Across Atlantic Ice

by Dennis J. Stanford

  FIGURE 10.1.

  Projectile point made of chert from Ramah Bay, Labrador. The point was found on the upper strandline of the late glacial Champlain Sea in Vermont.

  In 1980 Loring published an analysis of more than thirty fluted points associated with a former shoreline of the Champlain Sea in present-day Vermont.34 He proposed that they had been used for hunting sea mammals in the near shore environments of the ancient sea. One of the points is made of a fine-grained blue-gray material that he originally thought was a variant of the local Cheshire quartzite (figure 10.1).

  Loring turned his attention to fieldwork in northern Labrador, where he became familiar with Ramah chert, which outcrops in the Torngat Mountains south of Hamilton Inlet. The Ramah chert reminded him of the fluted point he had thought was made of an “odd Cheshire quartzite.” His curiosity piqued by the potential implications of the Paleo-Indian use of this material, he arranged to re-examine the point. His visual comparison of the point with both Cheshire and Ramah stone confirmed that Ramah was likely the source of the raw material. Subsequent laser microprobe analyses confirmed his suspicions.

  The straight line distance from Ramah Bay to where the point was found is about 1,300 kilometers. However, following that course would have been impossible, since nearly the entire distance between the two areas was glaciated. Further, most of the Canadian coastline from the Torngat Mountains to the mouth of the St. Lawrence was also glaciated, with tongues of ice extending into the Atlantic Ocean. In fact, at the time the point was made, a boat would have been the only way to travel between the two areas. Moreover, the flintknapper or an intermediary would have had to skipper a vessel with the ability to sail into the wind against the iceberg-laden Labrador current and skirt marine glaciers along a storm-ridden coast with few if any places to make landfall. Following the shortest water route, the distance from Ramah to Vermont is more than 2,400 kilometers.

  The most likely scenario is that the Paleo-Americans who made the trip to the Ramah source left not from the Champlain Sea but from a closer port, perhaps in Nova Scotia, the last point of land before the open ocean. Even from that ice-bound remnant of land, the sea voyage would have been a round trip of 1,500 or so kilometers. We doubt that the expedition wintered on the source, as it was a barren, rocky area isolated by glaciers and sea ice for most of the year; hence we suspect that the entire expedition was accomplished during a single summer.

  The Ramah chert source is located on the seaward side of the Torngat Mountains, which stand skyward like a beacon towering above the glacier-covered landscape. Our question is, why make such a long and dangerous trip? Did the sailors know the chert was there? Was it a destination point learned from oral history? Was it part of their society’s origin story? Or were they simply out exploring along the margin of the ice and sea?

  Even those who still believe that Clovis people were the first Americans should not be too surprised that they knew about watercraft. After all, these were clever people who hunted and killed mammoths while exploring the breadth of North America. Boats would have been very useful, especially in the last activity. Moreover, by the time Clovis bands arrived on the Pacific shore of America, boats were in use by the people already living there. So if Clovis people didn’t know about boats when they arrived on the West Coast, they would have learned fast!

  In some areas of the southeastern United States an archaeological culture known as Dalton succeeded Clovis. Among the stone tools that Dalton flintknappers produced were formal woodworking adzes and distinctive fluted points. Residue studies of their adze blades reveal traces of charred wood, perhaps evidence of the alternating burning and adzing technique used to make board planks and hollow out large logs for dugout canoes.35 While this is not proof positive that Dalton people constructed dugouts, it is highly likely that they did. The remains of creatures such as swordfish in their middens leave little doubt that post-Dalton eastern Maritime Archaic peoples, who lived in the northeastern part of the United States and southeastern Canada around 5,000 years ago, fished far out to sea. This prehistoric deep-sea fishing tradition once again speaks to the well-established relationship between humans and oceans.

  Fifty-three prehistoric dugout canoes were found when Newnans Lake in Florida dried up during the drought of 2000.36 Of these, nearly 70 percent date to between 3,000 and 5,000 years of age. Although the canoes are not extremely old, their sheer number is a mind-boggling reflection of what remains to be found in the archaeological record and a sobering reminder of how much maritime archaeological evidence was lost when coastal sites were destroyed by rising sea levels at the end of the ice age.

  Some people have surmised that evidence of trans-oceanic migrations in the warm tropical waters of Indonesia 20,000 years before the Solutrean is irrelevant to the ice age North Atlantic.37 But this discounts the post-development cross-cultural spread of new and important ideas that can move across the globe with lightning speeds, especially when disseminated by sailors. Prehistoric people were clearly exploiting marine resources in colder Pacific waters 30,000 years ago. Unfortunately there is a hiatus in the archaeological record of Paleolithic maritime development between 11,000 and 26,000 years ago because the LGM shoreline sites were inundated when melting glacial ice raised the sea level to its current elevation. It is no coincidence that the first evidence of maritime development worldwide is from 10,000 years ago, give or take a thousand years. Was the sudden appearance of Bell Beaker people on the Baltic Coast an invasion from the south, as archaeologists have long thought? No, they were indigenous refugees retreating southward before rising sea levels. Only underwater archaeology can decipher the cultural events that took place on the continental shelves before the establishment of the modern mean sea level.

  ATLANTIC CROSSINGS

  Without the distractions of modern life prehistoric human actors studied their scenes, observing the interrelated flows that connected earth, sky, and water. These were the essence of life, to be pondered, to be understood, and to be used in harmony. It must have taken generations to fully appreciate the relationships between the sky and the water. Rising ocean swells and falling tides warn of approaching storms, fog banks reveal hiding ice leads, flocks of screeching birds indicate surface schools of fish. The wind at our back carried them home, and the sun, moon, and stars showed them the trails.

  When the climate warmed during the LGM and the polar front shifted northward, the annual formation of landfast ice along the Cantabrian coast became undependable. “A friend acting strangely” is the lament of Inuit elders referring to today’s similar weather patterns, as global warming makes their traditional knowledge irrelevant.38 As the ice edge shifted northward, fragmented and intermixed ice pans temporarily replaced it, but fewer and fewer basking seals likely appeared on the horizon as their habitat receded. New skills and technologies were required to cope with these changes of resource availability. Watercraft, perhaps already in use for hunting the late spring floes, would have to play a larger role as resource catchment areas moved farther out to sea. An alternative taken by many Solutrean people was to fall back on terrestrial creatures to provide the groceries.

  Another option was to move along with the ice edge as its annual arrival shifted northward along the Aquitaine-Celtic coastline. By the warmer phases of the LGM there may have been many bands of hunters scattered along the coast whose families moved out to sea along the ice edge, following the harp seals, great auks, and other animals in their annual migrations. There were eastern and western populations of these animals. The European pods and flocks fed on cod migrating along the ice edge toward Greenland. The western animals followed cod bred in the shallows of the Flemish Platform east of the Grand Banks in a combined summer migration that moved east-northeast, converging with their eastern cousins south of Greenland in mid-summer.

  Savvy Solutrean sailors would have known from the behavior of polar bears, as well as birds and foxes that scavenge seal kills made by the bears, that they would find land to
the west.39 They would have noted driftwood floating eastward in the sea current; perhaps the search for a wood source was itself a motivation to find the land to the west. Because of a polar atmospheric condition that produces a visual effect known as an Arctic mirage, hunters following the Canadian seals toward the Grand Banks could have seen the mountains of Newfoundland from 400 kilometers away. This phenomenon—also called superior mirage, Fata Morgana mirage, looming, or hillingar in Icelandic—is caused by a temperature inversion: when cold air is under warm air, light from distant objects is refracted in a downward arc, making it possible to see things that are far beyond the horizon.40 In their experiences navigating along the Celtic shelf, Solutrean sailors would have become well aware of looming and had probably spotted Iceland, with its plumes of volcanic ash, Greenland’s high ice cap, and Labrador’s tallest mountain.

  Once the westward passage was keyed to the mountains looming in the horizon, Solutrean explorers likely made a beeline toward land, knowing that ice of the year would soon be forming and that a winter camp on land would be a pleasant respite from living on the ice. Before arriving on the glaciated shores of Newfoundland they would have been diverted southwest along the ice edge until they encountered a chain of low islands connected by inland passages with lee bays. This island chain includes the Grand Banks, Sable Island, and Georges Bank, now submerged beneath the sea but then a safe haven for winter camping (figure 9.1). Here was a refuge uninhabited by other humans and with ice dynamics and seal populations that were familiar to these people, an ideal area to expand their range of exploitation.

  During the following summers and years, hunters would explore these new lands, most likely following the seals back to Europe during their annual migration east along the ice margin. They would have encountered old friends and other people working the ice edge, whom they might have lured with tales of rich resources to join them in the New World. Those who explored northward would discover the unglaciated Torngat Mountains and their treasure of Ramah chert. Southern expeditions would eventually make landfall on Georges Bank. Here were coveted stands of spruce trees, not to mention land animals, and the gateway to the interior lands of the New World.

  Eventually the roller coaster climate once again plunged into deep freeze, forcing the polar front back south and covering much of the North Atlantic in a thick mantle of ice. In North America, seals and their predators alike were forced southward into refugia along the eastern continental coast. Now the new south became an economic windfall, and these Solutrean people were no longer trapped on a narrow strip of land wedged between Europe’s mountain glaciers and Arctic seas. Indeed, vast lands opened up to the west, rivers that needed exploring teemed with salmon, and other new terrestrial resources augmented their maritime larder. With these new resources and unclaimed territory, their population grew and continued to expand southward. By the end of the LGM the descendants of those early mariners were well established at least as far south as the Susquehanna and Notaway Rivers of the mid-Atlantic region.

  Around 14,500 years ago global warming terminated the LGM, dramatically reducing glaciers and shifting the polar front northward. Worldwide, continental shelves were rapidly inundated with seawater, beginning sequences of local coastal environmental changes. In eastern North America the seawaters that breached the wide, flat continental shelf created vast tidal marshes along the coast. Rivers that cut wide valleys during the LGM filled beyond their capacity, creating estuaries, and some eventually became bays, like the Chesapeake. Early mid-Atlantic people, the descendants of the Solutrean hunters, witnessed dramatic changes to their environment and retreated upstream from the sea level rise. The Arctic sea mammals disappeared from the seascape, but they were replaced by other species. Mammoths and mastodon, horses and bison—animals whose images were long before painted on cave walls by Iberian ancestors replaced sea mammals and were once again the primary prey. Darts tipped with detachable foreshafts and end blades were found to be as lethal to terrestrial animals as they were to sea mammals (figure 7.5).

  The evidence from La Riera Cave supports the general outline of this model (see chapter 8). The formation of landfast ice likely began during the onset of the cold, dry climatic phase recorded in levels 4, 5, and 6. That climate, which presumably displaced people toward northern Spain, was also responsible for the establishment of sea mammal rookeries in the Bay of Biscay. This convergence acted as a balance, and the local people’s exploitation of new economic opportunities seems to have allowed for population expansion with minimal stress or hostilities. The nutrition gained from fatty oils and other nutrients derived from sea mammal consumption not only significantly aided survival during the coldest phases of the LGM but also ensured the reproductive success of the Solutrean people living in northern Spain.

  La Riera’s level 7 registers a clear shift in economic and residential strategies. Although there are plenty of possible explanations for the change, we suggest that the underlying cause was the onset of an LGM warming phase that rendered the annual landfast ice unpredictable. By level 8 there were marked changes in tool kits and site functions from those of levels 4–6. In fact, the previous occupants may have abandoned the area, since several new point styles were introduced into the cave debris. The change of use of La Riera Cave may well signal that some of its former occupants elected to follow the ice northward along the Aquitaine coast. The replacement population keyed in on the red deer as their primary food source.

  CONCLUSION

  This book has been a personal and professional journey for both of us. It has taken us from the mainstream to the position of attempting to broaden the search for evidence of the earliest colonists of North America beyond the northeast Asian unilineal model. This work began as a concept book in which we hoped to elucidate an old idea, elevating it to the level of theory. We arrived at this position from different directions but with a common experience, the investigation of Clovis sites and materials. Bruce came to the idea the way others have in the past century, seeing similarities between some Upper Paleolithic artifacts and Clovis artifacts while doing archaeology in southwestern Europe. Dennis came to it by recognizing the lack of Clovis precursor technologies while working in Alaska. Individually neither of us had strong enough evidence for challenging the theory of a Beringian origin for Clovis. Together, we think we have forged a solid basis for just that challenge.

  As we began to formulate our theory and to inventory the plethora of evidence that we would have to examine and evaluate, we realized that the book would have to be more than ideas. It would have to be based on sound information. This of course meant that we would have to do the research.

  That we have put this study together now, and that it seems to be of current interest, is no coincidence. Archaeology is in a period when new discoveries and re-evaluations of old work are being generated at an astounding rate. Even as we finished our manuscript, new models of the North Atlantic environment during the Last Glacial Maximum were being proposed. New and exciting work is being done in western Beringia, and Alaska is witnessing increased archaeological exploration. Some Beringian sites have been re-dated, such as Ushki, which has been taken out of the running as a possible Clovis progenitor. Recent work with fluted point sites has shown them to be younger than Clovis, and the lowest level at Swan Point, the oldest site yet found in Alaska, is clearly linked to the Late Dyuktai culture of western Beringia. At the same time, five sites—Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania, Cactus Hill in Virginia, Miles Point and Oyster Cove in Maryland, and the Cinmar discovery on the outer continental shelf near Chesapeake Bay—significantly predate Clovis and overlap with the Solutrean.

  The past decade has also seen a new openness and sharing of the archaeological information from the Russian Far East. Works previously unknown in the West have become available. Many have been translated into or summarized in English. We have gained access to not only the collections and reports but also our Russian counterparts, with whom we maintain active dialogue
s.

  Clovis archaeology has been enhanced by the discovery of new sites, especially those in the southeast and Texas and on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay, that have changed our views about the complexity of Clovis lifeways. The past couple of decades have also been a time of giant strides in the study of flaked stone technology. Understanding its intricacies has given us a whole new area of behavior to throw into the mix. The list of recent advances goes on to include new methods of tracking human genetic relationships, reconstructing ancient environments, finding evidence of early textiles in burned clay, and developing more reliable dating methods, to name but a few.

  But despite all that is new and exciting, we have been disappointed in some areas where little progress has been made in the past fifty years. Probably the greatest surprise to us has been how little new research has been done on the French Solutrean. The collections we examined were from the early decades of the twentieth century, with a couple of important exceptions. Even in recent literature, the discussions about the Solutrean are little different than they were when Bruce was working in southwestern France more than thirty years ago. We have relied heavily on the work of Spanish and American archaeologists in northern Spain and a team of international researchers in the Claise Valley of France. They have investigated and continue to investigate well-stratified sites, applying the most current methods.

  We recognize that the idea that Clovis may have had a European ancestor is not new, but in view of recent advances we disallow the conclusion that it has been adequately tested, and rejected. We hearken back to a statement by a pre-eminent southwestern archaeologist, T. Mitchell Prudden, who in the first decade of the twentieth century described the Pueblo archaeology of the Four Corners region as a “sucked orange” with nothing important left to discover.1 There are several generations of southwestern archaeologists, and a fascinated public, who would beg to differ!