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Clovis defenders remained as adamant as their critics. Regarding Monte Verde, Haynes told me, “My comment is, where are the photographs of these ‘artifacts’ when they were in place? If you’re trying to prove that site to other archaeologists and you find an unequivocal stone artifact in situ in a site that’s twelve thousand years old, everyone should run over with a camera. It wasn’t until after we brought this up that they dug up some photographs. And they were fuzzy! I really became a doubter then.” Such putative pre-Clovis sites are “background radiation,” he said. “I’m convinced that a hundred years from now there will still be these ‘pre-Clovis’ sites, and this will go on ad infinitum.”
“Some of our colleagues seem to have gone seriously wrong,” lamented Thomas F. Lynch of Texas A&M in the Review of Archaeology in 2001. Proudly claiming that he had helped “blow the whistle” on other Clovis challengers, Lynch described the gathering support for pre-Clovis candidates as a manifestation of “political correctness.” He predicted that Monte Verde would eventually “fade away.”
For better or worse, most archaeologists with whom I have spoken act as if the Clovis-first model were wrong, while still accepting that it might be correct. Truly ardent Clovisites, like Low Counters, are “in a definite minority now,” according to Michael Crawford, a University of Kansas anthropologist—a conclusion that Fiedel, Haynes, and other skeptics ruefully echo. Following Monte Verde, at least three other pre-Clovis sites gained acceptance, though each continued to have its detractors.
The ultimate demise of the Clovis dogma is inevitable, David Henige, author of Numbers from Nowhere, told me. “Archaeologists are always dating something to five thousand years ago and then saying that this must be the first time it occurred because they haven’t found any earlier examples. And then, incredibly, they defend this idea to the death. It’s logically indefensible.” Clovis-first, he said, is “a classic example of arguing from silence. Even in archaeology, which isn’t exactly rocket science”—he chuckled—“there’s only so long you can get away with it.”
HUGGING THE SHORE
Since Holmes and Hrdlička, archaeologists and anthropologists have tried to separate themselves from Abbott’s modern descendants: the mob of sweaty-palmed archaeology buffs who consume books about Atlantis and run Web sites about aliens in Peru and medieval Welsh in Iowa. The consensus around Clovis helped beat them back, but the confused back-and-forth ushered in by the genetic studies has provided a new opening. Unable to repel the quacks with a clear theory of their own, archaeologists and anthropologists found themselves enveloped in a cloud of speculation.
The most notorious recent example of this phenomenon is surely Kennewick Man. A 9,400-year-old skeleton that turned up near Kennewick, Washington, in 1997, Kennewick Man became a center of controversy when an early reconstruction of the skeleton’s face suggested that it had Caucasian features (or, more precisely, “Caucasoid” features). The reconstruction, published in newspapers and magazines around the world, elicited assertions that Indians had European ancestry. Archaeologists and Indian activists, for once united, scoffed at this notion. Indian and European mitochondrial DNA are strikingly different. How could Indians descend from Europeans if they did not inherit their genetic makeup?
Yet, as Fiedel conceded to me, the collapse of the Clovis consensus means that archaeologists must consider unorthodox possibilities, including that some other people preceded the ancestors of today’s Indians into the Americas. Numerous candidates exist for these prepaleo-Indians, among them the Lagoa Santa people, whose skulls more resemble the skulls of Australian aborigines than those of Native Americans. Skull gauging is, at best, an inexact science, and most archaeologists have dismissed the notion of an Australian role in American prehistory. But in the fall of 2003 an article in the journal Nature about ancient skulls in Baja California revived this possibility. Aborigines, in one scenario, may have traveled from Australia to Tierra del Fuego via Antarctica. Or else there was a single ancestral population split, with the ancestors of Australians heading in one direction and the ancestors of Indians heading in another. In either version of the scenario the ancestors of today’s Indians crossed the Bering Strait to find the Americas already settled by Australians. Migration across Antarctica!—exactly the sort of extravagant notion that the whitecoats sought to consign to the historical dustbin. Now they may all be back. If Clovis was not first, the archaeology of the Americas is wide open, a prospect variously feared and welcomed. “Anything goes now, apparently,” Fiedel told me. “The lunatics have taken over the asylum.”
Despite such misgivings, one can see, squinting a little, the outlines of an emerging theory. In the last few years researchers have focused more and more on a proposal linked to the name of Knut Fladmark, an archaeologist at Simon Fraser University, in British Columbia. As a graduate student in the mid-1970s, Fladmark was so surprised to learn of the paucity of evidence for the ice-free corridor that he wondered if paleo-Indians had instead gone down the Pacific coast by boat. After all, aborigines had reached Australia by boat tens of thousands of years ago. Nonetheless, most archaeologists pooh-poohed the idea, because there was no substantiation for it.
By examining pollen in the ocean sediments near the Pacific coastline, researchers have recently learned that even in the depths of the Ice Age warm southern currents created temperate refuges along the shore—islands of trees and grass in a landscape of ice. Hopping from refuge to refuge, paleo-Indians could have made their way down the coast at any time in the last forty thousand years. “Even primitive boats,” Fladmark has written, “could traverse the entire Pacific coast of North and South America in less than 10–15 years.”
Evidence for the coastal route is sparse, not least because archaeologists have never looked for paleo-Indian settlements on the shoreline. Future searches will be difficult: thousands of years ago, the melting glaciers raised the seas, inundating coastal settlements, if they existed. Coastal-route proponents like to point out that Clovis-firsters believed in the existence of the ice-free corridor without much supporting data. The coastal route has equally little empirical backing, but in their view makes more sense. Most important, the image of a seagoing people fits into a general rethinking of paleo-Indian life.
Because the first-discovered Clovis site was a hunting camp, archaeologists have usually assumed that Clovis society was focused on hunting. Indeed, Clovisites were thought to have entered the ice-free corridor by pursuing game—“follow the reindeer,” as skeptics refer to this scheme. In contemporary hunting and gathering societies, anthropologists have learned, gathering by women usually supplies most of the daily diet. The meat provided by male hunters is a kind of luxury, a special treat for a binge and celebration, the Pleistocene equivalent of a giant box of Toblerone. Compared to its brethren around the world, Clovis society, with its putative focus on massive, exterminating hunts, would have been an anomaly. A coastal route helps bring the paleo-Indians back in line.
Then as now, the Northwest Coast, thick with fruit and fruits de mer, was a gatherer’s paradise: wild strawberries, wild blueberries, soapberries, huckleberries, thimbleberries, salmonberries; clams, cockles, mussels, oysters; flounder, hake, salmon. (To get breakfast, the local saying says, take a walk in the forest; to get dinner, wait for low tide.) Perhaps the smell of candlefish fat, ubiquitous in later Northwest Coast Indian cookery, even then hovered over the first visitors’ fires. One can guess that their boats were not made of wood, because they had long lived on the almost treeless plains of Beringia. Instead they may have been made from animal skin, a readily available resource; though soft beneath the foot, fragile-looking hide vessels have been known to traverse hundreds of miles of open water. A visitor to the Northwest twenty thousand years ago might have seen such a craft bobbing over the waves like a long, floating balloon, ten or twenty men lining its sides, chasing minke whales with stone-tipped spears.
All of this is speculative, to say the least, and may well be wrong. Next year
geologists may decide the ice-free corridor was passable, after all. Or more hunting sites could turn up. What seems unlikely to be undone is the awareness that Native Americans may have been in the Americas for twenty thousand or even thirty thousand years. Given that the Ice Age made Europe north of the Loire Valley uninhabitable until some eighteen thousand years ago, the Western Hemisphere should perhaps no longer be described as the “New World.” Britain, home of my ancestor Billington, was empty until about 12,500 B.C., because it was still covered by glaciers. If Monte Verde is correct, as most believe, people were thriving from Alaska to Chile while much of northern Europe was still empty of mankind and its works.
Cotton (or Anchovies) and Maize
(Tales of Two Civilizations, Part I)
BIG BUILDING
“Would you like to hold a four-thousand-year-old textile?”
Without waiting for my assent, Jonathan Haas slid the fabric into my hand. It was about two inches on a side, little more than a scrap, and aged to the color of last season’s straw. To my eye, it seemed carefully made: a warp of fine cotton threads, ten or fifteen to the inch, crossed at half-inch intervals by paired weft threads in a basket-like pattern known as “weft-twining.” Haas, an archaeologist at the Field Museum of Natural History, in Chicago, had plucked the fabric from the earth minutes before, two graduate students immortalizing the operation with digital cameras. Thousands of years ago it had been handled or worn by other people; bits of their DNA might still adhere to the fibers. (If so, I was contaminating it.) To be the first person in two hundred generations to see or touch an object—to reach across time with eye and hand—is one of the reasons why people like Haas spend their days sifting through ancient soil.
Ordinarily, archaeologists label and store such artifacts immediately. But just as Haas removed the cloth from the ground, he was distracted by the excited shouts of a group of workers a hundred feet away. Haas clambered over the rough ground to take a look. Poking through the earth at the workers’ feet was something that resembled the edge of a dinner plate. Haas kneeled to inspect it. When he came back to his feet, his eyebrows had shot up like a pair of circumflexes. “What’s this doing here?” Haas asked the air. “It looks like unfired ceramics.” The site was supposed to be very old—well before the local invention of pottery. “Better have a look at it.” Reaching for the trowel in his back pocket, he had realized that the textile was still in his hand, and asked if I would mind hanging on to it.
“Would you like to hold a four-thousand-year-old textile?”
Haas was standing midway up a sixty-foot hummock in a valley along the central coast of Peru, about 130 miles north of Lima. The valley was desert, withered and yellow-gray except for the crooked band of green that marked the course of the Fortaleza River. In the late 1990s Haas and Winifred Creamer—his wife and co-teamleader, an archaeologist at Northern Illinois University—assisted a research team led by a Peruvian archaeologist, Ruth Shady Solis, that had spent years investigating an ancient ceremonial center fifteen miles to the south. By carbon-dating some of Shady’s material, they helped establish that the Peruvians had uncovered the oldest known city in the Americas.
Afterward, Haas, Creamer, and a Peruvian archaeologist, Álvaro Ruiz, drove a four-by-four through the back roads of the area between that excavation and the Fortaleza Valley. Called the Norte Chico, the region is studded with isolated knolls, twenty to fifty feet high and as much as two hundred feet long. These mounds had been flagged as possible ruins for nearly a century but never excavated because they seemed to have no valuable gold or ceramic objects. The Pan-American Highway had been laid right through them without causing an outcry. Haas, Creamer, and Ruiz had decided to drive through the area because they suspected that the mounds might be more interesting and numerous than had been realized. Ultimately, the three researchers determined that the Norte Chico held the remains of at least twenty-five cities, all of which they wanted to explore. On the day I visited, the team was unburying a city they called Huaricanga, after a nearby hamlet. Here the Pan-American Highway had, as it turned out, sliced through some of the oldest public architecture anywhere on earth.
“You mean to tell me there’s no dental picks at all?” Haas was saying. “All these people and not one has a dental pick? I’d really like a pick for this thing.”
“Nobody can find one,” Creamer said. She left to supervise the second part of the dig, two hundred yards away, on the other side of the highway.
Haas sighed, pushed back his wide-brimmed straw hat, and leaned into the dirt with jackknife and paintbrush. Despite the low clouds—an almost featureless carpet a thousand feet above our heads—perspiration stippled his temples. With Ruiz documenting the work with a digital camera, Haas silently plucked out dead insects, bits of leaf, and lengths of shicra, a kind of thick twine made from reeds. When he had cleared enough, he sat back and stared at the now-exposed object. “I have no idea what this is,” he announced. “Got any tweezers?” Ruiz produced a caliper-sized pair from his backpack.
“Bravo,” Haas said. “We have tweezers.”
Although the Huaricanga mound resembled an ancient sandhill, the soft, shifting, slightly gritty surface was not sand but the fine, windblown soil geologists call “loess.” Fertile stuff, if it can somehow be irrigated, the loess blanketed the underlying structure like a heavy tarpaulin tossed over a piece of machinery. Here and there the archaeologists had scooped it away to reveal granite walls that had once been smoothly plastered. Over time, weather and earthquakes and perhaps human malice had buckled most of the walls, but their overall layout had been preserved. Behind them the team had removed some of the fill: bags of stones, created by knotting shicra into mesh sacks, filling the sacks with chunks of granite, and laying the results like fifty-pound bricks in the foundation.
Moving slowly, Haas tweezered out the pieces—they looked like the remnants of a serving platter—and passed them to Ruiz, who dropped them into a resealable plastic bag.
“Are all of those from a single object?” I asked.
“I’d guess so, but your guess is good as mine,” Haas said. With his wide face, gray goatee, and merry smile, he resembled, for the moment, an aging folk singer. “All I can say is, this is really strange.”
Almost twenty people were working on the Huaricanga mound, shoveling away the obscuring loess. Half of them were local workers; Peru has so many ruins from so many cultures that in many small towns archaeological labor is a flourishing blue-collar trade. The others were graduate students from Peru and the United States. After two days of labor, workers and students were halfway through clearing off the top platform and the staircases leading to it; the layout of the structure was visible enough to map. The temple, for the mound was surely built for religious reasons, was laid out in a wide, shallow U about 150 feet long and 60 feet high, with a sunken plaza between the arms. In its day its grandeur would have overwhelmed the visitor. Little wonder: at the time of its construction, the Huaricanga temple was among the world’s biggest buildings.
In college I read a one-volume history of the world by the distinguished historian William H. McNeill. Called, simply enough, A World History, and published in 1967, it began with what McNeill and most other historians then considered the four wellsprings of human civilization: the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, in modern Iraq, home of Sumer, oldest of all complex polities; the Nile Delta, in Egypt; the Indus Valley, in Pakistan; and, in east central China, the valley of the Huang He, more familiar to Westerners as the Yellow River. If McNeill were writing A World History today, discoveries like those at Huaricanga would force him to add two more areas to the book. The first and better known is Mesoamerica, where half a dozen societies, the Olmec first among them, rose in the centuries before Christ. The second is the Peruvian littoral, home of a much older civilization that has come to light only in the twenty-first century.*18
Mesoamerica would deserve its place in the human pantheon if its inhabitants had only created maize, in terms of h
arvest weight the world’s most important crop. But the inhabitants of Mexico and northern Central America also developed tomatoes, now basic to Italian cuisine; peppers, essential to Thai and Indian food; all the world’s squashes (except for a few domesticated in the United States); and many of the beans on dinner plates around the world. One writer has estimated that Indians developed three-fifths of the crops now in cultivation, most of them in Mesoamerica. Having secured their food supply, Mesoamerican societies turned to intellectual pursuits. In a millennium or less, a comparatively short time, they invented their own writing, astronomy, and mathematics, including the zero.
A few decades ago, many researchers would have included jump-starting Andean civilization on the honor roll of Mesoamerican accomplishments. The Olmec, it was proposed, visited Peru, and the locals, dutiful students, copied their example. Today we know that technologically sophisticated societies arose in Peru first—the starting date, to archaeologists’ surprise, keeps getting pushed back. Between 3200 and 2500 B.C., large-scale public buildings, the temple at Huaricanga among them, rose up in at least seven settlements on the Peruvian coast—an extraordinary efflorescence for that time and place. When the people of the Norte Chico were building these cities, there was only one other urban complex on earth: Sumer.