The First Americans

by James Adovasio

  Vance Haynes crossing Chinchihuapi Creek during the 1997 site visit to Monte Verde.

  Known as Monte Verde, the site is located on the banks of Chinchihuapi Creek, a tributary of the Maullin River in south-central Chile. It lies about thirty-six miles from the Pacific Ocean in a humid, cool forest, and as it is an open-air locality, is a rarity. Or rather, it was an open-air site. Sometime not long after it was inhabited, the waters of the creek rose and covered the site, which eventually filled in, becoming a peat-filled bog that inhibited bacterial decay of things that usually disappear from the archaeological record. In this anaerobic coffin, an eclectic array of normally perishable artifacts, as well as many other items, was preserved over the millennia.

  When the radiocarbon dates came back in 1977, Dillehay found his career veering in an unintended direction, toward the quest for the first Americans. For the next ten years or so, Dillehay and a team of, in all, sixty professionals from various disciplines excavated Monte Verde, and for fifteenyears thereafter Dillehay wrote up the results of his excavations and defended both them and himself from an onslaught of skepticism, naysaying, virulent professional innuendo, and out-and-out personal attack. He has told me, as well as some other colleagues, that if he had to do it all over again, he wouldn't. It hasn't been worth the agony.

  1997 inspection team examining stratigraphy at Monte Verde. Tom Dillehay is on the far right.

  Based on what he found buried and preserved in the boggy ground,here is what was happening at Monte Verde some 12,500 years ago: At some point about twenty or thirty people built a twenty-foot-long tentlike structure of wood and animal hides on the banks of the creek. They framed the structure with logs and planks that were staked to the ground, making walls of poles covered with animal hides. Using cordage made of local reeds, they tied the hides to the poles, dividing the interior with similar hide-and-pole walls into what appear to be separate living spaces. Each such area had a brazier pit lined with clay. At many hearths, they left some stone tools and spilled seeds, nuts, and berries.

  Ongoing excavations at Monte Verde. In the foreground, near the creek, they are uncovering residential structures.

  Residential structure remnants from Monte Verde. These remains date to ca. 12,500–13,000 B.P.

  A stake from the foundation of a residential structure at Monte Verde. Tied around the stake with an overhand knot is a strip of junco ( Juncussp.) fiber. This construction dates to 12,500–13,000 B.P.

  Outside the tentlike structure were two large hearths, apparently used communally, grinding stones, and a store of firewood. At some point, presumably close to the time when the site was abandoned, someone— probably an adolescent—walked across some soft clay that had been brought to the site to reline the firepits. He or she left three footprints inthe clay that were subsequently sealed under the anaerobic ooze that covered the site.

  Human footprint from an occupation surface at Monte Verde, dating to 12,500–13,000 B.P.

  Not far off, these people also built a wishbone-shaped structure of wooden uprights set in sand and gravel hardened with animal fat. Here mastodon carcasses were butchered and tools were made. Here also these people brought and perhaps dispensed some eighteen medicinal plants, half of which were local and half of which came either from the seacoast about thirty-six miles away or from the arid mountain lands some forty miles in the opposite direction. These same plants are actually still used by the local people today for lung and skin ailments. Aquatic food plants formed a good deal of these people's diet, and they also ate the meat of mastodons, paleollama, and small creatures like freshwater mollusks. Thearchaeologists even found “chaws” of partly chewed seaweed, nearly perfect molds of the chewer's palate and molars, which they probably sucked on for the high iodine content. In all, the remains of six mastodons were left behind at the site. It seems likely that these beasts were either adventitious kills, perhaps in the nearby boggy areas or scavenged prey of other animals. In addition, wild potato species formed a good deal of the diet, their remains left in the cracks of wooden mortars and food storage pits in the corners of the shelters.

  The assorted lithic tools from the MVII occupation at Monte Verde. Top right: two bola stones. Top left and center: El Jobo projectile fragments. Ground slate spear head and a crude quartz biface.

  These people also brought salt from the coast a short distance away, pebbles that had been rolled and smoothed in the surf and that they turnedinto chopping tools, and bitumen for fastening stone tools to wooden hafts. From bone, they made digging tools and gouges; from wood, digging sticks and spear shafts. Except for a handful of bifacially flaked stone projectile points and chopping tools, as well as some grooved sling stones and grinding stones, most of the stone tools they used were extremely simple— chiefly pebbles that were only slightly modified—by, say, splitting or knocking off a few flakes with ivory batons.

  Remains of a wishbone-shaped foundation made of clay of a suspected shaman's hut. Medicinal plant remains were found in and around this structure, which dates to 12,500–13,000 B.P.

  Clearly the Monte Verdeans were engaged in a multitude of tasks involved in gaining a living from the variety of resources in the numerous ecological zones both nearby and distant. They had situated themselves on prime real estate, a day's walk or two from both the coast and the foothills of the mountains, each with its own array of useful resources. They knew what they were doing, which means they probably were in the area for some time, not just passing through. Some of the hearths and living spaces in the living tent even suggest a certain specialization in the accomplishing of chores: one hearth and its surrounding living space in the tent were characterized by cutting tools made of quartz and fruits and tubers from brackish estuaries; another living space appeared to be a specialized area for working hides. It appears that at least some of the group remained at the site year-round or most of the year.

  The Monte Verdeans were probably a group of incipient colonizers in the region, moving in at a time when the glaciers were rapidly receding and the immediate area of the Maullin River was a cool, temperate wetland forest circled by a variety of other habitats and ecological zones. And there they pursued a lifeway far more sophisticated and sedentary than what anybody had expected for such early inhabitants of the hemisphere.

  To many who read about this, it just did not seem right. The dates were alarming, of course. It meant that people had been living in what appears to be something like a village, something certainly more socially complex than a band of wandering hunters and gatherers, 10,000 miles south of the Bering land bridge more than a thousand years before Clovis Man had reached Arizona. There was enough trouble already, what with Junius Bird's people being in Fell's Cave in Tierra del Fuego only a couple of hundred years after Clovis people appeared in North America. This meant that serious archaeologists had to swallow the idea of proliferating bands of hunters and their families trotting south ten or twenty miles a day, chargingthrough deserts and tangled forests, pausing for fleeting moments to mow down the big mammals that got in the way, bolting down hundreds of pounds of meat, racing over mountain passes, splashing through rivers, breast-feeding babies on the run, leapfrogging whole regions, desperately seeking… what? Some mystical, mythical destination that they knew lay south?

  Biface from the earliest occupation at Monte Verde. This specimen may date to 33,000 B.P.

  But aside from the awkward—actually, impossible— dates at Monte Verde, the artifacts were all wrong. Some bifaces, a lot of primitive uni-faces, and all that other junk. More than one commentator asked, “What planet did these people come from?” The question reflected awe in some and skepticism in others. The Monte Verdeans simply did not meet the expectations of those who were locked into a Clovis-inspired theory of the peopling of the hemisphere. (Remember the role of expectations in this entire unfolding story, starting with the unlikelihood that the Indians could have piled up dirt into grand mounds.)

  In 1979, Junius Bird himself, still at th
e American Museum of Natural History in New York, visited Monte Verde—as it turned out, just when the crew was excavating a sterile level—and pronounced the site void of human artifacts. Soon enough all the scavengers jumped on the still living but bleeding carcass, though most of them had not visited the site. Indeed, to this day, Tom Lynch declares that the wood and bone “artifacts” aredoubtful, as are the hearths and remains of the dwellings, and that the bi-facial stone artifacts are intrusive, having slipped down through the muck into the level in question from some more recent habitation. He and others further claimed that the association of remains, artifacts, and hearths with the dated materials was uncertain. In other words, virtually everything was wrong with the excavation and the analysis of its materials. Lynch even sniffed on more than one occasion that Dillehay was not really an archaeologist but “an ethnographer.”

  On the other hand, Tom had asked me to evaluate the perishable artifacts—the cords used to tie the posts together and so forth—which I did at Lexington, Kentucky, at the university, and, in my mind, there was no question about them. Nor could I find anything about the excavation to squawk about. After all, this was a “wet” site and I had worked at one, the Windover Bog in Florida, which is probably the most important and carefully excavated wet site in eastern North America. My late wife, Rhonda Andrews, several of my students, and I had analyzed all the textiles, basketry, cordage, and wood from that site.

  Even Vance Haynes, that grinch of North American archaeology, was quoted in 1992 as saying that it was “pretty hard to overlook the evidence from Monte Verde.” Haynes noted that the bifacial projectile point at Monte Verde was very similar to the ones found at Taima Taima in Venezuela.

  So what was really going on? Was this really the holy grail? Or was it just another flash in the pan?

  CHAPTER NINE

  FIREWORKS AND THE PALEO-POLICE

  For years before and after Aleš Hrdlíčka suggested to the Colorado Museum's Jesse Figgins that he would be wise to summon a panel of blue-ribbon scholars (meaning, at that time, mostly easterners) the next time he found a human artifact in association with mammoth bones, site visits by luminaries had been seen as a way of verifying an investigator's assertions. It had begun as far back as Brixham Cave and, shortly afterward, in Abbeville, France, when the English scientists unanimously certified the work of the amateur Boucher. In recommending what would have amounted to a permanent committee, Hrdlíčka said, “I believe that in some such way only can we arrive at conclusions that will command the confidence of every worker.”

  In 1989, Vance Haynes wrote the following to Dave Meltzer at SMU: “The implications of Monte Verde for American archaeology are so important that I think a panel of objective conservatives should be formed and funded by NSF [the National Science Foundation] to visit the site, examine it, take samples, etc. If a positive consensus results we can then accept the interpretation and formulate new hypotheses for the peopling of the New World. If not, Monte Verde will have to be relegated to the bin of possible pre-Clovis sites awaiting further data.” I would be remiss if I did not point out that by the oxymoron “objective conservatives,” Haynes meant himself and the Clovis First disciples.

  In the early days of the twentieth century, site visits could resolve certain kinds of problems that arose from the lack of widely agreed upon field techniques, the status of finds made by amateurs, and the difficulties of determining age solely on the evidence provided by the geology, associated fauna, and a few other features of the site. By the time of Monte Verde, however, some of these problems were better resolved in other ways. In particular, age determinations were mostly a matter of laboratory analysis, and such dating is no longer anything a site visitor can reasonably comment on except by attacking the excavator's assessment of the stratigraphy from which the carbon-dated samples arose or by finding possible sources of contaminants that the excavator somehow overlooked. As a result, a site visit today really is not in a position to confirm a pre-Clovis site, only to find reasons to reject such an interpretation. Also, in the old days there weren't so many archaeologists or so many specialists involved, and people could generally agree on who were the elite, most distinguished, and wisest arbiters in the field—people like Hrdlíčka himself or Kidder, who early on pronounced Folsom Man an Ice Age figure. I myself thought that Haynes's proposed visit to Monte Verde was ridiculous. Who among the sophisticated, highly trained, and competent people in the field (or those who thought they were sophisticated, highly trained, and competent) would take the word of a bunch of other archaeologists for whom they might have only modest regard despite their luminous credentials? Nonetheless, the archaeological site visit was born again with every hope that it would settle the matter once and for all.

  It took what might seem a long time to pull off the site visit to Monte Verde, considering the site's potent challenge to the dogma of the day. Dillehay had issued an invitation in 1989, which had sparked Haynes's letter to Meltzer, but it took almost another four years before the three of them had prepared a formal proposal to fund the visit. Finding a cross section that would satisfy most willing believers, skeptics, and those on the fence was harder than it at first had seemed. In 1991, the Dallas Museum of Natural History assumed responsibility for the trip and obtained funding from members of its board and the National Geographic Society. This also took a lot of time. Finally, by January 1997, the pantheon of archaeostars had been selected and the Great Chilean Site Visit was under way—first stop Lexington, Kentucky, where Dillehay was a faculty memberof the University of Kentucky and where many of the Monte Verde artifacts were housed.

  The delegation of course included Meltzer and Haynes, along with Donald Grayson of the University of Washington, Alex Barker of the Dallas Museum of Natural History, Dena Dincauze of the University of Massachusetts (she who had denigrated so much of my stuff at Meadowcroft), Robson Bonnichsen of Oregon State University, and Dennis Stanford, the ever-puckish head of anthropology at the Smithsonian. Also there were three Latin American scholars—Gerardo Ardila of Colombia and Francisco Mena and Lautaro Núñez of Chile—and me. It was not configured as a panel of pre-Clovis skeptics or, conversely, pre-Clovis enthusiasts; rather, it was, as designed, a mixed bag reflecting a range of views. To me, Vance Haynes and Dena Dincauze were skeptical to the point of being closed-minded. I was not actually an official member of the panel since I was obviously biased by having worked on the Monte Verde perishables, but I was invited along to comment on those artifacts. At this time, Meadow-croft was still under a cloud of doubt thanks largely to the continuing nibbling at the edges by Haynes, Dincauze, and some small fry. Monte Verde was now where the excitement lay, and however skeptical the profession was about site visits, the results of this one could have an enormous impact. Certainly the press would eat all the drama up however it was decided. Of course, if Monte Verde checked out, as I knew it should, Meadowcroft would not be hanging out there alone. Replicability!

  The avowed purpose of the visit was threefold: (1) to evaluate the controversial (in age) “artifacts” of stone, wood, bone, and other materials and assure both the panel and therefore the world that they were indeed artifacts; (2) to observe the sediments and stratigraphy and make sure that, among other things, the artifacts had not intruded into the old strata; and (3) to ascertain that there was no contamination or other problems that could have confounded the radiocarbon samples.

  At the University of Kentucky, where many of the Monte Verde artifacts were archived—especially the lithic material, but also some bone and soft-tissue items—formal presentations were made by Dillehay, me (on the perishables), and two others. The panel examined the material at hand. Then it was off to Chile. Bonnichsen could not make that part of the trip.

  We spent a day at the Universidad Austral de Chile at Valdivia, wherethe remaining artifacts from the site (including the celebrated footprint) were housed and heard a synthesis of the stratigraphy from the university's Mario Pino, a longtime colleague and friend
of Tom's. By this time, it was obvious to almost all that the alleged artifacts from Monte Verde housed in Lexington and Valdivia were not only truly man-made but profoundly different from Clovis artifacts. The site visit would be almost anticlimactic. The second day was taken up with travel to the site with stops along the way to examine the local geology of the area. The third and final day was spent at and around the site.

  Since the excavation, the main occupation area of Monte Verde had been destroyed by the construction of logging roads and by stream meander, but we were able to inspect a number of stratigraphic sections within and immediately adjacent to the original site. Among other features, we all had a good look at the layer of peat that had covered the archaeological site, which had itself been covered by two distinct layers of sand and gravels. Nothing, we were able to assure ourselves, could have intruded through the layer of peat into the artifact-rich late Pleistocene strata in question. There was nowhere to derive any intrusive items, as there are no overlying later deposits. No one found any source of contamination.