Poking Holes in Comfortable History

By PLS
Excavation is a dirty business in more ways than one. It turns up stuff that can change the history that underpins a power structure. When shards speak, historians listen and politicians tremble. For instance, worries over the potential for validating Israeli claims to Jerusalem were no doubt revived last month when excavations outside the Temple Mount provoked stone- and angry word-throwing by Muslims who don’t like the underpinnings of the Al Aqsa mosque to be tampered with.

Let’s come closer to (my) home in Santa Fe. What you see here is a big auger that’s been drilling long skinny holes for pilings that shore up the walls of a huge hole that will be the parking garage under a new convention center in the middle of the city (a strong contender for America’s oldest). Digging this largely accomplished hole has taken more than a year because every bit of dirt had to be sifted for archaeological traces of previous occupation–Native American, Spanish or territorial American. What’s found in any dig tells us something about history—and around here, as in many places, history is hotly contested because the living are fighting for control of the land they hope their ancestors were buried in or at least left identifiable debris in. Brass buttons. Pottery shards. Arrowheads. Seeds. Anything helps to build an argument.

The worst fear of excavators in Santa Fe is finding Indian bones. The uncovering of skeletal remains can delay a project while methods of disposal are debated. It can even bring a project to a halt. The haggling can take months—or more. People aren’t junk, so human remains should be treated with respect, however difficult it may be to agree on what “respect” entails. But must old bones stay where they are, or can they be respectfully interred elsewhere? Imagine an absurd worst case scenario: were it determined that the whole of Santa Fe is built on an excavation-certified old village and/or graveyard, to what extent can the existence of the city itself be justified? Which should go? The city or the bones?

The Kennewick Man Conundrum

A dramatic instance of the fear of what bones may reveal began on a flooded river bank in Washington state in 1996. Initial examination of the remains that had been washed up not only suggested that the skeleton was amazingly ancient (5000-9500 years ancient it’s now thought) but that this extraordinary individual might not be mongoloid. He was perhaps caucasoid. Like—oh no!—white people. So maybe native Americans wouldn't be able to say this land was always all theirs. Wow!

Naturally scientists wanted to apply every possible genetic test to any DNA that could be extracted from these remains, but local tribes strongly resisted. Many of their arguments were spiritual and cultural, but one can imagine that some of the forboding had nothing to do with honoring the old ones or fearing retribution by ancestral spirits. If a Caucasian was indeed resident in the so-called New World as early as this (or even just traveling through), the pre-history of the western hemisphere gets considerably more complex.

Perhaps the Indian position would have prevailed in the courts had there been unity among local tribal leaders, but five northwestern tribes claimed the remains, and in the end these poor bones were indeed tested to death (so to speak). The results were intriguing and anything but simple. Some of the findings were consistent with Polynesian or Ainu origins, which at least muted the white man/red man aspect of the initial battle of the bones.

At any rate, since science couldn’t prove the poor fellow was more Nez Perce than Umatilla or anything else, he remains the property of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and resides at the Burke Museum of Natural History in Seattle. According the museum website, race is now considered to be a suspect category. It’s DNA, not skin color, that tells us who we are, physically.

Mummies on the Silk Route

Another embarrassing collection of bones turned up in Chinese territory along the fabled silk route. Startlingly well preserved Caucasoid mummies of people who lived nearly 4000 years ago were unearthed where only proto-Chinese should have been buried. For a long time Chinese authorities kept this evidence of an anomalous ancient population well cared for and well hidden. Then the news leaked out and eventually Western anthropologists were allowed to examine the mummies and their accouterments. In this case, DNA testing wasn’t required to establish Caucasian origin. These mummies are so well preserved one almost expects them to sit up, rub their eyes and say, “Gee, that was a long sleep!” The woman in the photo I’ve reproduced lived around 1800 BCE and she’s still wearing her night cap, so to speak.

Not only do these people resemble modern Europeans, wall paintings of their descendants show warriors with red hair and blue eyes—and the well preserved clothing in which they were buried often exhibits patterns identical to modern European textiles—plaids and twills. Think Scottish tartans, for example. It seems that the Celtic peoples didn’t only head West during their grand migration from the quasi-mythic Indo-European heartland. They went East as well. Further proof of the mummies’ identity comes from archaic non-Chinese words embedded in northern Chinese dialects even today. Finally, an analysis of available cognates indicates that these people spoke a tongue belonging within the Indo-European family of languages.

Question: had these incredible mummies been markedly Mongoloid, would Chinese authorities have kept so mum about them? I doubt it. If this story intrigues you, read the fascinating The Mummies of Ürümchi by Elizabeth Wayland Barber.

The Mutable Y Chromosome

Race isn’t the only myth that modern genetics challenges. Culture and religion are also under siege. A recent story in the New York Times makes explicit the anxieties that have been aroused by the distribution of mutations on the Y chromosome in modern human populations. These mutations allow us to trace the pattern of migration taken by our homo sapiens ancestors as they left Africa and spread around the world. The general picture is clear. We are all children of Africa. But there are details which remain to be filled in, so anthropologists have sought DNA samples from many populations, including Native Americans.

However, almost every federally recognized tribe in North America has refused to participate in this DNA investigation.

“What the scientists are trying to prove is that we’re the same as the Pilgrims except we came over several thousands years before,” said Maurice Foxx, chairman of the Massachusetts Commission on Indian Affairs and a member of the Mashpee Wampanoag. “Why should we want to give them that?” In short, science be damned. “What’s the benefit to the tribe?”

Politics! And more. Just as many Christians cling desperately to the belief that the Biblical creation story is literal fact, many native American tribes have creation stories that are undercut by the Y chromosome migration theory. DNA samples taken from the Havasupai tribe for a diabetes study “were later used [maybe not entirely ethically] to link the tribe’s ancestors to Asia. To the tribe members raised to believe the Grand Canyon is humanity’s birthplace, the suggestion that their own DNA says otherwise was deeply disturbing.” And the Wiki entry on Kennewick man suggests the same.

The Umatilla have argued that their origin beliefs say that their people have been present on their historical territory since the dawn of time, so a government holding that Kennewick Man is not Native American is tantamount to the government's rejection of their beliefs.

There’s short term political, social and economic advantage to pretending that “racial” or cultural boxes have some immutable reality that must (or can) be protected in a changeless pure form. But modern genetic science is proving, whether we like it or not, that we humans aren’t significantly different from one another--- and that our dispersal over the globe isn't a clear cut matter of timeless territoriality by totally distinct peoples.

Human history clearly suggests that building walls to keep some people in and others out is an ultimately futile operation.

Picture credits: (1) PLS; (2) BBC; (3) Mummies of Urumchi.

Comments

[Carmen Grayson]

What a satisfying post. Combined with the AAAS site DNA stories (Eurekalert) and this little summary, come helpful insights for history-lovers untrained in genetics.

[Donald]

A great post. As always on the Kennewick Man story, there are details that are hard to get into a summary. The skeletal material that was "tested to death" was never actually turned over to the federal government. The private individuals that found the bones took them to a local archaeologist, Jim Chatters, who kept some of them and sided with the more hard-nosed scientists against the Indian tribes. There were archaeologists on both sides of this issue, and there are still a lot of hard feelings about it. I believe that Chatters behaved unprofessionally throughout.