Those skills are what the bones cannot preserve and what the record cannot directly document.

The technology of the boats and the knowledge of the navigators are invisible.

Only the consequence is visible: someone was there.

The End And The Beginning

The story of the Arlington Springs Man begins with Phil Orr in a canyon in 1959 and ends, for now, with the repatriation of the remains to the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Mission Indians in 2022.

In between, it passes through the evolution of an entire scientific discipline — from the conventional radiocarbon methods of the 1960s through the AMS revolution of the 1980s and 1990s to the XAD bone-protein purification methods that produced the reliable date.