And the means by which human beings became specimens often were reprehensible. Thus they joined dodos, mammoths, and the other specimens of a vanishing world on display in nineteenth-century museums. In either case the verdict was that the Indians, or at least their cultures, were doomed.
They tended to view American Indians either as romantically noble paragons or as subhuman savages, depending upon the circumstances. Europeans and later Euro-Americans, like most humans, believed implicitly in the superiority of their own traditions, a belief buoyed by their political, organizational, and technological successes. To show us how we got to our present state of discomfort, Thomas starts with Columbus. The recent history of the remains of Kennewick man is put in context in a concise prologue, which anchors everything that follows, giving relevance to what might otherwise be read as dry soporific history. After all, the author, an eminent archaeologist, persuaded Vine Deloria, a leading American Indian polemicist, to write the book’s foreword.
Thus Skull Wars is an apt title even though the details of history reveal a much less polarized relationship between the two. Only a few have had both identities simultaneously, and there is a popular presumption that the two are natural enemies. He uses the incendiary Kennewick case, which is still in litigation, as his entrée into the intertwined history of archaeologists and Native Americans. One has to be either foolish or courageous to write such a book, and Thomas is no fool. Because it is all of these things it is also terrific ethnohistory. It is at once a history of American archaeology, a multiple ethnography in which the ethnographers are examined as closely as their subjects, a treatise on the nature of science, a discourse on current politics, and a prize-worthy example of modern journalism. Snow, Pennsylvania State Universityĭavid Hurst Thomas has written a superb book of many parts.
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