Bones of Contention

He was 45 or 50 years old when he died; a ripe age, considering the knocks life had handed him. He'd survived a rib-crushing blow to the chest, the crippling of his left arm, a murderous attack by an unknown enemy. But his death, when it came, was peaceful enough. Whether he died alone out on the flats near the great river or was interred there according to the ceremonies of his people, he was lucky in his resting place. His bones lay quiet for 9,000 circuits of the wheeling heavens, while 400 generations of his kind lived and bred and died in their turn. In the end, it was the river that broke their long sleep.

Each year, on the fourth Sunday in July, the inhabitants of the Pasco Basin assemble in their tens of thousands on the banks of the Columbia River for the grandest, if not most solemn, event of their ritual year: the running of the hydros. By late afternoon this year, with the last race run and the champion crowned, the crowds were streaming out of Kennewick's Columbia Park toward home and Sunday dinner, unaware that the day's excitements weren't yet over. Paddling in the river shallows between races, two young celebrants had come across a human skull.

The remains of forebears occupy a special place of reverence in many human cultures, and ours is no exception. Confronted with a human skull in a bucket, officers of the Kennewick law accompanied the youths to the scene of their discovery, found more bones strewn about in the river shallows, and passed word up through their superiors to Benton County coroner Floyd Johnson, the man in charge of death in those parts. Johnson's pre-elective experience as a police officer had acquainted him with death in most of its forms, but it had not qualified him to discern identity or date and cause of death from a huddle of bare bones. Fortunately, an adept in the arcane art of divining information from human remains was ready of hand, in the person of James C. Chatters, BA, MA, PhD.

Most doctors of anthropology have their labs on college campuses or in museums of the life sciences. Chatters' lab occupies the basement family room of a split-level home on the northern fringe of Richland, Washington, near the airport. There Chatters pursues the financially precarious career of a freelance scholar, earning his living as an expert consultant on the age, ecology, and history of sites of scientific interest from the shores of Puget Sound to the forests of Montana, as a consultant to federal, state, and Native American governments on the interpretation and proper handling of ancient human artifacts and remains.

As he sat down Monday morning to fulfill his mandate from the coroner, Chatters needed to answer two questions. The first—death by foul play or natural causes?—was the easiest to dispose of. Apart from some ribs, broken but re-fused, the only evidence of possible violence was a grayish discoloration in the left blade of the pelvis, smaller than a little-finger nail: possibly a bullet embedded in the bone, possibly a chip from an ill-timed rock blast, but in any case nothing likely to cause death. Conclusion, pending additional information: death from natural causes.

The second question, that of age, was harder to answer. The bones were clearly not "fresh": Minerals leached from the desert soil had stained them, here and there welding sand grains in contact with them into a patchy, recalcitrant crust. Just as surely, they had not been in the river long: Despite the current, even small bones of the hands and feet had not been washed far from the area where the skull, pelvis, and limb bones lay.

In the Tri-Cities area, human remains turn up in and near the Columbia fairly often. The 60-mile "Hanford Reach" between Priest Rapids Dam and the mouth of the Snake River is the last stretch of the Columbia not yet chopped and channeled by the busy hand of man, and every spring flood turns up evidence that Native Americans lived and worked and buried their dead along its banks in the centuries before the federal government fenced them off for its own deadly games.

Chatters had seen such remains often. Even at first glance, the bones deployed on his worktable looked different, the skull in particular. Typically, Native American skulls are roundish, not notably different in dimension ear to ear and nose to nape. Often they're somewhat flattened at the back, the result of being firmly secured to a backboard carrier during infancy, when the braincase is still soft and easily reshaped. The skull in Chatters' hand exhibited no flattening; and it was "dolichocephalic," significantly longer front to back than side to side.

By itself, long-headedness isn't terribly helpful in identifying the provenance of human remains, but there were other, subtler anomalies as well. In Native Americans, teeth tend to form a tight arc in the jawbone, often "recurving" in slightly toward the rear. The teeth in this skull, worn but well preserved, displayed a broad frontage and no recurvature, and lacked one of the most distinctive skeletal signs of Native American biological heritage: a broad, single root on a particular tooth in the upper jaw that in most strains of Homo sapiens sapiens exhibits two. Most subtle of all: Above the canine teeth of the skull and just below where the nostrils flare in life lay two small dimples in the bone of the upper jaw. These "canine fossae" aren't part of the Native American identi-kit, but they're all but omnipresent in persons of European ancestry.