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By Root 1854 0

knew a guy who also had an eagle on the back of his jean jacket, but who, unlike Denny, could make the eagle flex its wings by moving his shoulders in a certain way that Denny admired; that most Indians hate the Internal Revenue Service even more than they hate the Bureau of Indian Affairs, because they believe that they paid taxes for all time when the federal government forced them to give up two billion acres of land; and that if I really wanted to see a crime against nature, I should visit the Quinault reservation, on the Olympic Peninsula, which had been plundered by loggers in the 1950s (I did, a few weeks afterward; Denny was right). He also explained to me why he and some other Indians had it in for archaeologists. The causes were many, in his telling, but two of them seemed especially pertinent: Aleš Hrdlička and the overkill hypothesis.

Hrdlička’s zeal for completeness made him accumulate as many Indian skeletons as possible. Unfortunately, his fascination with the bones of old Indians was not matched by an equivalent interest in the sensibilities of living Native Americans. Both his zeal and his indifference were gaudily on display on Kodiak Island, Alaska, where he exhumed about a thousand skeletons between 1932 and 1936 at Larsen Bay, a village of Alutiiq Indians. Many of the dead were two thousand years old, but some were ripped from recent Alutiiq graves, and a few were not Alutiiq at all—the wife of a local salmon-cannery manager, eager to help Science, shipped Hrdlička the cadavers of Chinese workers when they died.

Larsen Bay was the single most productive excavation of Hrdlička’s long career. Confronted with what he viewed as an intellectual treasure trove, this precise, meticulous, formal man was to all appearances overcome by enthusiasm and scholarly greed. In his pop-eyed hurry to pull bones out of the ground, he tore open the site with a bulldozer and didn’t bother taking notes, sketching maps, or executing profile drawings. Without documentation, Hrdlička was unable afterward to make head or tail of the houses, storage pits, hearths, and burial wells he uncovered. He pored through old Russian and American accounts of the area to find answers, but he never asked the people in Larsen Bay about their own culture. Perhaps his failure to approach the Alutiiq was a good thing. Hrdlička’s excavation, made without their permission, so angered them that they were still steaming when Denny was there on a salmon boat fifty years later. (In 1991 the Smithsonian gave back the skeletons, which the townspeople reburied.)

Overkill was part of the same mindset, Denny told me. As the environmental movement gathered steam in the 1960s, he said, white people had discovered that Indians were better stewards of the land. Indigenous peoples were superior to them—horrors! The archies—that was what Denny called archaeologists—had to race in and rescue Caucasian self-esteem. Which they did with the ridiculous conceit that the Indians had been the authors of an ecological mega-disaster. Typical, Denny thought. In his view, archaeologists’ main function was to make white people feel good about themselves—an opinion that archaeologists have learned, to their cost, is not Denny’s alone.

“Archaeologists are trapped in their own prejudices,” Vine Deloria Jr., the Colorado political scientist, told me. The Berkeley geographer Carl Sauer first brought up overkill in the 1930s, he said. “It was immediately knocked down, because a lot of shellfish and little mammals also went extinct, and these mythical Pleistocene hit men wouldn’t have wiped them out, too. But the supposedly objective scientific establishment likes the picture of Indians as ecological serial killers too much to let go of it.”

To Deloria’s way of thinking, not only overkill but the entire Clovis-first theory is a theoretical Rube Goldberg device. “There’s this perfect moment when the ice-free corridor magically appears just before the land bridge is covered by water,” he said. “And the paleo-Indians, who are doing fine in Siberia, suddenly decide to sprint over