Here is one for controversy. These guys find a skull in the river in Washington and turn it into some researchers who figure it is some pioneer. It comes with a complete skeleton and they find a stone arrowhead in the hip. This dates it back about a few hundred years right away. But doing radio carbon dating on the bone they find it to be 9,000 years old! The strange thing is, the skull seems to be of European type not Amerindian. (big nose narrow eye sockets, prominent jaw.. etc ...) So instead of an interesting anthropological discussion we get, you guessed it, politics. (not to mention fringe white power groups claiming we were here first after all.. I thought they didn't need proof?)
The local tribes want the skeletal remains buried with no more study. The US gov't wants the remains sent back to the local tribes etc.. Get this, a statement by the US gov't admins was that "we believe based on x,y, z factors blah blah ... that the skeleton is "overwhelmingly" ... "probably Asian" and as such is classified as native (whatever that means.. ). (The reconstruction looked more neolithic than Asian) This is their theory i.e. political theory ... and that is that. First time we have relied on Congress to come up with scientific theory that is definitive.
Now if nobody knew who this guy was in fact or even what "tribe" or burial place he belonged to I don't see any real way of establishing whether he should be buried by this group or that, or buried in a museum. We could extend this further to say where in a case where we don't know whether the skeleton is "European" or Indian and it is less than 400 years old.. who buries it then?
Poor Kennewick man. No doubt he would have preferred at one time that no one cared. But if he knew now people where looking into his past would be object? After all as a spirit he may think the investigator who looks him over is an honest man seeking knowledge as he once did. Here we presume that spirits are bigger guys than we are (or have less to worry about) and not prejudiced about little stuff like political issues.
The other thing is no matter who the skeleton belongs to, who is saying that a preservation and study of the man shows any lack of reverence to him or truth? Why are we curious in the first place? If we were not reverential about these men and animals we preserve from our forgotten past, would we so carefully study and preserve them? My idea of a person who did not care is someone who would kick the skull aside that he found and say, "old bones, so what, who cares about those people and their bones" ..!
I look upon it like donating organs. If you are willing to let someone have your liver after you die, would you not feel that some distant ancestor would have been equally broad minded about his bones after he passed on?
Archeaologists and anthroapologists may be as responsible as anyone for the new cultural relativism that has evened the playing field between groups, and may help redefine the outlook of many who would otherwise see too much of their supposed uber when they look ober dere.
EC<:-} |
