Kennewick Man Update

From William Slawski at Delaware Law Office - a Delaware Legal Weblog - who apparently has figured out how to blog and bill - comes the definitive rundown on the Kennewick Man controversy. Kennewick Man, you will recall, was a Holocene era skeleton dating back approximately 8,500 years ago which had skeletal features suggesting that some immigration to North America came out of Europe. [Drawings of the reconstructed find looked like Jean Luc Picard.] Almost immediately various Native American groups began to cite their tribal stories and their religious belief that the skeletons of ancestors should not be disinterred for study. The Army Corps of Engineers obligingly buried the site under tons of concrete.

Now stop there for a moment. Eight thousand years ago. What were your ancestors doing at that time? Who knows? But if you are Caucasian you can bet that they weren’t in Europe. My Celtic ancestors arrived in their portions of Europe only about circa 500 BC, displacing earlier non-Indo-European peoples, and were displaced in turn by Germanic and Latin invaders within the next thousand years. There is approximately zero chance that the random skeleton unearthed in County Galway from the Holocene epoch has any connection to the modern Irish.

Yet, an implicit racism exists when it comes to Native Americans. Somehow Native Americans are immune from the turnover of populations that exists everywhere else, and somehow Native American oral tradition can actually trace back history in North America over eight thousand years, a claim unimaginable in European history outside of silly psuedo-scientific documentaries.

Fortunately for science, the Magistrate ignored the myths and superstitions that apparently ruled the Department of Interior during the 1990's. Mr. Slawski also has the opinion from which these quotes are gleaned.

On the burying of the archeological site:

In April 1998, the Corps buried the discovery site of the remains under approximately two million pounds of rubble and dirt, topped with 3700 willow, dogwood, and cottonwood plantings. COE 5873-74, DOI 2347-51, 2515. The lengthy administrative record that Defendants filed with this court documents only a portion of the process by which the decision to bury the site was made. Nevertheless, that record strongly suggests that the Corps' primary objective in covering the site was to prevent additional remains or artifacts from being discovered, not to "preserve" the site's archaeological value or to remedy a severe erosion control problem as Defendants have represented to this court.

On the notion that modern groups can claim the Kennewick Man as one of their own:

There is no reasoned starting point from which to evaluate whether a
shared group identity exists between the present-day Tribal Claimants and a particular earlier
group.

The Court relied on this pragmatic construction of the statute for the purpose of determining whether a modern group could claim seizin with respect to really, really old bones:

The statutory language also implies that the members must perceive themselves as part of a group and function as such. There must be at least some common elements of language, religion, customs, traditions, morals, arts, cuisine, and other cultural features; a common perspective on the world and the group's role within it; and shared experiences that are part of the group's erception of its history. See, e.g., DOI 3021-24, 7512, 8992, 9031-33, 10309. This commonality distinguishes the group and its members from other groups, and legitimizes the present-day group's authority to represent the interests of deceased members. See, S Rep No 101-473 9, DOI 0581, ("The requirement of continuity between present day Indian tribes and material from historic or prehistoric Indian tribes is intended to ensure that the claimant has a reasonable connection with the materials"). Retention of group identity over time also requires transmission of "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom...

The Court quite correctly concluded that no such group identity could be traced from the Holocene epoch:

“In other words, the available evidence is insufficient to either prove or disprove cultural or group continuity dating back 9,000 years.”

The Kennewick Man incident is important both as archeological data, and as an example of the harm that politics - now exclusively politically correct politics - can do to science.