Tuesday, Dec. 28, 1999

No turning back on Kennewick Man

By Mike Lee Herald staff writer

Slowly, Jim Chatters pulled out the skulls. One by one, he put casts of some of the hemisphere's most ancient human remains on his workbench like a millennial rogues' gallery. Every drawer and shelf was littered with bones, casts and rocks or pictures of them.

"It's kind of interesting when you can get this band together," Chatters said. "What they are is a three-dimensional document."

His filing cabinets bulge with information gathered over his last year of globe-trotting after the oldest Americans. It's an obsession fueled by Kennewick Man, the 9,200-year-old bones Chatters inspected along the Columbia River more than three years ago.

They won't let go. And neither will he.

The Department of the Interior released its long-awaited report on Kennewick Man earlier this fall. It verified Chatters' assessment of the skeleton he was asked to examine in July 1996 as a potential murder victim.

The key point in the report - and the one that sparked a 3-year-old lawsuit over whether scientists get to study the bones - is that Kennewick Man's cranium doesn't match those typical of modern American Indians - which is what Chatters said soon after inspecting the bones.

He first wondered if it was a white settler's skeleton that perhaps was 150 years old, but a spear point in the man's hip prompted Chatters to send for a radiocarbon date, which came back at about 9,200 years old.

"It was really good to see corroboration of my observations," said Chatters, a forensic anthropologist who was asked to present his inventory of the remains at a large national conference on the peopling of the Americas in Santa Fe, N.M., in October.

"My only apprehension was that (the government team) would see everything I did. They didn't - they missed some things," he said.

Kennewick Man's features likely came from the Ainu, a near-extinct band in Japan that bears Caucasoid characteristics, or from Polynesians, the federal report said.

"I never said he was European," said Chatters, who blames much of the controversy following the discovery on what he calls "the absolute mess" the press made of the findings. "I said he had European-like features."

If he could do anything over, Chatters would prepare a carefully worded press statement about the remains, which he eventually turned over the Army Corps of Engineers.

Issues of origin and race are delicate and political - and perceptions of Chatters as a Eurocentric usurper of Indian heritage spread in the months following the discovery. It also made for lively times at college campuses where Chatters has lectured.

One critic is David Liberty of Hood River, Ore., who has bird-dogged Chatters for more than three years through a thick trail of paper generated by the discovery. Liberty hasn't even gained the support of his own tribe - but he's not alone in his perceptions of Chatters.

To an outsider, the depth of animosity Chatters sometimes incites is jarring, even given the often ego-driven and ideological world of academia. Some in that realm regard him as an upstart who's in over his head.

The U.S. Justice Department didn't charge Chatters with wrongdoing, but Liberty isn't letting go. He said he was working for the Umatillas in the summer of 1996 reburying remains unearthed by Tri-City construction projects and was at Columbia Park a few days before Kennewick Man was found.

"The impact of burying my ancestors and being at Columbia Park really put a burden on my shoulders for Kennewick Man," he said. "There is no way I can turn my back on him."

For all the controversy, Chatters also has used the press to his own advantage, doing hundreds of interviews over the last three years and appearing as a central figure in major national magazines and news shows.

He's toured widely on the lecture circuit - including recent forums in Calgary, Canada, and at the prestigious Leakey Foundation in San Francisco.

And he's written plenty about Kennewick Man, gaining wealth in the currency of scientific advancement.

Chatters, a senior research scientist, left Battelle in 1993 as manager of the lab's cultural resources program and started his own business called Applied Paleoscience out of his north Richland home.

His focus had been long-term changes in the environment; for instance, understanding the ebb and flow of salmon populations over the ages.

But everything changed with Kennewick Man. For the last year, Chatters has been flying across the hemisphere inspecting many well-preserved early remains - including the Brown's Valley skeleton, the Spirit Cave Mummy and Minnesota Woman - and trying to build a thesis about their relationships. He's even got casts from Brazil, which he made during a short stint there earlier this year.

Speculation in the archaeological community about those possibilities is driving much of the interest in Kennewick Man.

"I want to see how he fits into the picture," said Chatters, who is considering a book on Kennewick Man and other ancient remains. "You have to have a fresh look at things or you are not going to see it."

The conundrum is Kennewick Man and many early skeletons fall well outside norms for any modern peoples, according to analysis using a massive database of ancient skeleton cranial measurements. "All you can really do is take people of the present and look to see if you can establish ties to peoples of the past," Chatters said.

During that attempt, the Richland scientist has attracted support from contemporaries. "It has brought me into contact with a lot of people I didn't know before," said Chatters, whose associates now include renowned scientists who filed the lawsuit based on his findings.

Still, he added, "I am not one of the top movers and shakers and probably never will be because I am not at a university."

Given all that's happened, Chatters paused when asked recently if he'd go through it all again if he had the choice.

"Would I go through all this again?" he repeated.

"Once is enough."