Hum Nat (2011) 22:225–246 237 person, favored going forward with the Task Force” (Chernela 2009). This begs the question of why Chernela went forward with an investigation that followed the path of Tierney. Compare the words of Jane Hill, the former president of the AAA who chaired the Task Force. On April 15, 2002, after Hames resigned from the Task Force, Sarah Hrdy wrote to Jane Hill objecting to the situation and got this response from Hill: Burn this message. The book is just a piece of sleaze, that’s all there is to it (some cosmetic language will be used in the report, but we all agree on that). But I think the AAA had to do something because I really think that the future of work by anthropologists with indigenous peoples in Latin America—with a high potential to do good—was put seriously at risk by its accusations, and silence on the part of the AAA would have been interpreted as either assent or cowardice. Whether we’re doing the right thing will have to be judged by posterity. (Obtained via email from Hrdy, November 6, 2009; used with Hill’s permission from November 6, 2009; emphasis in original.) So, even though Tierney’s book was “just a piece of sleaze,” Chagnon, the late Neel’s legacy, the Chagnon and Neel families, and these two men’s colleagues were put through a major investigation to preserve the field for other American anthropologists? Why did Hill not say publicly what she said to Hrdy? Why not admit that Chagnon must be publicly strung up to save anthropology from “just a piece of sleaze”? Let me be clear: I understand the desire—and the duty—on the part of people like Lamphere, Peacock, and Hill to try to preserve the ability of American anthropologists to study in South America. But this way? Did the Peacock Commission really need to act like a grand jury, hastily issuing a sealed indictment, never pausing to really examine whether the evidence warranted an indictment, in spite of multiple authoritative and well-publicized denunciations of Tierney’s fakeries? I think not. Indeed, the Peacock Report should come as a shock to any scholar worth her salt. (A copy of it has recently been made available at the Hume online archive [Peacock et al. 2001].) Not only is it a mess in places in terms of reasoning and lacking basic formatting consideration, the report itself states that it was prepared so hastily that not all members of the Peacock Commission were able to approve the final version. One has to wonder, if the life’s work of your colleague is on the line, can you not take some extra time to produce a report you feel comfortable showing to the membership of your supposedly democratic scholarly organization? Apparently not if you think your job is utilitarian public relations damage control. In the event, the Peacock Commission specifically called for an “investigation” into alleged ethical transgressions. Inconveniently, the AAA’s bylaws did not allow for adjudication of ethics complaints. Thus, the El Dorado Task Force was charged with doing an “inquiry” instead (Gregor and Gross 2004:688). Here, “inquiry” versus “investigation” was a distinction without much difference. The Task Force’s report basically begins in earnest with a statement summarizing which ethical violations Chagnon was found to be guilty of (AAA 2002a; see vol. 1 sec. 2.2). The media advisory from the AAA alerts the press to the ethics findings (AAA 2002b). Not an ethics investigation? And consider some quantitative data: Excluding pages