In 1996 on the banks of the Columbia River a 9,300-year old skeleton was found
that would become the impetus for the first legal assault on the Native American
Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). The Kennewick Man, as it came to be called, put to test whether the American Indian tribes of the area were culturally affiliated with the skeleton as they claim and their oral traditions affirm, or
whether the skeleton was affiliated with a people who are no longer present. At the
same time, another 9,000-year old skeleton was found in the storage facility of the
Nevada State Museum, where it had gone unnoticed for the past 50 years. Like the
Kennewick Man, the Spirit Cave Mummy also brought to fore the question of cultural affiliation between contemporary American Indian tribes of the western Great Basin and those people who resided in the area during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene.
Cultural anthropologist Peter N. Jones tackles these contentious questions in this
landmark study, Respect for the Ancestors. For the first time in a single work, the
question of cultural affiliation between the present-day American Indians of the
American West and the people of the distant past is examined using multiple lines
of evidence. Out of this comprehensive study, a picture of continuous cultural evolution and adaptation between the peoples of the ancient past and those of the present-day emerges from the evidence. Further, important implications for the field of anthropology are discussed as a result of this benchmark study.
Anyone working in the American West today will benefit from this book.
