eople (Roger)2. And Chatters spotted a projectile point embedded in his right pelvis, a Cascade point, normally dated between 5,000 to 9,000 years before the present (Roger)3. It was clear that the point had been there while the individual was alive; the lesion in the bone had partially healed. Chatters sent off a bit of the bone to be radiocarbon dated. Imagine his astonishment when he received the radiocarbon date as over 9,000 years ago.
Chatters showed some of the bones to physical anthropologist Catherine J. MacMillan, a professor emeritus at Central Washington University. She had made many of the same observations as Chatter. CAT scans of the pelvis,
however, indicated that the projectile point might be of the Cascade phase, usually dated between ca. 9000 and 4500 B.P(Chatters)4. "I was stunned when I examined the pelvic bone and the projectile point associated with it," wrote MacMillan in an August 31 letter to the Benton County coroner, "so I decided to reexamine the skull. My opinion remained the same--Caucasian male."
Later that month, anthropologist Grover S. Krantz of Washington State University examined the bones. The skeleton "cannot be anatomically assigned to any existing tribe in the area, nor even to the western native American type in general," he wrote to Chatters on September 2. "It shows some traits that are more commonly encountered in material from the eastern United States or even of European origin, while certain other diagnostic traits cannot presently be determined."
Because of the skeleton's age, the Corps of Engineers determined that it was "of Native American ancestry" and therefore subject to NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. (The Native American Graves Protection and Re
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