“Because of fiascos like Kennewick Man, however, there may not be anybody to do the research in the future.”

hen the Army Corps of Engineers couldn't make one of North America's most exciting archeological finds go away, it decided to perform a massive cover-up operation. Literally. First it dumped 500 tons of rock and gravel from helicopters onto the Columbia River discovery site. Then the Corps layered the shoreline near Kennewick, Wash., with more than 300 tons of dirt and logs. Finally, it planted thousands of trees on top of the remade terrain, once a muddy beach. "The Corps destroyed as much as possible as fast as possible," says geologist Tom Stafford. "It's like they hit it with a nuclear bomb."

A group of scientists tried to stop the Corps. Two lawsuits were filed. Even Congress got involved. But the Corps — perhaps acting on orders from the White House — plowed away. As it buried the site last April, a group of American Indian activists looked on with approval, listening to the ceremonial taps of a tribal drum-beater. The fight over Kennewick Man, as the ancient human remains found beside the Columbia River are popularly known, by then had become a cause célèbre for both sides. Although Kennewick Man represents an invaluable opportunity to learn about ancient migration into the New World, his bones are currently locked away in a museum unexamined, a victim of conscious neglect, bureaucratic ineptitude, and political meddling.

In July 1996, two college students were walking along the river when they spotted a human skull sticking out of the earth. They contacted the police, and that evening local forensics expert James Chatters was asked to retrieve the remains. The bones looked fresh, says Chatters, but soil stuck to them — suggesting that they had been in the riverbank for a while. Back at his lab, he noted the skull's Caucasoid features. "I thought we had found an early European settler," he says. The county coroner requested radiocarbon dating. The shocking results: The skeleton, almost 90 percent complete, was nearly 10,000 years old.

That wasn't supposed to happen. Kennewick Man doesn't look like a modern American Indian. His skull is long rather than short, and his face is narrow and prognathic instead of broad and flat. He lacks other features, such as shovel-shaped incisors, that are generally associated with the Mongoloid peoples of Asia who are conventionally believed to have populated North and South America. Several fringe groups have mistakenly suggested that Kennewick Man was white. But nobody knows the color of Kennewick Man's skin, or much else for that matter. The only sure thing is that his remains show that the original settlement of the western hemisphere was more complicated than once imagined. And that bothers an outspoken clique of Indian activists.

Before researchers could conduct a full investigation on Kennewick Man, the Corps seized the remains. They acted on behalf of five local tribes, which claimed a right to the bones under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act passed by Congress in 1990. The Indians wanted to rebury Kennewick Man, and the Corps was going to let them. "From our oral histories, we know that our people have been part of this land from the beginning of time," explained Armand Minthorn of the Umatillas. "We do not believe that our people migrated here from another continent, as the scientists do."

The scientists, of course, have long believed that American Indians are descended from people who crossed a Bering Strait landbridge. Kennewick Man doesn't necessarily challenge the Asian source, but he does speak to the fascinating complexity of ancient demography. The remains potentially point to a tumultuous and violent past that contradicts the Dances with Wolves image of ecologically sensitive, peace-loving victims of white conquest.

The Corps quickly complied with the Indians' demands — perhaps because it was eager to use the remains as a bargaining chip in its constant treaty negotiations with tribes over salmon fishing, waste disposal, and other matters. Indeed, an internal memo circulated at the time mentions the Corps' overpowering political incentive to heed the tribes' demand: "All risk to us seems to be associated with not repatriating the remains."

Not quite. The Corps came under withering criticism in the local community and, increasingly, in the national media. Eight prominent scientists sued the Corps for the right to study the remains, and a judge halted plans to give Kennewick Man to the tribes. Several months later, he ordered the Corps to reevaluate its actions, and it looked like the scientists were going to have their day in the lab. Then the remains fell victim to terrible mismanagement, and perhaps even sabotage.

The first bad sign was a Corps plan to "preserve" the riverbank where Kennewick Man was discovered by burying it beneath hundreds of tons of riprap. Corps spokesmen claimed that they needed to protect it from erosion. That attracted the attention of Rep. Doc Hastings, Republican of Washington, who had been following the case in the press and once lived within view of the Kennewick Man site. "That part of the river isn't even free-flowing — it's part of a lake behind a dam," he says. "There's no significant erosion." In an added wrinkle, the Corps' own research team advised against this "stabilization" effort.

Hastings amended an appropriations bill to prevent the Corps from moving forward. Similar language passed the Senate, and on March 31, 1998, the Corps said that it would not touch the site. The next day, however, Congress went out of session without reconciling the two bills. At the close of business, Hastings received word from Lt. Gen. Joe Ballard that the Corps would indeed go ahead with its dumping operation. Within two weeks, the Kennewick Man site and whatever secrets it still held lay beneath piles of rubble. Corps documents, including a Nov. 28, 1997, letter to the National Marine Fisheries Service, say that "concern on the part of the White House" led to the Corps' dubious erosion-control plan. Nobody in the Clinton administration, however, can explain the nature of this "concern."

Then, Kennewick Man himself started to disappear. Before he was transferred to Seattle's Burke Museum last fall, the Corps had been holding him in a poor state of storage. Kennewick Man was a real-life skeleton in a closet, and the Corps' own curation report noted that some fragments were even kept in a brown paper bag. Meanwhile, the Corps had secretly permitted Indians to perform religious ceremonies with the remains. Worse yet, in court documents filed last May the Corps admitted that a portion of the remains were "unintentionally turned over to the tribes." They were buried and no attempt has been made to recover them.

Finally, during an October inventory, the Smithsonian Institution's Douglas Owsley discovered more pieces missing. The two femur bones — valuable to researchers because they reveal height, age, and other important characteristics — were both originally found in six fragments, but only one of each is left. A furious Owsley calls the situation "a deliberate act of desecration." The Interior Department, which assumed responsibility for the case last year from the Corps, says it will conduct tests on Kennewick Man within the next few weeks, but the scientists now wonder how much information has been lost forever.

They are hoping Kennewick Man doesn't ultimately go the way of the so-called Buhl Woman, nearly 11,000 years old, whose remains were reburied by the Shoshone-Bannock tribe in Idaho without extensive study. According to scientists who had limited access to her bones, she may have displayed features similar to Kennewick Man. Then there's the case of Nevada's 9,400-year-old Spirit Cave Mummy, another ancient skeleton with Caucasoid-like features whose thorough examination has been blocked repeatedly by the Bureau of Land Management.

Remains that old are extremely rare, making each one a priceless discovery for the scientists who probe them. Because of fiascos like Kennewick Man, however, there may not be anybody to do the research in the future. Robson Bonnichsen of Oregon State University worries that graduate students won't want to study prehistoric America because of the legal hassles. "We're going to lose talented young people," he says. "Our ability to know what happened here long ago will vanish."

Maybe that's the point.

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