ABSTRACT
I begin this chapter with the oft-repeated tale of the 1996 discovery of human remains in Washington State. At the end of July that year, two young men inadvertently discovered a human skull while walking along the banks of the Columbia River near Kennewick, Washington. They notifi ed local authorities who, after a more thorough search, found not only a skull but also an almost complete human skeleton. A preliminary police investigation determined that the remains were not those of a recent victim, but rather of someone who had lived and died well before the end of the twentieth century. Dr. James Chatters and other consulting archaeologists fi rst posited that the remains were those of a nineteenth century European male settler, but the later discovery of a projectile point embedded in the hip suggested otherwise (Chatters 2001). Preliminary carbon-dating tests put the age of the remains at approximately 9200 years old, making the “Kennewick Man,” as he was eventually dubbed by archaeologists and the media, among the earliest and most complete human skeletons ever found in North America.
