The Passing of the Paleoamericans: Kennewick Man/The Ancient One and the End of a Non-Indian Ancient America

• In Event: How Collections End: Objects, Meaning and Loss in Laboratories and Museums - I

Abstract

This paper considers the repatriation of some the most ancient human skeletal remains from the United States as two sorts of ending: their end as objects of scientific study, and their end as ancient non-American Indian settlers of North America. In the 1990s, some prominent physical anthropologists and archaeologists began replacing “Paleoindian” with the new category of “Paleoamerican” to characterize the Western Hemisphere’s earliest inhabitants. Kennewick Man/The Ancient One, a nearly 9,000 year-old skeleton, convinced some anthropologists that contemporary Native American peoples (descendants of Paleoindians) were not biologically related to the very first American colonists. The concept of the Paleoamerican therefore denied Native American peoples their long-held status as the original inhabitants of the Americas. New genetic results, however, have contradicted the craniometric interpretations that led to these perceptions, placing the most ancient American skeletons firmly back in the American Indian family tree. This paper describes the story of Kennewick Man/The Ancient One, the most famous “Paleoamerican,” explores how repatriation has been a common end for many North American collections (Paleoindians included), and enumerates what kind of ending repatriation may represent materially and ethically for anthropological science. This paper also contributes to STS--in particular indigenous science studies--by examining how the assumptions of traditional anthropological science around Indianness have been newly troubled by technological innovations in ancient DNA extraction and interpretation. Whether this troubling will productively transform how ancient identities are constructed is, however, still an open question.

Author

• Ann Kakaliouras, Whittier College