Stirring Bones Of Contention Corps Wants To Bury Kennewick Man Site, Says Bones Missing

While the hunt for Kennewick Man’s missing leg bones continues, the Army Corps of Engineers says it’s nearly ready to bury the Columbia Park site where the bones were found in July 1996.

Both maneuvers have just about everyone involved with the controversial case pointing fingers, passing blame and bemoaning what could be the loss of a 9,200-year-old artifact.

“I don’t think that anyone wants the bones of people they care about mistreated or in hands where they don’t belong,” said Stephen McNallen, leader of the Asatru, a group based in Northern California that practices a native European religion.

This week’s flurry of activity is another bizarre turn in a case that has included finding extra bones and cedar leaves in the bone box, secret religious rites at the lab and theories that Kennewick Man looked like a Star Trek character.

“This is beginning to seem like a Monty Python movie,” said Alan Schneider, lawyer for scientists suing to study the bones. “The only thing we don’t have is a guy in the background clapping two coconuts together.”

But the corps says something else is missing: fragments of Kennewick Man’s femurs. The corps says inventory lists from Richland scientist Jim Chatters don’t match inventories done by their experts.

The U.S. Department of Justice is handling the investigation, which was announced Tuesday. Kennewick Man’s bones are being held at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland until a federal district court judge determines if American Indian tribes get to rebury them or if scientists get to study them first.

Floyd Johnson, Benton County coroner, said he’d been interviewed this week by federal lawyers trying to track the apparently missing bones. They asked him questions about how he packed and stored the bones in a Benton County Sheriff’s Department evidence locker in September 1996, about two months after the bones were found in Columbia Park.

Johnson said he oversaw Chatters, who was working as an assistant coroner on the case. If any bones were stolen, said Johnson, someone other than Chatters did it. “I have a complete faith in Dr. Chatters’ honesty.”

Michael Clinton, lawyer for the Asatru, turned blame on the corps. “This is just another piece of evidence that they are incompetent as far as handling the remains,” Clinton said. “I think it was just the corps’ attempt to lay the blame for their ineptness at Chatters’ doorstep.”

The Asatru are suing to have the bones studied because they think Kennewick Man could be a European who came to North America by boat or land bridge.

Chatters denied taking the bones and says they might not be missing at all. Although he hasn’t seen the corps inventory to know what fragments are missing, he suspects that because he glued together small bones, fewer pieces showed up on the inventory.

“It … reduced the number of objects, but doesn’t take anything away from the whole bone,” he said.

Corps spokesman Dutch Meier said, “Only he knows whether he glued pieces together. We will work with the Department of Justice to check various possibilities.”

Clinton and Schneider agree the corps announcement is a distraction from the central issues of the case, including the propriety of covering the site where the bones were found with rock, dirt and plants.

In a court brief, the corps announced work could start this week.

The corps announced in early January it planned to cover the site to decrease bank erosion from spring runoff. It’s thought that more erosion could unearth more bones.

A flurry of objections followed the announcement, but the agency “continues to believe the site protection plan … offers the best option for permanent site protection,” according to its court statement.

Scientists who want to study the bones say such work will make it costly or impossible to study the site further for clues about Kennewick Man’s life and times.

Immediate site protection is favored by the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, said Paul Minthorn, deputy director of natural resources for the tribe.

“It’s something we have been advocating for some time,” Minthorn said. “These kinds of sites are irreplaceable. You only get once chance to protect them from artifact hunters or the environment.”