Given their extreme rarity in the Americas, it is unwise to make too much of any single skeleton or other human remains from this period. Not only are there great diversity and complexity in the human anatomy—the differences often shading imperceptibly from one type to another—but there are also individuals who simply don't fit the type even though they are members of it. After all, the National Basketball Association now has a ballplayer from the People's Republic of China who is seven feet six, scarcely your typical Chinese. Furthermore, the skull is exceptionally malleable in evolutionary terms and capable of changing greatly over generations, much less thousands of years. For example, native skeletons from some two or three millennia after Kennewick Man show resemblances to today's native populations. So far, all that the older skeletons tell us for sure converges with what the linguists and the molecular biologists tell us: that more than one group of people showed up here a long time ago and populated the entire hemisphere. This too is what the archaeological record now shows with considerable clarity. After more than a half century, the questions of who they were, when they got here, and how remain wide open. Indeed, we are living in one of the most dynamic periods in the history of New World archaeology.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
WHO ARE THOSE GUYS?
In the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Butch and Sundance are relentlessly pursued across Utah by a determined white-hatted lawman, Joe Lefors, and his Native American scout, the improbably named Lord Baltimore. Watching their persistent pursuers track them in the dark, by lantern light, across sandstone slickrock, Butch and Sundance repeatedly turn to each other impressed but perplexed and ask each other, “Who are those guys?” Who, indeed? Although they suspect the identity of their stalkers, they don't really know the answer. In reverse, the same is likely to remain true here: we stalkers of the first Americans do not know yet who “those guys” we seek really are.
Although it would be reasonable to suppose that I have some well-defined ideas about who the people who first entered the New World were, I don't. I don't have an exact, or even inexact, scenario in my large head about how people first arrived on the continent. Certainly I don't know exactly who they were, precisely when they arrived, or even how many times they came and then sallied forth to make a life—or more accurately, lives—for themselves. What I do know firsthand is that some of those guys were here in western Pennsylvania hanging out in a large rockshelter above a quiet creek sometime around 16,000 years ago. More important, I believe I know what their presence does and doesn't imply about the first colonizers of the New World.
People sometimes accuse me of being obsessed with the details of excavation, rather than the meaning to be derived from it. A while back, my friend and longtime colleague David Madsen of the Utah Geological Survey told me that a newspaper reporter had been asking about me, and he had told her I was the kind of archaeologist who spends more time on “field minutiae” than on the interpretations of excavations. I told Dave that I took that as a compliment.
Right now, thanks to developments over the past couple of decades, the number of things we don't know for sure about the initial peopling of this hemisphere exceeds what we do know. Those unknowns will perhaps be resolved one day by the many subfields we have talked about thus far—glacial geology, genetics, linguistics, and so forth—but the real answers about who those guys were will have to come from the ground. Only the discovery of actual artifacts or human remains that are solidly dated and found in unexceptionable circumstances will provide us with the resolution we seek. And this means that the data must be retrieved in an appropriately resolute manner—which is why I took Madsen's comment as a compliment.
In our pursuit of the initial colonists of this hemisphere, we have concentrated on the record of those who made it or succeeded, as is only natural. We like winners. But almost surely in those days, there were also losers—failed colonists from doomed colonizations who arrived on the edge of the continent or even penetrated well into it and then, for one reason or another, simply didn't survive. We know from both population genetics and ethnographic analogues that the first successful colonists would have had to arrive in a band of at least fifty people. Otherwise, the population would have dwindled from accidents, illness, age-based attrition, and ultimately a scarcity of mates.
No matter if only one or a half dozen of these groups entered the New World, the overall population size was very small and would remain so for a long time. Moreover, dispersed as they would soon be over a vast landscape, their tracks and traces would be—and in fact, are—very hard to find. As Tom Dillehay, Dave Meltzer, and many others have pointed out, those pioneers are virtually invisible, archaeologically speaking. Paul Martin and Vance Haynes, of course, use this invisibility to suggest that no one was here before Clovis and that only with Clovis's lethal points is there a widely detectable and unmistakable indication of human presence.
I suggest a much more likely alternative. Recently, the eminent British archaeologist and Paleolithic specialist Clive Gamble visited Meadowcroft in the course of making a film about the dispersal of anatomically modern humans around the world. In a discussion about the numerical scarcity of pre-Clovis sites such as Meadowcroft and Monte Verde, he reminded me about an article he and some colleagues had written several years before on the initial colonization of northern Europe toward the end of the Pleistocene, as the great Scandinavian ice sheet retreated. In that article, Gamble and company stressed that it had taken nearly four thousand years for humans to spread north only eight hundred miles into a region they already knew existed. So much for blitzkrieg, Clovis-style dashes across the landscape of some unknown continent.
More important, however, was the nature of the evidence of the initial penetration of the northern third of the European continent. The earliest sites were few, small, widely dispersed, and virtually invisible, and Gamble ascribed them to what he called the “Pioneer Phase” of colonization, which by its very nature was highly ephemeral. For several thousand years, this would remain the case, until populations began to increase significantly, sites became larger and more common, and the threshold of visibility had been crossed. At this point, humans would have passed on to what Gamble called the “Residential Phase” of colonization. Standing as we were at Meadowcroft, one of literally only a handful of early New World sites, we heard Gamble's point loud and clear. Sites such as Meadowcroft and Monte Verde represent the Pioneer Phase in the peopling of the New World, while the Clovis horizon marked the threshold of visibility and the initiation of the Residential Phase.
But what exactly is the Clovis horizon? Clovis experts, especially the traditionalists, think they know the answer to this. Not simply a distinctive technological suite, Clovis is to them also a sociopolitical and, presumably, a genetic and linguistic entity as well. They consider Clovis people first and foremost hunters of big game, and their trademark fluted points are eloquent testimony to their skills.
Most people in the field, though, no longer think that is true. We now know that the diagnostic fluting of Clovis and later Folsom points conveyed no particular advantage in the hafting of stone points onto wooden or ivory shafts, nor in facilitating the penetration of such shafts into the resistanthides of thick-skinned megafauna. Why, then, are they “suddenly” everywhere or at least seem to be? Often found unused in special caches, Clovis points may in fact represent, if not luxury items, then perhaps something quite different. As Dave Meltzer muses, they could have played a crucial role not in hunting but in social bonding between far-flung groups—serving, perhaps, like a secret handshake.
Whatever the hallmark fluted points may represent, for now Clovis is more than ever an enigma, another of the great unknowns. Where it came from, what it was all about, and what happened to it after its brief stint on the earth are all open questions. My guess is that Clovis points and other lithic technologies will not, in the long run, provide the answer to who the first Americans were or when and how they got here. The lithic record
alone will not and cannot fully explicate the successful colonization of this hemisphere. Most of what the first colonizers made and used in their daily life was perishable—constructed of wood, leather, bone, and plant fiber— and most of it has not survived. Where it is present at places such as Monte Verde, or in dry caves or permafrost, it tells us far more about the first colonists than any Clovis point or, indeed, any other modified rock ever will.
The rarity of perishable artifacts, coupled with the scarcity of early sites, means that when such sites are found they must be excavated with exquisite precision and monomaniacal attention to detail. Such sites and their contents need to be managed with the care one provides for one's most sacred objects. Anything less, and these extremely rare sites will be ruined, their evidence left ambiguous and their precious insights forever lost.
Although, in truth, I am not bereft of opinions about the identity of the pioneers, I did take Madsen's comment as a compliment. Some others in my field have developed quite elaborate ideas about the great adventure of peopling the New World; what follows are “answers” several authorities have put forward in the last few years, some staggering in their precision, others astounding in their boldness.
NENANA IN THE TANANA, THEN THE WORLD?
One story goes like this: About 11,800 years ago, some people were living in central Alaska in the Tanana River valley, which leads into the upper Yukon River basin. As we know from the existence of Arctic ground squirrels there, it was steppelike in those days, and some of its inhabitants, whom we call the Nenana after the neighboring valley, probably explored the Yukon plateau fairly far south in the warm summer months, eating plants, fish, waterfowl, and big game along the way. Each summer they extended their base camp a bit farther southward, noting that the great ice sheet that stood a mile high at its edge was retreating. Once out of the mountains, they would have seen the vast welcoming plains of Canada stretching away to the horizon. This pioneering band might well have rushed back to the Tanana Valley to tell the others about these wondrous lands and then come back the following summer along with not only the rest of their band but a couple of other bands, too, who were eager for a new and better world. “It is very likely,” wrote the author of this model, “that there were people whose curiosity and quest for knowledge of the beyond would urge them ever southward.”
Then one of the bands' leaders decided he would go headlong to the south as far as he could go, and at summer's end, he and his followers found themselves on the shores of Lake Peace in Alberta. Later on, back in Alaska, these people made tools from the gigantic bones they had occasionally found lying about in the gravel outwashes of cold-running rivers. Although they had never seen the creature that had left its bones lying around, just south of Lake Peace they saw what they could imagine was its spoor—huge tracks together with enormous piles of dung. Adrenaline must have rushed, and they surely would have pressed onward.
The time was now 11,700 years ago, and the band had reached Boone Lake near Grand Prairie in Alberta. Among the poplar trees, they spotted their first mammoths, a herd of gigantic beasts unlike anything they had ever seen. For a while they watched; then they attacked. They managed to wound a young mammoth, only to have the enraged matriarch chargethem. When they hurled their small, light spears at the matriarch, they bounced off, so the hunters fled for their lives.
Before too many days passed, the band of hunters learned that the more they attacked the mammoth herds, the more wary the herds became, and soon enough they realized they needed heavier arms—bigger spear points with longer shafts. One of the hunters got the bright idea to make it easier to mount bigger spear points on longitudinally notched foreshafts. At first he experimented, removing a longitudinal flake from each side of the nearly completed big bifacial spear point. After perhaps days of breaking almost completed points, nicking his thumbs and fingers, and turning the air blue with late Pleistocene invective while the women kept the little children out of earshot, he succeeded.
Voilà—Clovis Man.
A few years later, he and his obedient followers, now highly skilled hunters, arrived in a winter camp near Wilsall, Montana. In all, it had taken six years for the band to travel from the upper Tanana Valley to what archaeologists call the Anzick site—a distance of some 3,500 miles, an easy march if they made about four miles a day from May to October each year. There at the Anzick site, the band leader's infant son drowned and was buried at the base of a small rock cliff with offerings of stone and bone implements. Summoned onward by the now-mythological promised land of the south, they went on to populate the entire hemisphere in a few hundred years, bands proliferating, splitting off, pushing on, and leaving caches of their fluted points behind, perhaps as markers of their passing, perhaps as offerings, or perhaps as a useful munitions dump in case they had to return.
Then trouble began. The world became drier, with year after year of drought. The water tables dropped, big game desperately gathered around the remaining water holes and fell easy prey to the hunters. Then, to make matters worse, the world turned bitterly cold during a period that lasted a thousand years, called the Younger Dryas. Winter freezes meant even less water for game. They perished, the remnants of once-great herds finally done in by the hunters. Among the big herds, only bison remained. Then, a good while later, some of these Clovis people, perhaps on the hunt somewhere in the Great Basin, ran into others, people who had arrived on the west coast via a coastal route.
This explanation of the peopling of the Americas sprang from themind of none other than Vance Haynes in the year 2001. It is supported, he says, by several circumstances: Nenana folk were in the Tanana Valley by about 11,700 B.P., when a warming trend occurred, creating an ice-free route through the two glaciers by 11,600 B.P., and Clovis folk were in Montana and central Texas by 11,550 B.P. Vance's hypothesis, as recounted above, is the only one of the few now floating about that simply cannot possibly be true. It is based, first and foremost, on the existence of the Nenana folk in the Tanana Valley in 11,700 B.P.
Given the long-held notion that people arrived in this hemisphere via the Bering land bridge, it is not at all surprising that archaeologists have looked on both sides of the Bering Strait for evidence of these people. With the discovery of the Clovis culture in the 1930s, it made sense to seek the remains of people who predated Clovis, people whose technology might have evolved into the unique fluted points of Clovis. Though not for a lack of trying, no one could find such remains. Instead, they found a variety of sites with microblades, the kind that can be stuck several at a time into notches in bone or wood foreshafts to make a composite javelin or dart point. Admittedly, eastern Siberia and western Alaska comprise an enormous amount of real estate, and hundreds of sites may well have gone unnoticed. But over the decades no one found any stone artifacts that might have evolved into Clovis—until the 1970s, when intensive excavation began in a place called Dry Creek in the Nenana River valley.
There Roger Powers, an expert in Russian prehistory, found the usual microblades, but in a stratum below he came across a number of older artifacts, notably some small, thin, triangular bifacial points and some teardrop-shaped points. Two other sites nearby bearing similar points— Walker Road and Moose Creek—soon came to light, and the three sites together served as type sites, which are the basis for recognizing the Nenana complex. The Nenana complex is defined entirely by lithic material, there being few or no organic tool remains. In all, the complex consists of points, knives, scrapers, perforators, hammers, anvils, and so forth. Radiocarbon dates came in averaging 11,300 B.P. and ranging from 11,800 to 11,000 B.P.
In other Nenana sites discovered later, such as one in the Tanana River valley, it became clear that these people had enjoyed a diet of cranes, ducks, swans, geese, beaver, squirrel, bison, caribou, and maybe even elk. Broken mammoth bones were also found, but it is not clear that mammoths actuallylived there among the Nenana people or that they hunted and ate them. The bones could simply have been the results of prior d
eaths, as Haynes suggests in his scenario. In any event, by 10,500 B.P., about the time Folsom points made their appearance in the American Southwest, the Nenana complex, with its bifacial spear points, was abruptly replaced by the bearers of the Denali culture, people who made not bifacial points but true microblades. So abrupt was the change that some scholars, including archaeologist E. James Dixon of the University of Alaska, believe that the Nenana people were displaced—basically run off—by another group. It may be, Dixon says, that interior Alaska was “a region repeatedly reoccupied by different cultural groups.”
The age of the Nenana complex has since been reassessed and is now thought to be 11,300 to 11,000 B.P., too late to be ancestral to Clovis. Vance Haynes seems to have missed that development, or perhaps simply ignored it or dismissed it out of hand. For decades Vance has appeared to be scientific and eminently reasonable by repeatedly calling for multiple working hypotheses. Unfortunately, for Vance himself there is but one working hypothesis, and it no longer adds up.
The sad fact is that the evidence is not going to make any difference to Vance, a man who, as one of his colleagues said, is now an example of someone whose mind has snapped shut, never to open again. With the exception of a handful of Haynes spear-carriers, the field has now clearly tilted toward the camp that believes in a pre-Clovis presence. Some like to argue whether this is what should be called a “paradigm shift” or not. Others question whether there ever was a paradigm (Clovis First) that needed shifting once the problems with it became too embarrassing to be ignored, or if it all happened differently from the way it is supposed to according to the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, who invented all the paradigm stuff. Frankly, such discussions don't make much difference, nor do they contribute much to the search for the first Americans. You can fit a lot of abstractions along with a host of angels on the head of a pin, and the rest of the world is going to yawn and turn on the ball game on TV.
The First Americans Page 29