Speaker: ancient skeleton led to new view of human settlement in America

James C. Chatters, a forensic archaeologist and paleoecologist whose life and career changed 10 years ago when the 9,400-year-old “Kennewick Man” was discovered, warned anthropology students here last week that “you never know where your career will take you.”

Chatters was 45 when he was called in to investigate the discovery of a human skeleton on a bank of the Columbia River in Kennewick, Wash. He was the first to study the bones, which were later radiocarbon dated.

The skeleton is one of the oldest found in North America, and Chatters said it has caused him to change his views about how America was settled.

Scientific examination of it was interrupted, however, when the Army Corps of Engineers seized it on behalf of Native American tribes, who wanted to rebury the remains as an ancestor.

Nearly a decade of legal battles ensued, with eight anthropologists (Chatters was not among them) challenging the impoundment. Last summer, after an appeals court ruled that the remains were not related to the Native Americans, scientists were again allowed to examine Kennewick Man.

Chatters, who has written a book about the finding, Ancient Encounters: Kennewick Man and the First Americans, came to Connecticut recently to give a talk sponsored by the Friends of the Office of State Archaeology and the Connecticut State Museum of Natural History and Connecticut Archaeology Center at UConn. Accompanied by state archaeologist Nick Bellantoni, he met with anthropology department students and faculty for lunch.

He told them that the aftermath of the Kennewick Man discovery has been “a hard thing,” with the press portraying him as a racist and an Indian tribe with which he once had a good relationship blacklisting him. One of the first findings about the skeleton was that it had Caucasian features.

Chatters again conducted a study on the remains in July — a CAT scan of the skull and pelvis – and has plans to scan as many of the bones as possible.