Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity (review)

Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity. By David Hurst Thomas. (New York: Basic Books, 2000. xxxix + 326 pp., foreword, prologue, endnotes, bibliography, index. $25.00 cloth.)

 

Dean R. Snow, Pennsylvania State University

David Hurst Thomas has written a superb book of many parts. It is at once a history of American archaeology, a multiple ethnography in which the ethnographers are examined as closely as their subjects, a treatise on the nature of science, a discourse on current politics, and a prize-worthy example of modern journalism. Because it is all of these things it is also terrific ethnohistory.

One has to be either foolish or courageous to write such a book, and Thomas is no fool. He uses the incendiary Kennewick case, which is still in litigation, as his entrée into the intertwined history of archaeologists and Native Americans. Only a few have had both identities simultaneously, and there is a popular presumption that the two are natural enemies. Thus Skull Wars is an apt title even though the details of history reveal a much less polarized relationship between the two. After all, the author, an eminent archaeologist, persuaded Vine Deloria, a leading American Indian polemicist, to write the book’s foreword.

The recent history of the remains of Kennewick man is put in context in a concise prologue, which anchors everything that follows, giving relevance to what might otherwise be read as dry soporific history. To show us how we got to our present state of discomfort, Thomas starts with Columbus. Europeans and later Euro-Americans, like most humans, believed implicitly in the superiority of their own traditions, a belief buoyed by their political, organizational, and technological successes. They tended to view American Indians either as romantically noble paragons or as subhuman savages, depending upon the circumstances. In either case the verdict was that the Indians, or at least their cultures, were doomed. Thus they joined dodos, mammoths, and the other specimens of a vanishing world on display in nineteenth-century museums. And the means by which human beings became specimens often were reprehensible.

Many American Indians shared this fatalistic view of their futures a century ago. When Native American populations sank to their nadirs around 1900, more than a few Indians voluntarily turned over wampum belts, traditional clothing, sacred objects, and the like to museums for long-term preservation. Politicians preached assimilation, ethnographers scrambled to collect data before knowledgeable elders died, and linguists struggled to record the words of dying languages. Few people anticipated the growth of American Indian populations in the twentieth century, and few allowed for the possibility that their cultures would change over time and remain intact. Yet that is where we are at the beginning of the twentieth-first century, and the legacy of false presumptions by our predecessors is an unwelcome burden.

Thomas Jefferson, sometime archaeologist, was followed by a series of nineteenth-century grave robbers whose methods disgust most of us today. It is worth noting that medical schools often got cadavers for their anatomy classes in the same way in that era, but somehow modern medicine avoids the odor that lingers over modern archaeology. As I read through Thomas’s history I wondered how near the present I would have to read before finding an archaeologist not fatally flawed by cultural hubris or faulty ethics. Morgan’s evolutionary theory was compromised by his notions of progress. Boas, for all his sympathy, could nevertheless treat people as specimens. Kroeber, on the other hand, possessed an intellect and ethics that would pass muster today, as revealed by the story of his relationship with the remarkable man known as Ishi. His temperate words mingle with those of living Native Americans such as Scott Momaday on the middle ground of reason and civility.

There are two crucial keys to understanding the events described in this extraordinary book, race and science, and popular...