Court Gives Scientists Access To "Kennewick Man"

by Diana Leal

The research will follow a long fight by U.S. Natives and their supporters, who say the "Kennewick Man" is a Native American who should be respectfully returned to his resting place without tests being performed.

The scientists argue that analyzing the remarkably well-preserved skeleton could answer some important questions about how the first people came to North America.

A federal court recently agreed, setting aside a previous decision to classify the skeleton as Native American. It ruled that scientists will be allowed to study the remains, and that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers violated the National Historic Preservation Act when it buried the skeleton's discovery site.

The Engineers Corps plans to appeal that ruling.

After discovering the skeleton six years ago, the corps handed it over to six native groups on the nearby Umatilla reservation in accordance with a federal law, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which holds that all persons, or descendants of persons, who lived in North America before 1492 are considered native Americans.

"Our community has confidence the court will recognize the necessity to protect native people and avoid their being treated like objects of scientific curiosity," the Umatilla natives said in a statement.

"Our religious beliefs, culture, and our adopted policies and procedures tell us that this individual must be re-buried as soon as possible. Our elders have taught us that once a body goes into the ground, it is meant to stay there until the end of time."

The skeleton, which experts say is 90 percent intact and is likely that of a 45- to 55-year-old man, has been stored in Seattle's Burke Museum for the past six years. Umatilla tribe officials have denied archaeologists permission to perform chemical tests and DNA analysis that could establish the skeleton's racial origin.

Scientists argue that the skeleton is part of a common American heritage, which should be open for all people to study.

"The demand of scientists to study the human skeleton with the purpose of finding new theories on the peopling of the American continent is as legitimate as the interest of natives in following the customs of their ancestors requiring dead people to be buried," Donald Grayson, an anthropologist and curator at Burke Museum, told IPS.

David Meltzer agrees. "There are human remains found in North America which can be dated before 1492 that are not native Americans. In this sense, the general principle [of the Repatriation Act] is not correct," said Meltzer, professor and director of the Quest Archaeological Research Program at Southern Methodist University, in an interview.

Scientists hope Kennewick Man will provide evidence to challenge the prevailing theory that man first arrived in America by crossing the Bering Straits from Asia.

For decades, scientists have believed that the peopling of the American continent took place around 12,000 years ago, in three separate waves, from three separate parts of the world. But newer evidence suggests that a steady influx of small groups from different parts of the world occurred earlier.

"We all have something important to learn from the past," Meltzer said. "This decision will allow us to have more details on one of the great human skeletons finds of this time. It will also help to clarify aspects of legislation related to native Americans and allow us to find clues to the biological and cultural affinities of those who inhabited this part of the world in distant times."

But Tom Grayson Colooneese, an anthropologist in the faculty of native studies at the University of Washington, believes that scientists have no intrinsic right to study other people's ancestors. "It is as if somebody decided to exhume one's great grandmother and expose her to experiment without the permission of the family," he said.

The Smithsonian Institution and its National Museum of Natural History have expressed an interest in acquiring Kennewick Man for their collection.