World History through Case Studies

Historical Skills in Practice

David Eaton

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350042629
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

This innovative textbook demystifies the subject of world history through a diverse range of case studies. Each chapter looks at an event, person, or place commonly included in comprehensive textbooks, from prehistory to the present and from across the globe – from the Kennewick Man to gladiators and modern-day soccer and globalization – and digs deeper, examining why historians disagree on the subject and why their debates remain relevant today. By taking the approach of 'unwrapping the textbook, ' David Eaton reveals how historians think, making it clear that the past is not nearly as tidy as most textbooks suggest. Provocative questions like whether ancient Greece was shaped by contact with Egypt provide an entry point into how history professors may sharply disagree on even basic narratives, and how historical interpretations can be influenced by contemporary concerns. By illuminating these historiographical debates, and linking them to key skills required by historians, World History through Case Studies shows how the study of history is relevant to a new generation of students and teachers.

1

Urge Overkill

In 1996, a pair of drunken students made one of the most important archaeological discoveries in American history. Stumbling in the shallows of the Columbia River, one of them grasped something solid: it was a skull. The police were called, and the remains were turned over to a forensic archaeologist named James Chatters for examination. Assuming they dated to the nineteenth century, he used skull morphology to identify the skeleton as Caucasoid. The discovery of an arrow lodged in the thigh bone seemed to confirm his suspicions. Perhaps an early settler had been killed in an Indian raid? Chatters was excited: “I thought we had a pioneer.”¹

But the arrow point was made of stone, and resembled the “Cascade” style that was normally found at much older sites. So Chatters sent a fragment of bone from the remains for carbon dating and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequencing.² The sample did not contain enough viable genetic material to conduct an analysis, but carbon dating revealed that the skeleton was approximately 9,200 years old. Responding to media questions about the find, Chatters claimed this long-deceased individual would have resembled Patrick Stewart, a famous white actor. This ignited wild speculation. Was it possible that the Americas had been first settled by whites, who were then exterminated by the ancestors of the modern Native Americans? No historians believed this theory, but there was no disputing that this skeleton offered a treasure trove of information. The research possibilities seemed endless.

These were complicated by the existence of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). Passed by Congress in 1990, this law stipulated that any Native American remains found on federal land had to be surrendered to a culturally affiliated tribe upon request. Less than a week after the radiocarbon dates were made public, five Native American groups demanded that the skeleton be turned over to them for proper burial. They argued that any 9,200-year-old human remains in Washington State had to be Native American. They also objected to Chatters’s decision to name this individual Kennewick Man, after the city in which he was found. The Native American groups preferred “oyt.pa.ma.na.tit.tite,” or the Ancient One. The US Army Corps of Engineers (ACE), which controlled the site where the skeleton was found, agreed to return the remains. Chatters then reached out to the academic community, seeking support for his efforts to deny the Native American claim. Eventually eight anthropologists filed a lawsuit to halt the repatriation proceedings. They claimed that Kennewick Man was not affiliated with any living Native American group, and thus the provisions of NAGPRA did not apply.

What followed was an eleven-year legal battle, a temporary resolution, and then a fascinating twist. Kennewick Man is an excellent starting point to examine how historians analyze and interpret evidence. For this chapter, we will start with a single archaeological find and look at how different groups interpreted its significance, the techniques used to uncover its mysteries, and examine how politics can work its way into scientific analysis.

The skull wars

One of the real challenges with regard to Kennewick Man was how to analyze and interpret the evidence about his origins. Historians were already deeply divided over how the Americas were settled. But the political context was even more problematic. The name “Kennewick Man” was coined by a white researcher, and the remains were held at white-run institutions. This tapped into a long history of whites describing the Native American past in racist and offensive ways. Now in 1996 Kennewick Man was being used to suggest that Native Americans were NOT the original inhabitants of the Americas. This political context is crucial to understanding how Kennewick Man became so controversial.

With regard to his origins, the first critical piece of evidence was the carbon dating done on the bone sample, but the same archaeological team also attempted to analyze Kennewick Man’s DNA. This can be done using mtDNA, which is located outside the cell nucleus and thus does not undergo recombination from generation to generation. Since it is passed from the mother to child more or less³ intact, it tells us a great deal about the maternal line far into the past. It can also be done using Y-DNA, which is similarly averse to recombination and is passed directly from father to son. In 1996, however, the age and mineralization of Kennewick Man’s bones meant there was insufficient genetic material to say anything one way or another about his origins.

In the absence of any conclusive evidence, sensationalistic theories became popular. Timothy Egan, writing for the New York Times, described Kennewick Man as “Caucasian,” a provocative statement supported only by Chatters’s initial comment that the skull had “Caucasoid features.” Craniology can be a helpful tool to determine the cultural affiliation of a particular skull, but only when the remains in question can be compared to an extensive database of similar examples. This is particularly problematic in relation to Kennewick Man because so few skulls have been found from a similar time period. This makes it difficult to know what skull sizes were normal for any Paleoindian population at that time. Craniology is even less accurate when making comparisons from past to present since skull shape changes due to diet, environment, and genetic drift.⁴ The facial reconstruction created by Chatters and Thomas McClelland did nothing to clarify the issue. By inserting individually layered muscles and tendons under the skin the face of Kennewick Man looked very “real,” but it was impossible to argue that he “looked Caucasian.” Depending on one’s perspective, one could just as easily see similarities to Native American heroes like Crazy Horse. Nonetheless, this highly subjective form of evidence was cited by Judge John Jelderks in his 2004 decision on Kennewick Man’s affiliation.⁵

It may seem innocuous to claim that a skull “looked Caucasian,” but this was an explosive assertion that tapped into well-established racial narratives. During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Native Americans were removed from their land because most whites believed they were too uncivilized to use it efficiently. This casually racist assertion was complicated by the existence of numerous large earthen mounds across these same areas, a sure sign of social complexity. Unwilling to accept that Native Americans were capable of building these monuments, nineteenth-century historians ascribed them to an earlier race of white Mound Builders. These whites, they argued, provided the dynamism necessary for monument building, but were exterminated by the ancestors of Native Americans when they arrived. As Meghan Howey writes, “If Indians had destroyed the white Mound Builders, white Americans were justified in killing Indians and removing them from their lands.”⁶ This narrative has long since been discredited in academic circles, but it persists among certain white supremacist groups. They interpreted Kennewick Man as evidence that an ancient race had populated the Americas before the Native Americans. It is indicative of the importance Kennewick Man held to them that the Asatru Folk Assembly, a California-based Norse religious group accused of racism, joined the lawsuit.⁷ They laid claim to the remains in the same way as the five Native American groups, further complicating an already rancorous legal situation.

It is important to emphasize that the belief Kennewick Man represented an early migration of whites was never shared by the anthropologists involved in the trial, but it is also easy to understand why many Native Americans were skeptical about the motives of researchers in general. After all, anthropology and archaeology had long, tortuous pasts of their own, pasts that were deeply imbued with forms of scientific racism. Samuel Morton, a famous nineteenth-century scientist from Philadelphia, claimed that his mathematical analysis of Native American skulls revealed that they not only possessed an inferior intellect, but were also so deficient in this regard that they could never be civilized. Darwin’s theories of evolution were also cited as proof that Native Americans were at an inferior stage of civilization to whites, and as a result doomed to extinction. This led to the belief that those still alive were on the verge of disappearing, and that they should be studied as “living fossils” before they vanished completely. Academics behaved in ways that suggest they shared popular prejudices about Native Americans. Franz Boas, for example, is honored today as “the Father of American anthropology,” and played a key role in discrediting forms of scientific racism based on skull shape. But in 1888 he also spent several months looting Native American graves in British Columbia. He later wrote, “It is most unpleasant work to steal bones from a grave, but what is the use, someone has to do it.”⁸ The looting of Indian graves and the desecration of their corpses was a path to academic fame in the late nineteenth century.

The looting reached such a feverish pitch that Congress passed the 1906 Antiquities Act. This made it illegal to excavate Indian archaeological sites without a permit from the federal government. And while this may have prevented “amateurs” from looting graves, it also excluded Native Americans from involvement in the process. With government officials and academic experts calling the shots, it was possible to get approval for excavations of tombs without ever consulting with living Native Americans. As Walter Hawk-Echo put it, “If you desecrate a white grave, you wind up sitting in prison. But desecrate an Indian grave, you get a PhD.”⁹

During the 1960s and 1970s Native American activists, influenced by their role in the civil rights movement, became increasingly critical of their exclusion from their own history. In 1971, the American Indian Movement (AIM) destroyed an archaeological site at Welch, Minnesota, including field notes and other research materials. Vine Deloria wrote impassioned polemics against the arrogance of academics, imploring anthropologists in particular to “get down from their thrones of authority and PURE research and begin helping Indian tribes instead of preying on them.”¹⁰ Some academics held the protestors in contempt, arguing that they were “citified” and just looking for jobs. Others were sympathetic to certain concerns (especially the desecration of graves) but worried about a backlash against scientific research in general.

The passing of NAGPRA in 1990 was the culmination of these tensions. They were evident in the odd coalition that ensured this legislation was enacted; left-wing environmentalists who believed Native Americans had a unique connection to the Earth, civil rights activists who sought equal treatment for all regardless of race, and right-wing culture warriors who perceived the issue through the lens of religious rights.¹¹ NAGPRA’s provisions were sweeping. They required all organizations receiving federal funding to return cultural artifacts to the appropriate Native American group. This process would take decades, but ultimately it was a great success. Many items looted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were identified, linked to an existing tribe, and then returned, often in moving ceremonies that reaffirmed to sovereignty of Native Americans over their past.

Figure 1.1 Members of the American Indian Movement occupy Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Wounded Knee, South Dakota, 1973. Courtesy of Bettman via Getty Images.

Native Americans also began to exert additional pressure on historians interpreting their past. Scholars generally agreed that the earliest Americans (or Paleoindians) arrived here from Asia via Beringia, a land bridge connecting Siberia and Alaska from about 30,000 to 11,000 years ago. However, they struggled to piece together how these Paleoindians managed to reach and settle the rest of the Americas and their theories could be quite speculative. A particular area of frustration for Native Americans was the overkill theory. It originated with the discovery of numerous spear points and mammoth bones at Blackwater Draw, a dry lake bed near Clovis, New Mexico, that had apparently been home to a hunting camp approximately 10,000 years ago.¹² Additional discoveries in the 1930s confirmed that similar hunting societies, called Clovis cultures after the original site, became common all across North America around this time. In 1964, C. Vance Haynes noted that these dates were quite close to those when many scientists believed an ice-free corridor briefly opened between the massive Laurentides and Cordillera ice sheets that isolated Beringia and Alaska from the rest of North America.¹³ Paul Martin and H. E. Wright extended this argument three years later by suggesting that when the new migrants reached the warmer plains further south, they rapidly hunted virtually every large mammal to extinction.¹⁴ This not only enabled rapid population growth, but also eliminated numerous species which may have been suitable for domestication. This version of the peopling of the Americas remains popular with many world historians, including Jared Diamond, Yuval Harari, and Neil MacGregor. To them, Kennewick Man was just one of many ancestors of these migrants.

But others were unconvinced by the overkill theory.¹⁵ They noted Haynes had merely demonstrated that a corridor opened just before the expansion of Clovis cultures, not that Clovis peoples had migrated along that route. And Native Americans were wary of the implications of this version of the past. Overkill became popular just as the environmentalist movement was reaching the mainstream, and it seemed extremely convenient as evidence mounted that whites had done irreparable harm to the environment in the process of conquering Native Americans (especially by slaughtering the buffalo in the nineteenth century), academics would now claim that the Clovis peoples were the original perpetrators of mass extinction. Just as the imagined extermination of the white Mound Builders was used to justify the real annihilation of modern Native Americans, the alleged environmental crimes of the Clovis peoples were being used to excuse the much more blatant excesses of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Americans.¹⁶

The popular alternative to the overkill theory was that Paleoindians arrived by migrating along the coast. Tom Dillehay argues that a number of key archaeological sites in the Americas predate the existence of the ice-free corridor. In the absence of a viable land route, this suggests that the earliest Paleoindians must have traveled along the Alaskan coast, an area that would have been rich with marine life even when the glaciers reached the sea.¹⁷ Initial examinations of Kennewick Man’s skull linked him to the Ainu, an indigenous peoples from East Asia, rather than Native Americans. This would fit neatly with Dillehay’s coastal migrations theory. Certain migrants from the Kurile Islands and Japan might have reached the Americas by sea, but probably struggled to adapt to this new environment and disappeared from the historical record.

But Kennewick Man revealed that even this alternative was problematic for Native Americans. Numerous smaller scale migrations might be a more realistic representation of the past, but this model also suggested it was possible that people had arrived in the Americas before the ancestors of today’s Native Americans, and then disappeared or di...