Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Books

Ivory Tower
The Scrooge of science
In his book "Voodoo Science," physicist Robert Park responds to alternative medicine and cold fusion with a resounding "Bah, humbug!"
By Jennifer Ouellette
[03/15/00]

I was a bad pornographer
What a shock it was to discover I didn't have a clue how to write dirty prose.
By Fiona Maazel
[03/15/00]

Reviews
"Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People" by John Conroy
Why do torturers torture? An author goes in search of answers.
By Patricia Kean
[03/15/00]

Reviews
"Use Me" by Elissa Schappell
A disarming debut collection tracks a woman's life from teenage passion to grown-up grief.
By Stephanie Zacharek
[03/14/00]

Brotherly love
Dave Eggers' memoir, "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," has charms to break the Savage heart.
By Dan Savage
[03/14/00]

Complete archives for Books

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Eighty years on, the grouch has not lessened, and the hysteria is still at boiling point. Witness the bitter controversy over the recent discovery of so-called Kennewick Man. On July 26, 1996, two young men stumbled on a human skull in the Columbia River in Kennewick, Wash. Local coroner Floyd Johnson called in a forensic archaeologist and expert in human remains, James C. Chatters, to make an identification of the excellently preserved remains.

Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology and the Battle for Native American Identity By David Hurst Thomas Basic Books, 270 pages Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com

With permission from the Walla Walla district Corps of Engineers, which oversees the site, Chatters recovered a human skeleton which he characterized as having "caucasoid traits." He assumed, therefore, that it must be a 19th century cadaver. Not so: Radio-carbon dating established an age of at least 9,000 years. The tall, middle-aged man who had come to grief in Kennewick nine millennia ago was not, according to Chatters, typically Native American. Then who was he? Was he possibly not Native American? "Lack of head flattening," Chatters coolly noted, "from cradle board use." Was he "white"?

The media jumped on board at once. Had early Europeans, they asked, preceded even the Vikings into the New World by thousands of years? Antagonisms arose between the scientific community and the alliance of five tribes who claim the body as a violated ancestor -- the Umatilla, Yakima, Nez Percé, Wanapum and Colville. Examine the remains for DNA, cried the scientists; bury our sacred ancestor, cried the Five Tribes. "All we're asking for," said one Five Tribes member, "is a little common decency." The grouch suddenly sprang to life again.

Nor were things helped much when Chatters made a reconstruction of Kennewick Man's face. Lo and behold, he was the spitting image of "Star Trek's" Jean-Luc Picard. "He could also pass for my father-in-law," mused Chatters diffidently. "Who happens to be Scandinavian." The Five Tribes were not amused.

Now into this murky and emotional fray steps David Hurst Thomas, a curator of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and a founding trustee of the National Museum of the American Indian. His new book, "Skull Wars," purports to be a history of the Kennewick lawsuit as well as a broad overview of the "deteriorating relationship" between archaeologists and Native Americans.

The book is prefaced by the noted Indian activist Vine Deloria, author of the gung-ho jeremiad "Custer Died for Your Sins," who is also neatly enough accorded a chapter in Thomas' book. The latter, notes Deloria, filled him "with incandescent rage." In his own book, Deloria sneered at white anthropologists as "anthros" and portrayed them as grim, hypocritical, imperialist exploiters. It is a dull caricature that Thomas himself enthusiastically endorses.

Thomas is nimble and well-read, and the bibliography betrays a mind that is curious and wide-ranging. I was pleased, for example, to see there the excellent David Henige of the University of Wisconsin, who has written brilliantly on modern misinterpretations of Columbus. Would, however, that Thomas had some of Henige's serious scholarly commitment to carefully worked insight and masterful intellectual narrative.

Although "Skull Wars" offers entertaining thumbnail sketches aplenty of American anthropologists like Franz Boas and Lewis Henry Morgan, the book is little more than a journalistic political tract designed to arouse the aforementioned "incandescent rage." In a series of rather rambling mini-essays we range with groaning predictability over every white-Amerindian grievance of the past 500 years, from Columbus and accusations of cannibalism to Red Power at Alcatraz. Foggy p.c. buzzwords such as "mainstream society," usually undefined, litter almost every page. And the loosely jumbled chapters somehow never accumulate any real continuity or vertical depth. In short, "Skull Wars" creates a curious texture in which sometimes interesting details (especially gossipy accounts of archaeological infighting ) are swamped by the vulgar and piously sermonizing mind of the activist. It is an all-too-familiar spectacle with American academics.

Thomas no doubt thinks that by devoting his first 100 pages to a kind of miscellaneous, potted History 101 account of post-conquest injustices that we will be better informed as to the cultural background to the Kennewick controversy. This is both patronizing and ludicrous. At one point he tells us that it was because the Greeks had a well-defined sense of "barbarians" that later Europeans decided to be unpleasant to Native Americans -- as if every culture in world history didn't also have similar notions of inferior outsiders. (The Ancient Mexica -- the correct term for the Aztecs -- for example, flatly called those living north of the Rio Grande "barbarians.")

But of course Thomas wishes to grandiosely string together Aristotle, the Conquistadors, poor old Columbus, Buffalo Bill, American anthropologists of the 19th century (fearful racists, needless to say), Manifest Destiny, the "termination" reservation reforms of the Eisenhower years and Kennewick Man into one seamlessly awesome tale of woe and infamy. They are all avatars, you see, of wicked "mainstream society."

Next page | Accusing all anthropologists of racism