Theories on the Earliest Colonists (Module 05)

	Principle 2: Diverse Interests - Descendant communities and the scientific community compete 
	    for and have vested interests in the nonrenewable resources of the past.

		Discussion - Anthropologists recognize that there are a multitude of "ways of knowing." This discussion 
		presents some of the scientific (i.e., archaeological) explanations of how and when the ancestors of the 
		American Indian came into the New World. At the same time, students are encouraged to be aware that 
		there are Native peoples who contest such explanations, preferring to offer their own accounts of how their 
		ancestors came to be here. Students come to realize that there are diverse interests in this regard, but that 
		it is not an "Indian versus archaeologist" explanation dichotomy is overly simplistic; that there is not "monolithic" 
		Indian explanation, but that as among archaeologists, even within the Indian community, a diversity of opinions 
		exist; that the question is not a trivial "science versus tradition" one. Discussions of "Kennewick Man" and 
		what it means to be Indian are brought up.