Bones: Discovering the First Americans

Mima Kapches is head of the Department of Anthropology at the Royal
Ontario Museum.

Bones is not an academic treatise on the initial peopling of the
Americas. That is only one among many topics the author, a journalist,
has taken it upon herself to tackle. Her initial focus is the chaos
surrounding the management of archaeological collections, including
human remains, in Ontario. From there she moves on the controversy
surrounding “Kennewick Man” in Oregon and issues pertaining to other
very old skeletal collections in the Americas, from Canada to Brazil.
Dewar next reviews research from Alberta on the theories surrounding the
ice free corridor, and then incongruously visits her dying grandmother
in Saskatchewan. She even speculates that anthropologists studying human
remains in the Americas are dying because they study these remains
(shades of the “Mummy’s Curse!”).

With greater editorial direction, Dewar might have focused on the
politics of anthropology, including the fact that “Kennewick Man”
was a pawn in a very powerful game of American military and Native
politics, and that throughout the Americas powerful archaeologists
control access to research areas and the flow of information from
excavations, such as the initial rejection of Tom Dillehay’s work in
Monte Verde, South America. That said, Bones is a good read. One of
Dewar’s strengths is an ability to capture people’s foibles and
quirks. She should also be acknowledged for introducing anthropological
issues to the general public, something few anthropologists have done.