Riddle of the Bones: Politics, Science, Race, and the Story of Kennewick Man

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Description

From its discovery in the Columbia River shallows three years ago, reporter Roger Downey has chronicled the epic adventures of the skeleton called "Kennewick Man": first as pretext for a media feeding-frenzy, then as centerpiece of a legal circus pitting celebrated scientists against Native Americans, the Corps of Engineers, and the Clinton White House, finally, at long last, as object of rational scientific study.

The saga of Kennewick Man offers abundant opportunity to explore today's rapidly-changing scientific theories about how the Americas first came to be settled, and by whom. But it also casts light on the divisions within the fields of anthropology and archeology concerning the role of politics and race in the pursuit of scientific goals, what constitutes ethical procedure in dealing with ancient remains, and the very purpose and direction of the scientific enterprise itself.

Roger Downey attended the College of the University of Chicago and the University of Washington before stumbling into a career in journalism with the Seattle "underground paper" Helix in 1969. Since 1976, he has written for Seattle Weekly, while pursuing a career as playwright and translator, primarily from the German.
Poor Kennewick Man--over 9,000 years old and embroiled in an incredibly complex, protracted, and acrimonious contemporary litigation.

It's probably a good thing he's dead. Bits of him have gone missing. He's been transported in Ziploc bags accompanied by armed guard. He's been buried, washed up, warehoused. His is a crisis of identity of epic proportions in an era and culture in which identity and ethnicity are key. Who is he? It depends, as journalist Roger Downey notes in Riddle of the Bones, on whom you ask.

Downey has covered the story since the skeleton's discovery in 1996, and in that sense he is an expert and participant. What Downey is not is an archeologist, an anthropologist, or a member of the Army Corps of Engineers, the Clinton administration, or any tribe claiming pre-Columbus roots in this country.

As a result, his book portrays the frustrations of these groups without being partial and without being so steeped in one set of lore, expertise, or ideology as to make his account either impenetrable or biased. And its colorful cast of characters and jaunty prose make this a good book for the general reader: "As Van Pelt saw it, the law was clear...

Chatters's Corps permit to dig at a site more than a mile downriver no more gave him the right to investigate or even handle remains from another than it licensed him to dig in Egypt's Valley of the Kings. This just might be a chance to catch Jimmie with his scientific pants down." --Julia Riches