Tag Archives: archaeology

Kennewick Man Update

The saga of Kennewick Man, the 9,200-year-old Caucasoid (which is not the same as “Caucasian”!) skeleton found in Washington state in 1996, continues. An federal appeals court panel has ruled in favor of reseachers who want to continue to study his remains, now stored at the University of Washington, and against the tribes that wanted to rebury him. Go here and here for more background on the controversy.

He was a tall, strongly built, middle-aged warrior who probably died a violent death. The question “at whose hands?” produces all sorts of fascinating speculation. Those speculations tie into theories of “diffusionism,” once discredited as ridiculed as “racist,” but now enjoying a bit of a quiet comeback.

Norse-tradition Pagans, led by Stephen McNallen claimed him as a European forebear, part of their argument that Heathenism was the natural spiritual path of today’s Euro-Americans. Some anthropologists suggested that he (and other, anomalous, non-Mongoloid skeletons found over the years) suggested that long-ago Polynesians also came to this continent, but were, perhaps, exterminated by the ancestors of those people now designated as Natives.

The Covill, Umatilla, Yakam, and Nez Perce tribes claimed the rights to rebury the skeleton as one of theirs, generally speaking, because he was found where they lived in historical times, from the 18th century onwards, at least. Their attorneys are not happy with the judges’ strict reading of the North American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, as described here in Native Times.

The tribes’ argument does not convince me either. We cannot assume that the population 9,000 years ago was the same as now/. It’s possible, but we know that tribes did change homelands–the Kiowa moving from Wyoming into the Southern Plains, to give just one example. NAGPRA was passed to repatriate the remains–thousands of them–of more recent skeletal remains, whose removal from their graves by scientific researchers had embittered many American Indians over the past century. But to claim a 9,200-year-old skeleton as “ours” is just too much of a stretch.

Kirk Mitchell’s mystery novel, Ancient Ones, was inspired by the battle over Kennewick Man’s remains. For more on the whole genre of “American Indian mystery novels,” go here.

Does This Symbol Make You Horny?

Does this symbol make you horny?

Two links on alleged aphrodisiacal properties of a design

found in a Neolithic Scottish village, here and here.

Dem Bones

American archaeologists have had more a decade’s experience with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). It has also been misapplied, I believe, as in the case of Kennewick Man. Although that skeleton may have been proto-Polynesian rather than European, Steve McNallen of the Asatru Folk Assembly filed a brief in the court case over who got the skeleton under NAGPRA’s rules. Mattias Gardell (see 29 November post ) makes an interesting point: We know that Norse people visited North America, but if a Norse cemetery were discovered in, say, Maine, a literal reading of NAGPRA would require those bones to be handed over the nearest federally recognized American Indian tribe as “ancestral remains.”

Now similar legal issues could be on the horizon in Europe, as discussed in two stories on Spiked Online, “Battle of the Bones” and “Burying the Evidence.”

“So far as governments are concerned, repatriation strategies have become part of the way in which they attempt to connect with what they perceive as fragmented, divided societies. In the USA and Australia, the apparent failure to integrate indigenous populations had became a particular cause for concern by the 1980s, and with no new solutions to integration on the horizon, the issue became how best to build a relationship – any relationship – with these separate, impoverished groups of people came to the fore.

“Repatriation, in this context, represented a symbolic reversal of conquest – a giving back of what had been taken, a recognition of the value of indigenous culture at the highest levels of government, and an attempt to create, not one national identity, but a new ‘pluricultural’ ideal” (“Battle of the Bones”).

(Thanks to Arts and Letters Daily for sending me down this track.)

British Pagan are increasingly positioning themselves as “indigenous religion” and taking an active interest in the management of prehistoric Pagan archaeological sites, so these controversies will only increase.

Trudging Along with Baskets of Corn

This Denver Post article on carrying corn to Chaco Canyon helps to illuminate the world of Bone Walker and the Gears’ other Anasazi novels. (See entry for 28 September 2003.)

NOTE: I do not know how long this link will be good, since the Denver Post does not make its archives available forever. If the link does not work, visit the Post and search the archive for “Chaco.”

The more I think about Chaco, the more I wonder if the great kiva of Casa Rinconada was not perhaps the Southwestern equivalent of the Nuremberg stadium, site of the Nazi Party rallies filmed so memorably by Leni Riefenstahl in Triumph of the Will.

Bone Walker

I have just finished Bone Walker, by the prolific Kathleen O’Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear, last in a series of novels set among the Anasazi people of the Southwest in about the 13th century. It is the third of a series, actually, and in the words of the authors’ Web site, “Bone Walker ties all the threads woven in The Visitant and The Summoning God together.”

The Gears used to be archaeologists. No doubt they got out of the profession due to its apparent high homicide rate, if we are to believe them, Tony Hillerman, Jake Page, and other writers. I always knew that archaeology was a high contentious and even vicious field; now we see that it is probably the most murderous corner of Academia.

If you read Bone Walker, personal knowledge or a map of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, is essential.

The interesting thing about the Gears’ novels is that they incorporate current archaeological thinking, e.g., how might the cannibalism documented by Arizona State University’s Christy Turner have occurred? Was there really religious warfare between followers of the “kachina cult” and other people?

Frankly, I wonder if the religious-warfare angle is not overdrawn. It sounds too much like 16th-century Europe: “Die, Protestant dogs!” I like to think that people who did not have “holy scripture” telling them what to do would be more likely to go to war for the usual reasons–resource control, prestige–and less over dogma or the nature of the gods.

For people who must spend a lot of time outdoors, the Gears do include some oddities. For instance, these Anasazi warriors skulking in Chaco Canyon are always trying to sneak from one town to the next in the “period of darkness between sunset and the rising of the New Moon.” Now think about that. One thing about us Pagans–we at least know when the Moon comes up.

And one woman, the beautiful but deceitful Obsidian, she of the perfect full breasts, goes jogging down the Great North Road with the warriors. Did the Anasazi invent the sports bra?

The Parrot Trainer

I feel as though I’ve written my guts out today, and then I check and it’s only a little more than 2,000 words. My breakfast and lunchtime break reading is Swain Wolfe’s The Parrot Trainer, a novel set among Southwestern archaeologists, but definitely not in the Tony Hillerman mode. Wolfe is much more given to “tweaking academic and knee-jerk political correctness,” but he knows where the genuine controversies are. And he’s read Christy Turner, clearly.