Army Corps Unlikely To Ok Kennewick Man Dig Scientists Stuck In Catch 22 In Bid To Learn More About Ancient Bones

The Army Corps of Engineers will likely deny a request by scientists who want to excavate the site where the 9,300-year-old bones of Kennewick Man were discovered last year.

Washington State University anthropologist Gary Huckleberry in late August asked the Army Corps for permission to dig a 50- to 100-foot trench near where the bones were found.

The Army Corps owns the land and will probably deny the request, said spokesman Dutch Meier in Walla Walla.

The reason is the agency still hasn’t received a final report on archaeologist James Chatters’ preliminary observations of the skeleton.

“Until we have received that thing from (Chatters), it would be premature to determine whether any additional site exploration would be appropriate or even necessary,” Meier said.

Attorney Alan Schneider, an attorney for a group of scientists seeking to study the bones, said Chatters can’t complete the report because the corps took the bones before he was finished examining them.

The ancient bones are locked away at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, pending the outcome of a lawsuit by eight scientists who want to study the remains. Several area Indian tribes contend the bones are from an ancestor and they want them immediately reburied.

Chatters, who is not a party in the lawsuit, said the place where the bones were found must be studied.

“It’s something that needs to be done in every case like this,” Chatters said. “Right now we only know that it came from the beach. We don’t have any sense of its geologic position.”

The bones are believed to be the oldest human skeleton found in Washington or Oregon. Chatters’ initial observations indicated the skull was not related to any area Indian tribes, and had Caucasoid features.

That brought a storm of protest from Indian tribes and the bones have since been locked away.

A spokeswoman for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation said the tribes would not comment on the excavation request.

Huckleberry’s request noted the possibility of running into other human or cultural remains, and promised to avoid areas where they are found.

“One of the unusual questions here is, ‘How did Kennewick Man happen to get where he was?”’ said Schneider, the scientists’ attorney.

Scientists also are curious about why the bones were so well preserved after 90 centuries.