The First Americans

by James Adovasio

  The final report delivered by the panel in the pages of American Antiquity in 1997 says, in the typically neutral language of such bulletins, that “all participants assembled at the end of this last day of the site visit to discuss their responses to what they had seen and heard over the course of the preceding week.” This is true. We all did assemble—first in a local saloon appropriately called La Caverna.

  THE SHOWDOWN AT LA CAVERNA

  One of the sponsors of our trip, the Dallas Museum of Natural History, insisted on a group discussion with the hope of achieving a final Brixham- or Folsom-like consensus about Monte Verde. I was skeptical for a variety of reasons beyond my general suspicions about the value of site visits by archaeostars. First of all, there were our two longtime and demonstrably implacable skeptics, Vance Haynes and Dena Dincauze. In addition, we included several very cautious scholars such as Don Grayson, who waslargely uncommitted, and Dave Meltzer, who leaned toward a pro–Monte Verde opinion but was remarkably close-mouthed, perhaps with an eye toward not overtly offending his friend and sometime mentor Vance Haynes. Even if Grayson and Meltzer threw in their lot with the pre-Clovis lobby, I did not expect Haynes or Dincauze to follow suit.

  I confidently expected that we would see some fireworks. Throughout the previous days of the Monte Verde visit, Dillehay had clearly shown that he would brook no nonsense. He was wired for battle. On one occasion while we were looking at Monte Verde artifacts housed at Valdivia, for example, Haynes questioned the identification of an obviously worked piece of wood as a lance.

  “How many wooden lances have you ever seen?” Dillehay asked acidly.

  “None,” Vance said, but he offered lamely that he had once seen an ancient digging stick.

  “Not good enough,” Tom said, shutting off the conversation. It was becoming perfectly clear that whatever Haynes's geoarchaeological expertise, it was based on open sites in the arid lands of the American West, and even in the desert, open sites are hard on perishable artifacts. On the other hand, caves and rockshelters in the West are among the best sites for preserving perishable artifacts, but Haynes has rarely worked in them. Monte Verde was a wet site, a place where water can provide thousands of years of anaerobic protection for implements that even in the dry lands of desert open sites will eventually rot away. Haynes simply had very little experience with wood or other perishable artifacts and was even suspicious of stone tools unlike the familiar Clovis type.

  On another occasion, Haynes viewed the celebrated and obviously anthropogenic Monte Verde footprint and inquired how Dillehay knew it was a human footprint. To this query, Tom could only return a leaden stare. God only knows what else Vance thought it might be. In all fairness, the footprint was not as pristine and obvious as it was when it was first excavated and photographed, but most agreed that even in its deteriorated state, it was an impression of a human foot.

  It should be noted that both before and after the trip, Haynes was unimpressed by any artifact or, indeed, any other indication of a human presence at Monte Verde, the sole exception being six stone tools that hereluctantly admitted had been made by human hands. Nothing better reflects his Clovis-germinated stone-tool bias. An even more telling remark reflects the limits to which he would go to dismiss evidence. When confronted with the knotted cordage from Monte Verde, some of which had actually been found tied to carbon-dated, 12,500-to-13,000-year-old wooden stakes, he asked whether or not the string might be of more recent age than the stakes. Such a notion was so far-fetched as to be absurd. Was he suggesting that some more recent native had stumbled across an ancient piece of wood somehow preserved above the peat for 13,000 years and for some reason had tied a piece of string around it? Tom and I could only shake our heads.

  Back in the late Middle Ages in Europe, a Franciscan scholar at Oxford named William of Occam enunciated a rule of logical thinking that has become known as the Law of Occam's Razor. It guides scientists to this day as a rule of thumb for looking at hypotheses and the data that support them. Essentially, it says that the simplest hypothesis that fits all the known facts is likely to be the right hypothesis. In the nearly manic need to protect a lifelong investment in one hypothesis, Clovis Firsters such as Vance Haynes now seemed prepared to violate that old and useful law, inventing complexities that make Rube Goldberg machines look like the Sharper Image catalog.

  We arrived at La Caverna, a small, dark cantina where we sat at long tables, oblivious to any locals who might have been present in the gloom. Tom and I immediately “ordered up”—or “looned down” in archaeological vernacular—as did most of the others, in preparation for the discussion. From the outset, Tom was again on the offensive, and I was in complete sympathy with him. Long before this site visit, as well as during its first days, people had been raising issues about his work at Monte Verde that were either irrelevant, unreasonable, or even plain ignorant. Yet his career, or at least the result of some two decades of it, rested to some degree on the outcome of this very visit. To my mind at least, he had little alternative to attack mode. It is a shame that progress in this field has to be made at the expense of someone else's life work or reputation, but if skeptics set themselves up for such a fall by closing their minds, they can really have no complaint. Indeed, I believe firmly that to change one's mind based on new evidence is more the sign of a true scientist than to hold out eternally, making more and more convoluted arguments in an attempt to discredit solid evidence. That kind of intransigence is a one-way ticket to the dustbin of history. Does anyone remember the names of the geologists who savaged an Austrian meteorologist named Alfred Wegener for his absurd notion of continental drift?

  As the meeting at La Caverna got under way, Tom bluntly said that Vance Haynes knew essentially nothing about wet sites or their contexts, the obvious implication being that Haynes was too unfamiliar with such sites to comment or be even a decent skeptic. In response to a question by Dincauze, Tom retorted by asking, “What have you done for the past twenty years?” His implication was also perfectly clear: that she, too, knew next to nothing about the kind of site she had just examined or about multidisciplinary research in general.

  Tempers flared again and again. Meltzer and Alex Barker, the Dallas Museum representative, tried valiantly to keep the peace, especially since these acrimonious proceedings were being observed by representatives of the National Geographic Society, another trip sponsor. But peace was not about to prevail. At one point I was answering a query (on what, I forget) from Vance Haynes, and Dena Dincauze interrupted. I said pointedly and not very politely, “I'm not addressing you.” Meltzer and Barker continued their attempts to calm us down into some semblance of collegiality.

  Then, suddenly and in a sense parenthetically, the talk turned to Mead-owcroft, and Haynes told me and the assembled multitude that if only I would date just one seed or one nut from the deepest levels at Meadow-croft, he might be led to believe in the antiquity of the site.

  That was it. I burst out in derisive laughter. Over the years, in scientific paper after scientific paper, Haynes had asked for yet another date, yet another study, raising yet other picayune and fanciful questions about Mead-owcroft, most of which had been answered long before he asked them—not just in the original excavation procedures but in report after report. Up until this time in Monte Verde, I had complied. But here we were, thousands of miles from Meadowcroft, looking into Monte Verde, and he was going on about nuts and seeds! He explained that in his opinion nuts and seeds are easier to pretreat for the removal of contaminants than charcoal is. This is a contention that Bob Stuckenrath, the last director of the Smithsonian and the University of Pittsburgh radiocarbon labs, foundlaughable. At this point, I knew that by Haynes's tortured reasoning, if I took a seed from Stratum IIa at Meadowcroft and the date came back just as old as the 16,000-year-old date from charcoal taken from a hearth, Haynes would say it had to have been tainted by some soluble contaminant—yet to be identified, of course. And if it came out younger than my older dates,
Haynes would deem the dates discredited, although it is well known that seeds can migrate between horizons quite easily. If he really felt the need for carbon dating of anything else besides the charcoal of hearths, we had provided just such a date on a fragment of birch bark from an ancient basket: 19,000 B.P., with a large plus or minus of 2,500, putting it easily into the 16,000 B.P. range.

  All this was running through my mind, along with the pent-up annoyance and frustration I had felt over the years—like what Tom was going through as well—and, after all these years, I felt only what I can describe as contempt.

  “Horseshit,” I said constructively. I told Vance Haynes there and then that never would I accede to any request he made for further testing of the Meadowcroft site because if I did he would simply ask for something else in a never-ending spiral of problems. I explained that the matter of Mead-owcroft's antiquity was settled as far as most other professionals and I were concerned, and that if any remaining skeptics did not believe it, I could not care less. I then stormed out of the bar with Tom to cool off outside in the parking lot.

  Later we rejoined an obviously quieter and more subdued group. To my utter disbelief, a consensus was beginning to heave into sight. Barker had gone around the table asking each participant for an opinion. We left La Caverna for another establishment, where we all had dinner. Tom and I wound up sitting at one end of the very long table. We were joined only by a National Geographic photographer. The rest of the party sat at the opposite end. Never mind the “historic” consensus on the age of Monte Verde; it was obvious that we were pariahs, considered badly behaved, overly aggressive, all that. For all his negativity, Vance Haynes is mild and generally soft-spoken. How could Tom and I be so hard on old Vance? More than a year later, one of the participants told me that ever since that night, some of the participants have thought of Tom and me as “the bad guys.”

  By the next morning, the soon-to-be-celebrated consensus had crystallized. Once the site visit ended and the archaeostars went home, the drafting committee (which included Haynes and Dincauze) began writing up the results for American Antiquity. Even as it came out in print, Haynes had begun to voice doubts to various colleagues; now he was suggesting a wondrous new array of hypothetical events that could have contaminated the site in some previously unperceived way, including—believe it or not— a volcanic eruption. In January 2000, he voiced his doubts publicly in National Geographic. I could hardly fail to notice that this was just what he had done with regard to Meadowcroft: agreeing at first, then recanting and throwing doubts around. I have been told by several Paleo-Indian scholars that Dincauze has said that she was “coerced” into consensus by Tom's and my bullying and boorishness. If not putting up with horseshit is boorishness, then I proudly accept the compliment.

  FIREWORKS IN SANTA FE

  By 1999, the second huge volume of Dillehay's report had been published by the Smithsonian Institution Press, and despite the original consensus of the paleo-police (by now reneged on by Haynes and Dincauze), controversy continued. I had, in fact, expected no less. Unlike the ever-optimistic Dave Meltzer and Don Grayson, who firmly believe that site visits by recognized authorities can actually change the trajectory of scientific thought, my view was jaded. I recognize that earlier site visits, as at Folsom, have in fact changed scientific perceptions, and that some “neutrals” were indeed swayed by the report of the Monte Verde visit. But most pre-Clovis critics became even more intransigent and outspoken. Still others who had made up their minds about the reality of pre-Clovis human presence long before the visit questioned the authority of the paleo-police to speak for the profession. They certainly didn't need us to tell them what to believe or to confirm what they already knew. Nor, in fact, did our South American colleagues, who rightfully viewed the predominantly North American–based consensus as too arrogant, too little, and, undoubtedly, too late. In any event, in the fall of 1999, a major meeting was called that would include both archaeologists and amateurs. It was named, suggestively, “Clovis and Beyond,” and it wassponsored by what on the surface seemed very strange bedfellows: the Smithsonian and a former Santa Fe gallery owner, Forest Fenn.

  Fenn had in earlier times been a self-confessed prolific pot hunter, claiming that he hunted pots only on private land and that the Indian religious objects he sold in his gallery in Santa Fe were legitimately his as a result of sales to him by individual Indians. This was a legally murky area decades ago, and federal laws are far tighter now. Fenn eventually sold his gallery and acquired land that contains the ruins of a prehistoric pueblo, which he proceeded to “excavate.” Also along the way he acquired an excellent collection of Clovis artifacts, including the so-called Fenn Cache, and has become a trader in such material. When the Smithsonian's Dennis Stanford was asked why he and the institution were collaborating with a man widely perceived to be of the archaeological demimonde, Dennis replied disingenuously that he believed in the notion of rehabilitation.

  This great Pro-Am meeting, “Clovis and Beyond,” attracted some twelve hundred participants to a large convention center in Santa Fe. The center was clogged with archaeologists, all of whom looked just like the rest of the people in Santa Fe, casually bedecked as they often are in field clothing and turquoise. Flint knappers knapped flint on the terrace in the crisp autumnal air of Santa Fe. Inside, excellent collections of Clovis and pre-Clovis artifacts (including Fenn's), as well as other objects, maps, and books of interest were on display. Controversy seethed during the meeting itself, during which some fifty people delivered papers on the many aspects of the peopling of the Americas.

  For one thing, an important late Pleistocene or early Holocene skeleton had recently been taken away from archaeologists by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and several of the archaeologists present in Santa Fe had brought suit against the federal government, seeking its return. This was Kennewick Man, and the plaintiffs were gathering signatures to back their stand. There were also the normal differences of academic opinion on various fine points, such as what had killed the mammoths, that would be aired and typically would remain unresolved.

  But the main controversy of the weekend was instigated by a relatively new entry in the world of popular science magazines, Discovering Archaeology, an offshoot of the venerable magazine Scientific American. That very week, just in time for the meeting in Santa Fe, the magazine publishedamong its colorful, reader-friendly pages a special, highly technical, sixteen-page insert written by Stuart Fiedel, a man whom very few archaeologists had ever heard of. As I mentioned earlier, Fiedel is an archaeologist with a company that engages in cultural resource management (CRM) services, what used to be called salvage archaeology, on contract with highway departments, local governments, federal agencies, and so forth. So far as anyone I have ever spoken to knows, this is the only kind of archaeo-logical work he has done.

  Fiedel's report was a wholesale attack on Dillehay's evidence at Monte Verde, from his procedures and protocols to his results. After finding what the Smithsonian Institution Press called copyediting errors in Dillehay's report (which were later corrected on-line and in a just published errata volume) Fiedel insisted that therefore there was no way to truly associate the artifacts Tom found with dated strata. The editors of Discovering Archaeology decided to publish his article even though it was far too technical for most oftheir readers, presumably to stir up a hornet's nest and thereby gain some publicity for their nascent publication. They succeeded. After providing Dillehay and his lithic specialist, Michael Collins of the University of Texas, with a couple of weeks and a few thousand words to respond, they also sent the piece around to several archaeologists, myself included, for comment, giving us a week and a few hundred words apiece to do so. These hasty and briefcomments were included in the report.

  This procedure was considered by most archaeologists present at the “Clovis and Beyond” meeting to be the sort ofthing where a referee would have instantly called “foul.” Complex arguments in the social sciences as well as
the hard sciences are traditionally, and for very good reasons, carried out, first at least, in the pages of what are called peer-reviewed journals. If I have something to say about an archaeological site, I submit it to an archaeological journal, and the editor, if he is interested, sends it out to other people in the same field (peers) who will point out flaws and ask for them to be repaired, reject it, or (rarely) say it is wonderful as it is.

  Nothing like this had happened with Fiedel's report—nor did the reviewers' nearly unanimous condemnation of most of Fiedel's points result in the jettisoning of his report, as it almost surely would have in a scientific publishing context. For all its efforts to bring the excitement of archaeology to a wider public, no one would ever accuse Discovering Archaeologyof having the kind of editorial judgment appropriate for such a dispute over highly technical matters. (And I would have to say that I can only imagine one basic response from the magazine's typical readers to this great gray blather of technical details: “Huh?”) Naturally enough, Vance Haynes and two other adamant Clovis First advocates, Frederick Hadleigh West and Tom Lynch, immediately found unassailable merit in Fiedel's effusion, not even taking umbrage at his thinly disguised inference that some evidence had been faked.

  People at the meeting in Santa Fe were abuzz with all of this and naturally enough awaited more lengthy oral responses to Fiedel's report. On the second day, Dillehay took the podium and quietly but forcefully accused Fiedel of having “a limited mental template,” thanks to his inexperience with anything as sophisticated and complex as a modern, multidisciplinary excavation, not to mention a wet site such as Monte Verde. He wondered how it was that Fiedel could find such flaws in his work when the eighty or so professional archaeologists and graduate students who had worked on the excavation or the attendant analyses over the years had found nothing of the sort, and he went on to say that Fiedel and other doubters were simply and essentially lost in “fantasy.” Dillehay received a standing ovation, which is not the sort of thing that usually occurs at academic meetings.