skeletal remains that are excavated from archaeological sites. Neither craniometry nor genetics is overly concerned with the deconstruction of received conceptions of human difference.Footnote 61 Further, craniometric and genetic conceptions of the ancient past align if compared with Native perspectives. Have students consider how this claim of popular support for science might bear on the dispute. How does it expand their possible routes of migration? Canada, too, does not have a national law that governs repatriation, so potential repatriations happen on a case-by-case basis (Chelsea Meloche, personal communication). 14 Meltzer, David J., Kennewick Man: coming to closure, Antiquity (2015) 89(348), pp. When archeologists filed suit to prevent this, arguing that the skeleton is not a tribal ancestor and can shed new light on the earliest inhabitants of North America, Kennewick Man became the center of a debate between science and religion in which both sought the protection of government and the law. Also, the public controversy over Kennewick Man/the Ancient One, erupting soon after the remains were found, involved anthropologists, such as the plaintiffs in the case, who had no previous relationship with tribes and nations in the area, and quickly proceeded to the question whether the remains were Indian at all. Later the article extends this analogy by claiming that archeologists have inherited from priests and shamans the role of answering questions about the origins of human culture. :) t XxNawabzada xX Advertisement For example, remains that do not share a cultural or biological connection to a specific living Native tribe or nation do not typically need to be listed as available for repatriation. | Click the card to flip On a warm July day in 1996, Will Thomas and Dave Deacy, two college kids, were watching some speedboat races on the Columbia River near Kennewick, Washington, when they came upon a startling sight: a human skull lying in the shallow water near the shore. For about 9,000 years, his bones lay entombed in earth, an unknown record of early life in the Americas. A mysterious set of 9,000-year-old bones, unearthed nearly 20 years ago in Washington, is finally going home. Kennewick Man Controversy. The fame of these ancient skeletons, then, attracted the attention of new potential stakeholders to their fate. ), Who Were the First Americans? While the already reburied Palaeoamericans are now lost to science, their legacy will likely continue with the data and interpretations that have been produced from them. Recent technical advances in DNA extraction from ancient remains have allowed viable uncontaminated DNA sequences to be analysed from some of these skeletal individuals. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.R.4. 8,500-Year-Old 'Kennewick Man' Is Native American The article explores the relationship between science and religion most directly when it describes the study of human remains as "an echo" of traditional rituals of respect for the dead. What kind of meaning do scientists see in human remains? 42 Baker, Brenda J., Varney, Tamara L., Wilkinson, Richard G., Anderson, Lisa M. and Liston, Maria A., Repatriation and the study of human remains, in Bray, Tamara (ed. DNA extracted from one of the oldest and most controversial skeletons ever found in North America, known as Kennewick Man, may call into question . However, seven anthropologists, including Bonnichsen, Owsley, Jantz and other well-known professionals in both biological anthropology and archaeology, filed a lawsuit to prevent the federal government from repatriating Kennewick Man/the Ancient One to the five northwestern tribes who claimed him.Footnote 12 For the plaintiff scientists, who wanted to preserve Kennewick Man/the Ancient One for study, deeming a skeleton Palaeoamerican severed the cultural and biological ties between the ancient remains and living Native peoples. Second, the ways in which a few prominent scientists constructed Kennewick Man/the Ancient One as Palaeoamerican stoked both the scientific and the political fray over the human beginnings of ancient America. 108145, 118CrossRefGoogle Scholar. 162163CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. Such was the disciplinary and political landscape around Kennewick Man/the Ancient One when, in the early 2010s, geneticists began to take an interest in the few sets of Palaeoindian remains excavated from the western half of the United States. The stunning find of a nearly complete ancient skeleton in the western American state of Washington in 1996, however, sparked controversies that swirled around early western hemispheric human remains for the next two decades. 1 Slayman, Andrew, Special report: a battle over bones, Archaeology (JanuaryFebruary 1997) 50(1)Google Scholar, at https://archive.archaeology.org/9701/etc/specialreport.html, accessed 20 November 2018. 2, Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2009, p. 33Google Scholar. 127CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. Kennewick Man Facts That Will Surely Take You Back In Time Email: akakalio@whittier.edu. The first facet of the Palaeoamerican story, then, is the material end to skeletal collections that repatriation and reburial represent. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine 1461553.0.CO;2-E>CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. 5364CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Instead of a clue that can unlock the past, they see him as part of their past, a confirmation of their past, and feel an obligation to respect the link between them. The anthropologists who objected to the tribes repatriation request cited the age of the remains and, crucially, the way the skull looked, to argue that Kennewick Man/the Ancient One was not Native American at all but Palaeoamerican and therefore not subject to NAGPRA's repatriation provisions.Footnote 44 As explained in the introduction, craniofacial morphology, measurements that define the size and shape of the features of the skull and face, placed Kennewick Man/the Ancient One outside the normal range of variation of other both pre-colonial and modern Native American skulls and faces. Garrison, Nanibaa A Additionally, not all physical anthropologists agreed with the use of craniometrics to evaluate the skeleton's cultural position. A few anthropologists among them Robson Bonnichsen, the founder of the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A & M University; Douglas Owsley, the head of the Smithsonian Institution's Division of Physical Anthropology; and Richard Jantz, a senior anthropologist at the University of Tennessee began to call these ancient skeletons Palaeoamericans to conceptually separate them from the Native Americans they assumed followed them in later migrations. This ending, though, has been a long time coming. v. The United States, United States Court of Appeals, Ninth District, at https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-9th-circuit/1420091.html, accessed 20 November 2018. In the last few years, though, genetic technology has fundamentally changed this previously intractable situation. The skeleton is over 8,000 years old, and is believed to be from a male who was around 40-50 years old when he died. A Crisis of Ancient Identity When two college students reported that they had found a skull fragment . 151160Google Scholar. Instead of an ancient immigrant, they see Kennewick Man as an ancestor, because tradition says that Indians have lived in North America from the beginning of time. In the last few years I have seen a few poster presentations at the Western Bioarchaeology Group (https://sites.google.com/site/westernbioarchaeologygroup/home) conference that have analysed previously collected data. Native tribes and nations from the various regions where these ancient remains were excavated, though, have consistently called for their repatriation. News of their repatriations or reburials has come out much more slowly and with much less media coverage than their finds and the craniometric results that led to the controversies over their Indianness. The criteria mandated by NAGPRA to determine the links between living and past Native groups dubbed cultural affiliation in the law has often been heavily weighted on the side of the biological. Thus far, only a few significant remains have been found in a cave in Mexico and on the plains of Montana. Through their use and promotion of craniometry as the method whereby ancient identity may be unlocked, the anthropologist plaintiffs succeeded in consolidating an equivalence between morphology and identity for the ancient past in United States federal law for the first time. On July 24, John Haworth (Cherokee Nation[], Explore the vast cultural system of Chaco Canyon and the extensive network of outlying communities that developed in northwestern New Mexico and southwestern Colorado from A.D. 800 to 1130. 46 Sarah Graham, Scientists win latest ruling in Kennewick Man case, Scientific American, at www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-win-latest-rul, accessed 10 November 2016; Watkins, Joe, Becoming American or becoming Indian? When archeologists filed suit to prevent this, arguing that the skeleton is not a tribal ancestor and can shed new light on the earliest inhabitants of North America, Kennewick Man became the center of a debate between science and religion in which both sought the protection of government and the law. I believe it was the right decision, yes the progression of science is important, but respect and consideration for a person's culture is just as important. Have a representative of each team present the group's summary of one phase of the case. Rather, to them the skull itself was the best predictor of an ancient individual's cultural position. 29 Anecdotally, I have never witnessed a student or professional leave anthropology, or their established position, because of repatriation. 541CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fine-Dare, Kathy, Grave Injustice: The American Indian Repatriation Movement and NAGPRA, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002Google Scholar. Anthropologists on Willerslevs team also reevaluated Kennewick Mans skull, and they argue that connecting him to any population based on the shape of his bones would require more skeletons from the same culture. In this view, repatriating Kennewick Man/the Ancient One to northwestern Native peoples, or to any North American indigenous group for that matter, would represent a serious mistake, since his craniofacial morphology indicated that he was probably not a Native American ancestor. 137141Google Scholar, 138. 31 Carl Zimmer, Tribes win in fight for La Jolla bones clouds hopes for DNA studies, New York Times, 29 January 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/02/02/science/tribes-win-in-fight-for-la-jolla-bones-clouds-hopes-for-dna-studies.html, accessed 15 February 2018. Despite all I have written here, it is possible that the Palaeoamericans will not end. The tribes and nations that claimed Kennewick Man/the Ancient One did not want the remains studied at all. 13 Bradley T. Lepper, Judge rules scientists can study Kennewick Man, Friends of America's Past, at www.friendsofpast.org/kennewick-man/news/021128-lepper.html, accessed 20 November 2018. Mystery solved: 8500-year-old Kennewick Man is a Native - Science Figuring out Kennewick Man's lineage would not only establish the legal case but might also provide important clues to the peopling of the Americas, such as who the first Americans were and what they were like. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.R.6. DNA Solves Mystery of Ancient American Skeleton's Origins 6989Google Scholar. cit. The primary objectives of this mission are to develop and demonstrate cutting-edge technologies essential for interplanetary missions. As the reconfigured story went, Palaeoamericans might have had a bright future, too, if not for the intrusion of the ancestors of American Indians, whose migration via the Bering land bridge as the glaciers receded would bring the mysterious Palaeoamericans to an undeserved early end. Have students, however, form their own judgment of the case. While this isnt the final word on Kennewick Mans ancestry, the new analysis makes a compelling argument for what can be learned from ancient DNA, notes Mark Stoneking, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. A genomic sequencing study suggesting that the 9,000-year old skeleton dubbed "Kennewick Man" was Native American will intensify a 20-year-old dispute about what should happen to the remains. hasContentIssue false, Repatriation and reburial: material and ephemeral ends, Craniometry, genetics and the original Palaeoamerican. This article describes the story of Kennewick Man/the Ancient One, the most famous Palaeoamerican; explores how repatriation has been a common end for many North American collections (Palaeoindians included); and enumerates what kind of ending repatriation may represent materially and ethically for anthropological science. 141161Google Scholar. Geneticists crack the 20-year mystery of the Kennewick Man skeleton - PBS 455458CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. Begin by gathering documents that reflect the competing perspectives in this controversy, using the resources available through EDSITEment. This past September, they published Kennewick Man: The Scientific Investigation of an Ancient American Skeleton (Texas A & M University Press), a richly illustrated, 700-page tome that documents Kennewick Mans legal and scientific importance. Why was the discovery of Kennewick Man so important to scientists? What 115Google Scholar; Dumont, op. In the United States the more pressing threat to educating a next generation in the social sciences and humanities is the increasing emphasis on and funding for STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields in higher education. Collections have certainly been lost, affecting individuals who were attached to specific collections because of their academic commitments.Footnote 28 Nevertheless, archaeology, biological anthropology and museum studies have continued apace, advancing theoretically, technologically and ethically in the last few decades.Footnote 29 Repatriation has also not been a monolithic kind of end that produces the same results or changes for every institution, researcher, tribe or nation.Footnote 30 For example, the Chumash of central California, because of their historically collaborative relationships with biological anthropologists, consented to have remains repatriated to them kept in an underground vault on their land, where qualified researchers may have access to them. Palaeoamerican, then, can continue to be used correctly as a geographical term in reference to the Americas. On the other hand, how does the history of legal disputes between Indians and non-Indians reflect on this case? In articulating their cranium-focused argument, the anthropologists who sued to stop the repatriation eschewed archaeological features about Kennewick Man/the Ancient One that marked him as indigenous to North America. The cultural evidence, however scant, did not point to any far-flung origins for these remains. 154165CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ross, Ann H., Ubelaker, Douglas H. and Falsetti, Anthony B., Craniometric variation in the Americas, Human Biology (2002) 74(6), pp. See MoreSee Less, 1.400 year old Native American Canal in Alabamaallthatsinteresting.com/alabama-native-american-canal?fbclid=IwAR3mHYIeYXEQNYyNWQPrjf_FS_feT5Zmqk #archaeology#Alabama What is the controversy of Kennewick Man? As mentioned above, with repatriation the expectation of perpetual curation and unfettered availability for study has come to an end. The Palaeoindian period began around 13,000 years ago in the continental United States, and ended with the retreat of the ice sheets that covered the northern part of the hemisphere during the last Ice Age.Footnote 3 For most of the twentieth century, archaeologists of North and South America assumed that all skeletal individuals excavated in the western hemisphere, no matter their time period, were related to contemporary Native North Americans or to the indigenous peoples of Central and South America. The 9,000-year-old was claimed as an ancestor by Native Americans, who called for his remains to be . Five of. Therefore I consider the characteristics of repatriation as an ending, and I discuss the kinds of roles and responsibilities both Native people and scientists can play and have played in the process of returning human remains to the earth. As an exercise in conflict resolution, divide the class into negotiating teams for both sides in this controversy and have a discussion aimed at finding a way out of this impasse and at framing a policy for avoiding such conflict in the future. However, the bulk of the educational materials available (such as monographs, advanced textbooks and research articles in the fields of archaeology and physical anthropology) are still mostly technical, and also subject to peer-review processes that demand that novel knowledge be the main product of the research. Biological anthropologists and Native people in Minnesota had been working together since the late 1980s, with state funding, to repatriate and rebury nearly all the human remains in the state.Footnote 32 The Minnesota Indian Affairs Council, though, allowed the anthropologists to study the remains before they were reburied. 3 Cordell, Linda S., Lightfoot, Kent, McManamon, Francis and Milner, George (eds. What does this evolutionary view imply about the role of religion in today's world? cit. 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