Their Skeletons Speak: 
Kennewick Man and the Paleoamerican World

 “This detailed study of the dis­cov­ery and foren­sic eval­u­a­tion of the skele­ton dubbed ‘Ken­newick Man’ puts foren­sic TV shows to shame. From his acci­den­tal dis­cov­ery in 1996 through mul­ti­ple exam­i­na­tions by sci­en­tists with ever-improv­ing foren­sic tools and years of unex­pect­ed stor­age due to NAGPRA (Native Amer­i­can Graves Pro­tec­tion and Repa­ra­tion), an actu­al human being emerges from a time long gone, speak­ing to us through his bones. Enter­ing briefly into this long-term inves­ti­ga­tion are the far more shad­owy fig­ures of oth­er Paleoamericans—Spirit Cave Man, Arch Lake Woman, and the Horn Shel­ter Peo­ple. Scat­tered through­out the lucid, read­able text are tight­ly focused infor­ma­tion­al bits on such top­ics as CT scans, radio­car­bon dat­ing, and NAGPRA prac­tices. Sharp col­or pho­tos, some nice art­work, and good maps pro­vide clear visu­als of the bones them­selves, and the fea­tures that helped define the man and his life. A final facial recon­struc­tion leaves read­ers face-to-face with a real person—someone read­ers would rec­og­nize if they met him on the street (we know how tall he was, how much he weighed, that one arm was stronger than the oth­er, etc.). Walk­er reminds read­ers that it was not their relics, but liv­ing, breath­ing Pale­oamer­i­cans who first arrived, set­tled, lived, and died in the long-gone Amer­i­can past … Lucid writ­ing, fine sci­en­tif­ic expla­na­tions, and attrac­tive book­mak­ing make this a win­ner.” (School Library Jour­nal, starred review)

“Ken­newick Man, a skele­ton retrieved from the Colum­bia Riv­er in 1996, is the focal point of this study, an object les­son in how sci­en­tists can deduce amaz­ing amounts of infor­ma­tion from what may seem to the untu­tored view­er to be unim­pres­sive dings, cracks, and con­cre­tions in bone or the sim­plest posi­tion of a limb in its final rest­ing place. To demon­strate how far the field of pale­oamer­i­can stud­ies has come in the past cen­tu­ry, Walk­er and Owsley back­track to dis­cuss sev­er­al oth­er notable human remains that have altered the timetable of human set­tle­ment and place of ori­gin. There’s a lot of tech­ni­cal infor­ma­tion here, on top­ics such as iso­tope-based dat­ing tech­niques, tooth-shape com­par­i­son, advanced CT scans, sed­i­ment accre­tions, bone stress, wound recov­ery, and the like, but for seri­ous read­ers who delight in foren­sic inves­ti­ga­tion or per­haps con­sid­er a future in the field, this mate­r­i­al will push their under­stand­ing fur­ther than most titles on this sub­ject for youth read­er­ship. Source notes, bib­li­ogra­phies, and an index are includ­ed.” (The Bul­letin of the Cen­ter for Chil­dren’s Books)