Charles Conrad Abbott, M.D., ca. 1875–1888.
Abbott's finds caught the attention of a professional, Frederic Ward Putnam, who had been appointed curator of the Peabody Museum at Harvard in 1875. Previous to his appointment, he had been a zoologist, but hewould become a major figure in the excavation and preservation of the great mounds of the Midwest, developing sophisticated techniques of mapping, digging, and recording of finds. In a sense, he rescued the Great Serpent Mound from destruction by buying it for the Peabody, which later ceded it to the state of Ohio to maintain. But Putnam's other interest besides the mound builders was proving that humans had lived in North America before the end of the Pleistocene. And so it was that Abbott's report on his “paleoliths” from the Trenton Gravels was published by the Peabody Museum, the tenth in its series of annual reports. And once a Harvard geologist journeyed to Trenton and went over the ground with Abbott, confirming the artifact-bearing deposits to be of Pleistocene age, Abbott crowed to himself that he had discovered America's Glacial Man.
For two decades, Glacial Man wowed the reading public in books both technical and popular and in lectures and other presentations. Abbott was pronounced America's own Boucher. Similar finds were pouring in from all over the East and elsewhere. Americans could rejoice that the New World had not been slighted by the Paleolithic hunters of the Ice Age, and some scholars would suggest that humans had found their way to this continent even earlier.
Meanwhile, at the Smithsonian's Bureau of Ethnology and at the U.S. Geological Survey, both by 1877 under the directorship of John Wesley Powell, scientists were altogether unfriendly to the idea of Glacial Man. It was theoretically awkward. The government scientists were virtually all followers of pioneer anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, whose Ancient Society postulated a simplistic series of stages that humans had gone through, from savagery through barbarism to civilization. This was seen as a gradual (but not glacially gradual) process, and the notion of Glacial Man in America left a huge gap in the archaeological record with practically nothing occurring between Pleistocene times and the American Indians, who were, of course, in Morgan's and other schemes, still savages.
By 1882, the artist turned geologist William Henry Holmes had turned from exploring the geology of the Far West to another interest: ceramics. He set out to catalogue and categorize all the known forms of American aboriginal pottery, a task he continued well into the 1890s and that formed the foundation of most other such research by archaeologists to this day. (It is worth noting that Holmes was one of the very first scholars to recordthat baskets, fabrics, and nets were sometimes impressed onto pottery, providing insights into the nondurable plant-based technologies seldom preserved in many parts of North America. These perishable technologies were generally far more important to their makers than the much more often recovered items made of stone.) Before his ceramic studies were complete, however, Holmes received another assignment, this from John Wesley Powell, which was—in essence—to destroy all the loose talk about Glacial Man. Powell, who was essentially responsible for putting the U.S. government into the business of science, and who had hired the largest single array of professional scientists anywhere in the world under one roof, was convinced that science was no place for the amateur. He insisted that science was threatened by such unscientific procedures as simply sticking a chipped rock from a riverbed of unknown age next to a Paleolithic tool from clearly Pleistocene Europe and calling them the same thing.
Powell suggested that Holmes start with a deposit near Washington, D.C., where a proponent of Glacial Man had recently discovered Pleistocene tools. There is an old photograph of Holmes, ever a calm and distinguished-looking fellow with a luxuriant brushy mustache, wearing a jacket, vest, tie, and narrow-brimmed hat, seated among a small surface quarry of cobbles located in the sun-dappled ground of a second-growth forest. It is a picture of elegant calm, not of paradigm destruction. It was here, however, that Holmes determined that these were not paleoliths but preforms—that is, the rocks from which recent Indian hunters had flaked off pieces to be made into arrowheads. Some of them, indeed, bore some resemblance to the turtle-shaped paleoliths of the Somme and other European sites, and Holmes promptly crafted a few such turtlebacks with his own hands, dramatically letting the air out of the Pleistocene claims.
He went on to study the geological settings in a host of locales, starting with the Trenton Gravels, where Abbott's evidence of Glacial Man had arisen, and he consistently found that the deposits were young, not Pleistocene, and that the artifacts present were merely Indian quarry refuse. Any that were found in old deposits had gotten there, Holmes asserted, by falling down rodent holes or being moved by other natural causes. The entire issue of the American Paleolithic, Holmes asserted, was “hopelessly embarrassed with the blunders and misconceptions” of people who were more like amateur relic hunters than serious scientists.
William Henry Holmes.
Naturally enough, proponents of Glacial Man were not pleased, nor were they persuaded. There have been, by the way, many studies made by science historians and other scholars suggesting that few people are likely to have their minds changed by mere argument and reference to the facts. More often than not, adherents to one scientific view do not give up when a new view arises replete with its own evidence. Instead, opposition to a new theory finally dies out when the adherents to the old theory themselves die out—a paradigm shift by the grim reaper.
Certainly, Charles Conrad Abbott was not about to throw in the towel. At scientific meetings, Abbott railed and fumed while the elegant Holmes remained cool and calm. Abbott wrote nasty poetry about Holmes. A supporter of Abbott was vilified as a “be-tinseled charlatan.” Abbott accused the government scientists of a kind of federal conspiracy “foisted on the unthinking to secure the scientific prominence of a few archaeologicalmugwumps.” The government scientists, it is true, were comparatively well funded, while the others had to struggle for research funds, and there was a sense that the members of Powell's empire—the U.S. Geological Survey and the Bureau of Ethnology—were arrogantly squashing any disputants. There is, in fact, some evidence that the government scientists did engage in efforts to keep opponents from getting their reports published in the scientific journals that were coming into being in this period.
Holmes continued to argue his view into the 1920s, having acceded to the position of director of the Bureau of Ethnology on Powell's death in 1902. By now, a new generation of archaeologists was coming of age in the twentieth century. They were loath to call attention to artifacts that might arguably be of Pleistocene provenance lest they find themselves cut to shreds by Holmes's elegant, swift sword. Indeed, the calmness that Holmes always displayed even when his opponents were at their most outraged and outrageous must have merely added to their frustration as they watched Glacial Man being systematically sliced to ribbons. In 1920, now in his seventies, Holmes accepted a position as director of the newly established National Gallery of Art, leaving science to return to his artistic roots. He held that position until a year before his death in 1933, a man who had moved with powerful grace between what later generations would perceive as two separate, even irreconcilable “cultures”—art and science.
Meanwhile, throughout the period when irrepressible, nongovernment archaeologists scoured the land for signs of Glacial Man, another line of evidence occasionally cropped up: bones. And by the turn of the century, an adjunct to Holmes had also cropped up, a man who soon gained a reputation as the most utterly implacable, even terrifying commentator on the notion of a deep human antiquity in North America that the nation had ever seen, or in fact has seen since. This was Aleš Hrdlíčka (pronounced approximately “Herdlishka”), a medical man who ultimately lodged at the Smithsonian and who was given to writing marginal notations like “mindless dolt” on other investigators' site reports.
Hrdlíčka was born in 1869 to a Bohemian family in what is the present-day Czech Republic, and was brought to New York at age thirteen.
Trained in two medical schools, he practiced medicine briefly before taking a position at the New York Hospital for the Insane in Middletown, New York. There he began a study of the physical characteristics of the inmates,and this led in turn to an interest in pathology that took him briefly to Paris and back to New York, working on large skeletal collections of European origins. He then caught the eye of none other than Frederic Putnam, who had gone on from Harvard's Peabody Museum to help found the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and the anthropology departments at both the University of California (Berkeley) and the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Putnam plucked Hrdlíčka out of New York's College of Physicians and Surgeons and sent him off on an 1898 American Museum expedition to the Southwest and Mexico, where hestudied the physical characteristics of several Native American tribes. Thus did Putnam set in motion the man who (with Holmes) would put to death his dream of the existence of Glacial Man.
Aleš Hrdlíčka.
The quest for “paleoliths” was largely over in 1899, but then one of Putnam's people found a human femur in the Trenton Gravels and hope glimmered again. Putnam turned the bone over to Hrdlíčka, who pronounced it no different from a modern Indian femur. By then the Trenton Gravels were so controversial that the femur was soon forgotten. With some more studies of controversial skeletal material in the Midwest, Hrdlíčka was fully into the fray, and in 1903 he was hired by Holmes to head the newly formed Division of Physical Anthropology at the Smith-sonian's National Museum, now the National Museum of Natural History.
As more and more supposedly Pleistocene human remains came to light, Hrdlíčka became The Man. Indeed, he had a severe-looking visage, a strong jaw, and a perpetual frown: dress him in western apparel, and he could easily have been a no-nonsense lawman bringing order and tough justice to a frontier town. (One can, a bit wildly, think of Holmes and Hrdlíčka as the Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp of early-twentieth-century anthropology, running all abusers of the proper scientific method out of Tombstone.) Simply stated, Hrdlíčka's position was that if people had been here in the Pleistocene, they should look different from modern folks. They should be more like Neanderthals. Both Hrdlíčka and Holmes were convinced that the human presence in North America could be no more than 4,000 or 5,000 years old, while there was a general sense that the Pleistocene ended some 15,000 to 20,000 years ago.
Hrdlíčka trashed virtually every “discovery” of so-called Pleistocene human remains, pointing out that they were hardly different from modern ones, and often called in geologists to throw doubt on the age of the geological deposits in which the remains were found. Peripatetic in the extreme, his researches carrying him to many exotic parts of the globe, Hrdlíčka surely knew his bones, knew about human variability, and few were likely to contradict him successfully when he arrived at a site of Pleistocene man and found just a modern Native American. In his wake, he often left embittered provincial archaeologists, warring factions snarling at one another over geological evidence, with otherwise normally courteouspeople accusing others of untrustworthiness and even deliberate falsification. The federal juggernaut rolled on, crushing all such claims. For those involved, it must have been an unpleasant time. As David Meltzer has written of the period:
Anthropologists bickered among themselves—but mostly with Hrdlíčka—over what a Pleistocene-aged human fossil should look like, then argued with paleontologists about the timing of mammalian extinctions. Paleontologists wrangled with geologists about where to draw the line between Pleistocene and post-Pleistocene formations. Geologists fought with one another over the number, timing, and evidences of glacial history. Even linguists got into the act, clucking their disapproval at everyone's failure to provide them with sufficient time to account for the great diversity of native North American languages.
Just as a new generation of archaeologists had given up raising the issue of European-like paleoliths lest they be cut down by Holmes's rapier, yet another generation of scientists learned to lie low about Pleistocene human bones lest they be bludgeoned by The Man. But, of course, there was more to it than that. Throughout the debate about Glacial Man that raged from the 1870s into the 1920s, a number of subtexts lay darkly behind the argumentation.
Most of the Paleolithic supporters knew little about contemporary Native Americans and couldn't have cared less, while the government scientists insisted that there had to be a direct line from the earliest migrants to the continent and the living aboriginal populations, which, they were convinced, had arrived not so long ago as the result of a single migration from Asia. Further, many of the Paleolithic supporters were easterners by birth and education—and in the East there was a tendency to want American discoveries and science to fit into European models. On the other hand, many of the Washington scientists came from more western areas and disdained connections to Europe in science as in many other things. At the time, a German-born American, Franz Boas, whose work among the Eskimos and Pacific Islanders had made him much more than the nominal founder ofmodern American anthropology, insisted on a direct link between anthropology and archaeology, and the Washington archaeologists agreed. On the other hand, the Paleolithic supporters saw little reason for it.
As we know now, glacial-age humans were present in North America; the Paleolithic supporters were right. We now have innumerable artifacts from this period; Holmes was wrong. And they were not Neanderthal-like; Hrdlíčka's hard line was wrong as well.
It may seem that these two men were professional naysayers, blindly holding to dogma, slowing down progress. But in a very important way, Holmes, Hrdlíčka, and the others who hammered the Paleolithic supporters of the era were right. For no one in that period did find legitimate evidence of Pleistocene humanity in North America. The Washington scientists established some hard-and-fast, wholly reasonable scientific criteria for judging such archaeological evidence, and these standards still apply. One had to find (1) undeniable artifacts or osteological remains that were unmistakably human; (2) an indisputable context (such as direct strati-graphic association with extinct Pleistocene animal remains); (3) a valid and reliable control over chronology—which in those days meant undisturbed stratigraphy. None of the sites so virulently attacked by Holmes and Hrdlíčka met all those criteria when they were announced or even when, in some cases, they were reexamined in more modern and technically proficient times. It is important to iterate that the general criteria they established then are neither unreasonably harsh nor unreasonably lax—and, as we'll see, they are basically the same criteria that are in effect in archaeology today.
Until the late 1920s, these criteria were never met in the quest for Glacial Man. Establishing exact chronologies was impossible at the time; only relative chronology could be determined, and, given the state of the art of stratigraphy, that was iffy at best. Stone artifacts such as crude hand axes could also be nothing more than broken cobbles or, as Holmes had shown several times, discards from recent Indians. The three hard-nosed criteria set a bar that was a bit high for the archaeological techniques of the time. So the issue remained at best a Mexican stand-off, the two sides glowering at each other over an apparently unbridgeable chasm. Then, at a time when most educated Americans were preoccupied with more urgent matters suchas Prohibition, the stock market, mobs, movies, and the illicit delights of the Roaring Twenties, an excavation in an insignificant arroyo in a remote part of New Mexico changed the world of American archaeology.
FOLSOM AND CLOVIS
Jennings, Meltzer, and many other archaeologists have “reconstructed” the scene that might have occurred at Folsom at the very end of the Pleistocene, but it is a tale worth telling again. At some point about 10,000 years ago, a herd of very large bison thundered down a narrowing arroyo, came around a curve, and were ambushed by a group of people armed with what were most likely wooden-shafted throwing spears or atlatl-propelled darts tipped with extremely fine, even elegant stone points. Some of the big animals probably escaped, thundering on, bellowing. A n
umber of the bison may have perished instantly, the fierce projectiles striking through ribs to a vital source of life, the heart or lungs. Some would not have been so lucky. The hunters no doubt promptly fell to finishing off the wounded and then began butchering this wonderful kill with the enthusiastic help of the other people, probably mostly women and children, who had watched from the bank above as the noisy and extremely dangerous melee took place.
Stretching away from this joyous and bloody scene were grassy meadows, broken by copses of trees. Beyond, forested hills rose to the horizon. It was a salubrious place and probably remained so over the years when similar events took place. Eventually, dust from the surround blew into the arroyo, covering the area and its bones and other signs of feasting. Some ten thousand years passed.
Chances are that in modern times the arroyo was visited by cattle that had strayed through the ever-fragile fences of ranchers who came to inhabit the valley in the nineteenth century, now a bit drier than when the huge bison had met their end, but otherwise little changed. Clearly it was straying cattle that brought the foreman of the Crowfoot Ranch near the tiny town of Folsom to this scene in late August of the year 1908, a day or two after heavy rains had flooded the area and sent torrents through this and other arroyos in the neighborhood, among other things freeing cattle to roam.
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