The Pendejo Cave discoveries came after the early dates I received at Meadowcroft, but they illustrate the tendency on the part of some archaeologists to find just what they are looking for, to perceive in the world before them exactly what they want to see. Indeed, it has only too often surfaced in scientific debate, such as the infamous cold fusion controversyof the recent past. This all-too-human quality is hardly restricted to archaeologists—it can be found among gamblers, lovers, salesmen, CEOs, and many others. The four digs I have described here—and of course one could fill several volumes with the details of all the others that have sought to set a much earlier date than 11,500 years ago for the onset of the peopling of America—violated one or more of the dicta long agreed upon by American archaeologists for judging the authenticity of an allegedly early site: (1) the presence of undeniable artifacts (2) in indisputable context (3) with valid and reliable chronological control.
The Canadian paleontologist Harrington found an artifact, to be sure, but he initially received the wrong date for it. The rest of the “artifacts” turned out to be quite deniable, and they all were found in what are called “redeposited” sands and gravels, meaning that the context was disputable. MacNeish had the habit of consistently interpreting anything that bore any resemblance to an artifact as unequivocally the work of humans, a case of enthusiasm and expectation often outrunning reason and technical analysis. Having long expected that the earliest Americans would be very ancient, Leakey got his ancient dates all right (for a while), but he put faith in a handful of highly questionable artifacts found in a context that was otherwise highly suspect—an alluvial fan. Desperately wanting to find an early cave dweller, Hibben blew all three criteria—and perhaps worse. In his book on early man, Hibben wrote of finding his mountain-dwelling, pre-Clovis pioneer: “by accident, we came upon a New World cave man, a primitive hunter that satisfied all our expectations as to how ancient man should act and live.” Frank Hibben's Sandia Man is perhaps the most extreme, not to mention egregious, example of finding evidence to fit one's expectations.
It was against this background, this literal roar of failed attempts, that I discovered in 1974 and 1975 that I had become another of these Don Quixotes, taking on the windmill of conventional wisdom and established dogma.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MELEE OVER MEADOWCROFT
Now that I can look back on some forty years as a student and then professional archaeologist, I have become very much aware that a good deal of my career—far from being a smooth, well-planned trajectory, one thing leading logically to the next—might better be described as a series of ricochets, one of which led me to the Meadowcroft Rockshelter in southwestern Pennsylvania, where my career has been rattling around for three decades.
I can say that I always wanted to be an archaeologist. I made up my mind about that when I was four or five years old, growing up an early reader in Youngstown, Ohio. My mother, a single parent (my father died in World War II), kept me supplied with books of all sorts, my favorites being anything on archaeology and geology. I knew before I graduated from grade school that I wanted to go to the University of Arizona to pursue archaeology, and by the time I got there in 1962, I was also deeply into motorcycles. So I ended up riding around the desert a lot (which, among other things, forces you to learn to appreciate the subtle differences in landscapes), graduating after three years and spending a fourth year in graduate school. I then returned to Youngstown to teach for two years at what would become Youngstown State University.
In 1968, I headed off to the University of Utah, where I became a graduate student of a legendary archaeologist named Jesse D. Jennings. Jenningswas probably the finest field archaeologist of his part of the twentieth century—and also at times one of the rudest, most abrasive human beings I have ever met. Evidently he was even more so in his earlier days, but shortly before I arrived he had suffered a horrendous heart attack. The story went that when he was lying gray-faced on the gurney, a doctor approached and asked if he wanted someone to fetch a priest to administer last rites. Jennings reached out, grabbed the doctor by the collar, pulled him down, and snarled, “Do you seriously think I intend to fucking die here?” The story may be apocryphal, but it definitely is “him.”
The Dark Lord, Jesse D. Jennings.
Jennings never praised anyone in my hearing. Instead, he was occasionally so brutal as to be repellent and, in fact, in some thirty years of teaching, he turned out only a handful of Ph.D.s. Most of his students simplycouldn't take the abuse, and left to study and finish their graduate work elsewhere. One of his teaching techniques was to take his students to other archaeologists' digs, where he would point out all the flaws in technique loudly and as brutally as he pleased. I was with him once when he asked the archaeologist at one site, “What did you use to excavate this place, egg-beaters and hand grenades?” He objected strenuously to having both males and females on a dig, since he was convinced—and said so out loud whenever he ran into this—that nothing could be done right what with everyone spending their time copulating. He was known to his creatures (his students and ex-students) by many epithets, among which perhaps the most used was “The Dark Lord” (after the grim and terrible figure in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings).
The Dark Lord had very little time or use for archaeological theory. When I was a student, something called New Archaeology had recently been born. This was a complex and allegedly revolutionary new way of looking at the archaeological record, explicitly calling for a more “scientific” approach. That is, you pose a hypothesis and then, in the manner of a physicist or chemist, try to prove it or disprove it by the evidence in the ground. It also called for carefully attending to the patterning of things found in the ground (such as where a feasting group threw picked-over bones), the crunching of archaeological data via what were at the time mainframe computers, and a great deal of theorizing about the nature of archaeological evidence. Jennings thought this was, put very simply, bull-shit on the part of people who didn't really know how to do the basic fieldwork of archaeology. “If you don't collect the data right,” he would say, “who cares what you think about it?”
Very early in my graduate career I was “assigned” to work for Mel Aikens (a former Jennings student who had completed his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago) on the material culture remains he had recently recovered from a site in Utah called Hogup Cave. After I had labored through Christmas break in 1968 on the lithic assemblage from the site, Jennings then bluntly suggested that perhaps I should analyze the basketry from the site, “as there was no one else around to do it.” This was scarcely an honor or reward. The Dark Lord held a low opinion of baskets, at least compared to stone tools, and, I assumed, an even lower opinion of those who analyzed such stuff. Significantly, though he never said so explicitly, I wasquick to realize that if I elected to ignore his “suggestion,” I should probably pack my bags and pursue my graduate career elsewhere. Indeed, I had actually heard him utter such an order to one of my fellow students before he exiled him into the Outer Darkness.
After the Hogup basketry analysis was completed, late in the spring of 1969, I decided I wanted to finish at Utah as soon as was humanly possible. Mel Aikens suggested that I reanalyze the many other basketry collections that Jennings and others had excavated in Utah over the previous half century and that were curated at the university museum. I could, Mel thought, use this data as a basis of a dissertation project that would ultimately involve the comparative study of similar collections housed at other institutions as well.
By late in 1969, I had visited nineteen institutions across the length and breadth of the United States and had looked at virtually every perishable artifact ever found in a proper archaeological site in western North America. I was well on the way to becoming one of the experts on this arcane kind of thing. Of course, expert or not, Jennings had doomed me to doing something that he himself did not consider “real” archaeology. Eventually I applied for and received a postdoctoral fellowship
at the Smithsonian Institution, and continued my comparative study of prehistoric perishables from western North America. Before I actually went to the Smithsonian, I was asked to analyze a large collection of early perishables from the Andes, which led in 1973 to a conference in Albany to report on the Andean material at the behest of its excavator, Tom Lynch (himself, coincidentally, soon to become deeply involved in the Clovis wars). When the conference was over, Jim Richardson, a scholar of South American prehistory at the University of Pittsburgh, asked if I could give him a ride home, as I was on my way back to Youngstown to visit my mother. On the way, we ran into a blizzard and my windshield wipers went out, so I had to lean out the window and wipe the windshield clear by hand while we plummeted along in a near whiteout. Jim chose that moment to tell me that they were looking for a North Americanist in the anthropology department at Pitt, and would I be interested? And I was thinking, my inner voice rising in pitch, here we are in this blizzard and we're both probably going to die, and this guy is asking me about a position at Pitt? I didn't think about it until later.
What they wanted was someone to teach the hard-nosed, multidisciplinarytechniques of field archaeology. I couldn't come right away since I was scheduled to do some fieldwork in Cyprus that fall, but I got the appointment anyway. Before leaving for the Mediterranean, I let the word out that I would like to find a place for teaching fieldwork the following summer that met various criteria: the prospective site needed to be reasonably accessible from Pittsburgh; it should be a place where little digging had been done before so that while the students were being instructed in field techniques, they would also be uncovering something new about the prehistory of the area; and preferably it should be a rockshelter. Much of what I had learned about excavating had come from working in and observing Great Basin rockshelters under Jennings or one of his students— and, of course, listening to The Dark Lord sneer at other rockshelter digs.
Somehow, in the spring of 1973, Phil Jack, a historian at California State College in California, Pennsylvania, heard about my requirement and contacted me, saying that he had a friend named Albert Miller, a big landowner in southwestern Pennsylvania near the West Virginia border and only a few miles from the Ohio River. On his property, or, more accurately, on the property of a foundation he and his brother Delvin (an illustrious harness racer) had created, was a large and largely untouched rockshelter that almost surely would make an ideal archaeological site. The property was called Meadowcroft, and as soon as I saw the Meadow-croft Rockshelter, perched among the trees about forty feet up from Cross Creek, a small tributary of the Ohio, I knew that generations of people through history and back into prehistory would have seen in it the same thing I did. It was a prime place for a temporary camp.
THE DIG AT MEADOWCROFT
People leaving the Ohio River to go hunting or collecting in the uplands would have found the channel of Cross Creek a pleasant and useful pathway, leading as it does gradually upward through very steep and hilly wooded country. Some seven and a half miles west of the river, the rock-shelter would have provided a comfortable stopping-off place for such travelers. I climbed up the embankment and found, in the rockshelter's embrace, evidence that modern wayfarers had also found it a prime place for their trips. There on the rocky floor was a crude stone fireplace, really just a circle of stones, and in the circle were beer cans, hash pipes, and syringes.
General view of Meadowcroft Rockshelter before excavations, facing west, ca. 1973.
Close-up of the Early Holocene stratigraphy at Meadowcroft. The tags mark microstratigraphic layers, occupation surfaces, fire pits, trash and refuse pits, and the loci of geological sampling.
Close-ups of Holocene microstratigraphy at Meadowcroft. Images were taken under different lighting conditions to show the flexibility of the lighting system used at the site.
Carved into brown sandstone, the shelter is located on the north shore of the creek, with a southern exposure. The prevailing winds, running from east to west, provide nearly continuous ventilation, blowing noisome smoke and insects away. The shelter itself is now about forty-nine feet wide and twenty feet deep, and the ceiling is about forty-three feet above the floor. In earlier times, the floor was lower and the overhang projected fartherout; in other words, the rockshelter was once substantially larger. In the intervening millennia, parts of the ceiling have fallen, in some cases in a rain of large chunks, or boulders, moving what is called the dripline (the line inside of which the site remains dry and outside of which the site is wet) farther and farther back (or north). This is typical of many rockshelters, as is the slow and steady, grain-by-grain attrition of sandstone from the ceiling, a product of the daily weathering of the cement that holds the sand grains together. Added to the rockfalls and the constant rain of sand grains was a lateral flow of sheetwash from the hillside that brought with it yet other sediments into the shelter, through apertures created at both ends of the collapsing roof.
The shelter is about 700 feet above sea level in a region of the Appalachian (or Allegheny) Plateau where the maximum elevation is some 1,200 feet. The elevation and southern exposure turned out to be more important than we could initially have imagined when we, students, and a small band of specialists from other fields descended on the rockshelter on June 15, 1973, for two months of excavations.
Below the beer cans and drug paraphernalia on the surface, we found steel beer cans, then old-fashioned beer bottles, then colonial glass bottles that Indians had flaked into tools. Before long we were into the era before European contact. At the outset, we thought that maybe the bedrock basement (or culturally sterile floor) of the shelter would be about three or four feet below the current surface, extending back maybe to 1200 or 1300 B.C.—just a guess based on other rockshelters in western Pennsylvania. That would be perfectly sufficient for our training purposes. It would take students down through a bit of complicated stratigraphy where they would, we hoped, encounter cultural features such as fireplaces and trash pits, objects of human manufacture, as well as natural unmodified objects or ecofacts such as plant and animal remains. By the middle of the summer, as we dug through progressively older strata, it was clear that the site was going to be both deeper and considerably more ancient than we had previously estimated.
The following summer (1974), we returned and by early July had penetrated through layers more than ten feet deep. We had come across some twenty levels of prehistoric fireplaces, showing that at this spot for literally thousands of years people had been taking it easy, sitting around the fire, munching. We plowed on down through layer after layer, finding the remains of successively older and more or less familiar cultures, known from other digs in the Northeast. We reached a stratum that was in excess of 10,000 years old—we knew this from the kind of spear points we found in it, called early Archaic and known to date back to that period. Below the early Archaic levels, we recovered still more cultural material that was more or less familiar. Then we encountered a layer of rocks from a major spall (rock fall) from the shelter's roof that had thoroughly sealed off the sediments below.
Breaking through the rock seal, we began to turn up decidedly unfamiliar but undeniably human-made things—artifacts. This was in levels that we knew were getting close to—and even deeper and therefore older than—the time period when current archaeological thought allowed humans to be. At a level that appeared to date to about 12,000 years ago, we found an intact spear point. It was about three inches long, evidently a tool that had once been bigger but had been repeatedly resharpened to its present size and perhaps simply left behind as too small. It was what archaeologists called lanceolate in shape and was unfluted (unlike Clovis points). It did not look exactly like anything else we had ever seen from the New World.
The Miller Lanceolate Projectile Point, in situ at Meadowcroft. The point is named after Albert Miller, who discovered the site. The point dates to between 11,300 and 12,800 B.P.
Late Pleistocene artifacts from Meadowcroft. All were found on
the same surface as the Miller point and date to between 11,300 and 12,800 B.P. From left to right: the Miller point; two blade fragments; two biface thinning flakes; a broken biface.
Close-up of small blades from Meadowcroft. Such items were used in sets, hafted into bone or wood handles/shafts, and at Meadowcroft date to between 11,300 and 16,000 B.P.
So we immediately decamped to our favorite bar in town and polished off ten kegs of beer. We named the point the Miller lanceolate to honor Albert Miller, the generous owner of a site that now looked as if it was going to make a lot of waves.
Bone tools from Meadowcroft Rockshelter.
And there was more. Below the Miller point were more firepits dating back as far as 15,000 years ago. In these lower levels we also found remains of bones, wood, shell, basketry, and cordage. The basket was a fragment, so fragile that we needed to spend two days injecting it with a polyethylene glycol solution (PEG) before we could pick it up. We were in what we called Stratum IIa, and from it we eventually extracted several dozen stone tools along with hundreds of small pieces that had been flaked off to make tools (such flakes are called “debitage”). Among the tools were rhomboidal “knives,” unifacial choppers and scrapers (meaning only one side had been chipped off), sharp-pointed gravers, and microengravers.
Ice Age blade cores from the Cross Creek drainage. These date to between 11,300 and 16,000 B.P. and are highly reminiscent of material from north China dating to 30,000 B.P.
Simple plaited basket fragment from Meadowcroft. This basket, like the others, is of birch bark strips and was used to produce containers of various configurations. This specimen dates to ca. 3,000 B.P.
The First Americans Page 18