Bunch of Amateurs (24 page)

These are the lyrics of the trade, played in the key of the high-science formality. And it’s with such swaggering sesquipedalianismo that an entire career of work can be cattily dismissed: “My review has raised doubts about the provenience of virtually every ‘compelling,’ unambiguous artifact,” wrote the archaeologist Stuart Fiedel in 1999 of the most promising pre-Clovis site ever.

The fight over this site—Monte Verde in Chile—is the most notorious in the field. The archaeologist whose work was trashed is Tom Dillehay of the University of Kentucky. He claimed to find fantastic evidence of a pre-Clovis community, a series of huts, one of which was some kind of primitive drugstore since there were traces of pharmaceutical herbs. He found a tent post still staked in the ground with knotted twine from a Juncus tree or, in the jargon, “the indisputably anthropogenic knotted Juncus.”

In 1997, a team of specialists, including Vance Haynes, visited the site, examined all of Dillehay’s cool evidence, and unanimously approved it. The pre-Clovis line was officially breached. Tom Dillehay was the man. But not for long. Haynes began to waver. Then this Stuart Fiedel, a private-sector archaeologist, wrote a withering dismissal of every single piece of evidence presented.

In his book, Adovasio (who sided with Dillehay on this one) suggested that Fiedel “reserve some space in the State Home for the Terminally Bewildered.” Adovasio whacked Fiedel as “a previously little known archaeologist now working for a private salvage archaeology firm” who “has no field experience in Paleo-Indian sites or complex late Pleistocene or Holocene sites” and “has published one rarely used prehistory textbook but otherwise has no apparent credentials.”

Archaeology’s tribal relations are run by a caste system that goes like this. The Brahmins are the credentialed, tenured professors at known colleges. They publish in peer-reviewed journals. Beneath
them are private sector archaeologists, also known as salvage archaeologists. They might publish in popular journals like
National Geographic
. But their day work is something different altogether. They determine for, say, a mall developer whether there are any “significant” remains on a piece of real estate slated to become a food court.

“The people in that world earn a good living,” said Richard Burger. “But it is seen as being outside of the intellectual debate because they are so busy writing reports, they don’t really publish in peer-review journals. Their work is sometimes called ‘gray literature.’ ” Below the salvagers are the rank amateurs and hobbyists who often spend a weekend out at some site hoping to find a Clovis point or two to sell on eBay or keep in their special cigar box back home. Below them all are scum, the scrurrilous amateur critics who write books such as this one.

Archaeology’s caste system is another facet of the discipline that makes it more amateurish a science than, say, particle physics. How many weekend astrophysicists could write up a report challenging Stephen Hawking that would be widely accepted as truth? When new evidence in, say, particle physics opens up a Kuhnian melee, the folks who rush into the breach tend to be … particle physicists. (There are exceptions, but take the point.) In prehistoric archaeology, though, with its rather elastic sense of membership ranging from well-credentialed academics like Adovasio to salvage archaeologists to slightly bonkers theorists to ranting neo-Nazis—well, all of them can rush right in. And do.

What underlies the mudslinging use of bloated Latinisms as well as the compulsion to make a show of tidy whisk brooms and Euclidean grids is the sense, maybe even fear, that archaeology is not a science at all. There’s a lot of play in the radiocarbon-dating, all the evidence is in dispute, and sure, maybe the elders’ caution can easily be dismissed as a Freudian conflict of interest. But maybe not.

All of this means that the pre-Clovis evidence requires a lot of interpretation, a fact that makes it very easy for personal desire and
anxiety to seep like groundwater into that drawer full of cobbles and lithics. As one defender of Dillehay confessed in his own report: “I wondered if, by being too close to these stones for too long, I was building an interpretive sand castle.”

But the sand castle’s been built. From the few lithics, others have begun to tell a new American creation story—about just who pre-Clovis man was, where he came from, how he lived and died.

The sudden appearance of this yarn explains why prehistoric archaeology really isn’t as much a science as an object lesson in just how amateurism can get so amateurish. The story that is getting told is a form of improvisational narrative—tribal storytelling. These stories have less to do with what’s obvious from the evidence than what some of us, anxious rootless Americans, deeply long to hear. It’s time to look closely at the story that’s getting told right now about the earliest inhabitants of this continent. I have a little experience in this field. I know how to jerry-rig a narrative using only a couple of wayward factoids to make it sound just right. It’s something I was born to do. It’s in my royal blood. I am the direct descendant of King Charlemagne.

For most of the 1990s, the sotto voce chatter about pre-Clovis man and his possible identity was little more than politically naughty buzz out on the edge of archaeology. Insiders talked about spear points, DNA, cordage, and some disputed bones, but it wasn’t a story as much as it was narrative tinder, very dry, waiting for a spark.

Which finally flew, one hot summer afternoon in 1996 on the
banks of the Columbia River. Some kids were trying to sneak into a hydroplane race, and as they stomped through the muck of a bank, one of them saw a few old bones and then pieces of a skull. The find was quickly passed on to a local forensic expert, a salvage archaeologist who worked out of a converted rec room in his house. He would become the rhapsode for these bones. Divinely, his name was James Chatters.

Chatters released the radiocarbon dating that put the bones back to 7600
B.C
. He also described a Cascade point embedded in the hip. This style of Paleo-Indian arrowhead is a long, thin design that would fit right in with the skeleton’s age. So far, so good. Standard ancient skeleton. But then Chatters said something odd, almost nonsensical to those unacquainted with the amateur anthropology rumor mill. He said he didn’t believe this skeleton belonged to a Paleo-Indian at all but rather to “a trapper/explorer who’d had difficulties with ‘stone-age’ peoples during his travels.”

In other words, this skeleton was not merely a non-Indian but a non-Indian who had survived well into Clovis time and then been killed by Paleo-Indians. Suddenly, this skeleton was a victim and the find was a crime scene.

Even as the media tried to make sense of this peculiar story, the Indians demanded the bones, charging that they had to be of Native American heritage. This was how these stories typically unfolded.

In 1990, President George H. W. Bush signed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. NAGPRA sought to make amends for the grave robbing and bizarre antics of the previous decades. In the nineteenth century, for instance, the Smithsonian wanted Indian skulls to mount on display. So, quite often after a battle, Indian corpses were decapitated and the heads packed in boxes and shipped back to Washington to be “studied.” The money was good enough that sometimes Indians would see white men—the emissaries of European civilization—loitering around a burial ground until the crowd left—in order to dig up Grandma and cut off her head. A
few centuries’ worth of desecration of the Indian body is something mainstream history still avoids mentioning. It’s hard for non–Native Americans today to understand the lingering resentment. Try this on: Toward the end of the Civil War in Denver, a group of marauding white men interrupted theatergoers with a mid-show display of fresh Indian scalps—not merely from heads but from women’s vaginas as well. The civilized audience whooped with approval.

As Native Americans asserted themselves, beginning in the 1970s, their movement led inexorably to a congressional act aimed at returning all stolen skeletons to the appropriate tribes. Some estimates put the number of skeletons held in museums at holocaust levels: 200,000.

NAGPRA decreed that all Indian human remains that could be culturally identified were to be returned to the appropriate tribe. Dozens of fights with museums erupted, and still go on to this day. Consider the University of California at Berkeley—a place one might suspect is ostentatiously pro return of Native American skeletons. But that would be wrong. Beneath the Hearst Gymnasium swimming pool is a charnel house of “thousands of remains” that Berkeley stubbornly holds on to, fighting all legal efforts to have them restored and reburied.

But these are all fairly recent skeletons—i.e., the last few centuries. Jump back a millennium or two and the skeletons tend not to have been stolen in conflict but discovered at various archaeological sites. These are also being reclaimed and reburied under the NAGPRA law.

In the past, a number of unusual skeletons have been discovered that date long after Clovis but are rumored to possess characteristics of another race of people—different from the Asians who crossed the Bering Strait. These skeletons have long fed the pre-Clovis rumor mill as evidence of some other group of early North Americans who survived the Clovis-era arrival of Paleo-Indians before slowly disappearing. As if to fuel this mill, as soon as such bones are discovered, modern Indians seize them and rebury them. In the
gossipy back alley of amateur American archaeology, they are notorious. They are mourned. Let us name them: the 10,800-year-old Buhl Woman found in Idaho in 1989, the 7,800-year-old Hourglass Cave skeleton found in Colorado, the 7,800-year-old Pelican Rapids Woman skull and the 8,700-year-old Browns Valley Man, both found in Minnesota—all reburied.

So, the Native Americans in Washington State immediately suspected this familiar talk about Kennewick’s origin was merely a political tactic to end-run the straightforward requirements of NAGPRA. The scientists, especially when it concerned these ancient skeletons that they wanted desperately to study, counter-suspected political correctness run amok. The conspiracy theorists, not surprisingly, saw a conspiracy. Then, something else happened. The issue quickly got caught up in energy politics.

At the time of the discovery of Kennewick, the Umatilla Indians were working with the Clinton administration to dispose of some outdated chemical weapons (WMD, as we say nowadays). The federal government wanted tribal approval on this difficult matter. And, by the late 1990s, the Umatilla were also a federally recognized tribe and had a casino, which meant they had political and financial clout and couldn’t easily be kicked around. So, when they screamed for the bones, the Clinton administration jumped. Chatters and the group of scientists who gathered around him calling for an open inquiry into the skeleton were stunned by what happened.

Bruce Babbitt, the then secretary of the interior, ordered that the US Army Corps of Engineers seize the bones. In the meantime, to “stabilize” the site where the bones were found, the Army choppered in five hundred tons of riprap and buried the bank. The archaeological site was protected by being destroyed.

This wasn’t just politics to the scientists, it was medieval obscurantism. This was the equivalent of forcing Galileo to recant and locking him in his room. Which is how the entire drama would play out in the courtroom—a fight between Native American Indians trying
to respect their elders and secular scientists defending their right to open inquiry.

But this time, there was one difference, one word that totally changed the story in the pop-culture telling outside the courtroom. When Chatters first examined Kennewick in his rec room, he looked at the skull and then deployed a single word to the media to describe what he saw: “Caucasoid-like.”

The narrative tinder suddenly exploded in flames, and from the fire arose a new and wild story: A Caucasoid man, who was among the First Americans, was murdered by genocidal newcomers, Mongoloid invaders coming across Beringia after the last ice age.

Throughout the theories and quarrels of this prehistory, there is a strange kind of recapitulation going on. Every theory propagated about the European conquest of the Indians after Christopher Columbus seems to have its doppelganger in the pre-Clovis era. Just as American Indians were the victims of genocide in the colonial period, so it seems were the early Caucasoids at the hands of paleo-Indians. Some theories say that the early Caucasoids were wiped out by germs, a recapitulation of the account of Indians and smallpox-infected blankets, which has become a near parable in American history. In this way, the scientists could even claim that the Indians’ attempt to take control of the Kennewick skeleton was simply the evil twin of nineteenth-century grave robbing, and haven’t we all had enough of that?

To bring the entire fight to a level of absurdity that marks it as a truly American event, the Asatru Folk Assembly—a neo-Norse movement that claims to represent the “native European” religion—also claimed Kennewick’s bones. The neo-Norsemen argued that they were the nearest tribe related to Kennewick Man and that under the law of NAGPRA
they
should be given the bones for reburial. The court did not give them Kennewick but did allow them to perform funeral rites over his bones. And so a year after that hydroplane race, big hairy blond men wearing horns and garish furs performed the
Norse burial ceremony in Washington State for their mourned errant ancestor.