The First Americans

by James Adovasio

  The handful of people in the field who still can't accept a pre-Clovis presence in the Western Hemisphere remind me of a bumper sticker that had a brief run in the late seventies and the eighties. It said STOPCONTINENTALDRIFT. In fairness, there are also some who just wish there weremore pre-Clovis sites. For these people, the fact that there have been any questions raised about Monte Verde and Meadowcroft makes them doubt the overwhelming evidence. They would love to have replicability before them, or more pre-Clovis sites. Happily, now there are.

  REPLICABILITY

  Replicability was not one of the necessary criteria formulated by that ultimate hardnose, Aleš Hrdlíčka, or anyone else in America or abroad untilrelatively recently. What the Clovis First fanatics didn't seem to notice was that, with all the replicability of Clovis sites, there were a lot of other post-Clovis sites, and some contemporary ones as well, showing an enormous variety of lithic styles, that all argued eloquently for behavioral diversity, bespeaking far more arrivals in this hemisphere than a single (and late) group. This is true not only in South America, where the various material cultures show no affinity whatsoever with Clovis, but also in North America.

  Excavations at Cactus Hill, Virginia.

  Artifact mapping at Cactus Hill.

  Profile of sand dune deposits at Cactus Hill.

  Mike Johnson, project director of the ASVCactus Hill Excavations, retrieving a C-14 sample.

  Clovis point from Cactus Hill.

  The search for pre-Clovis has provided a great deal of incentive throughout the seventy-odd years since the finds at Blackwater Draw, motivating such people as Scotty MacNeish, Ruth Gruhn, and Alan Bryan, never mind their failure to find the grail. But now it is in hand—this grail called pre-Clovis sites—and more of them will no doubt turn up as the years go by. Undoubtedly, such finds will produce as many questions as answers, which is one reason why people still study to be archaeologists.

  Several sites are under investigation that appear to be as old as, if not older than, Meadowcroft. One of these is called Cactus Hill, located on the shore of the Nottoway River, which meanders slowly across the coastal plain of Virginia into Albemarle Sound on the North Carolina coast. The site is located in a six-foot-deep, sequentially migrating sand dune and has been simultaneously excavated by two different teams, one directed by Joseph McAvoy of the Nottaway River Survey, under a grant from the National Geographic Society, the other by Michael Johnson of the Archaeological Society of Virginia. If this sounds like having two wives in one kitchen, that is exactly the situation. The two teams barely speak to each other. Even so, the two men did manage to combine their efforts in one of several reports issued from the site, the last being an article in National Geographic in 2000.

  The first three feet down in the dunes contain historic- to Clovis-era material, but four inches below that, in an unmistakably separateolder horizon, are a hearth and a charcoal concentration beneath an array of stone tools. This hearth is dated to 15,070 ±70 B.P. and the carbon beneath the tool cluster to 16,670 ±730 B.P. The pre-Clovis flaked-stone items are mostly blades made from quartzite cores collected elsewhere and made at the site by flaking the cores with soft stone hammers. Also represented are a couple of lanceolate, unfluted, bifacial points that could have been projectile points or hafted knives. Like the tools at Meadowcroft, these appear to have been the work of people who were foraging for a variety of faunal and floral food resources.

  Pre-Clovis artifacts from Cactus Hill.

  General view of Saltville, Virginia. Pleistocene faunal remains have been recovered here, some in association with archaeological material of late Pleistocene age.

  Another such site is reported from Saltville, Virginia, which is located in southwestern Virginia just north of the North Carolina–Tennessee border. Today this is classic Appalachia, a country of snakelike creeks and hills and also, incidentally, the home in nearby Poor Valley of the A. P. Carter family, who popularized real country music in the twenties and are still heard from in the persons of June Carter Cash and her husband, Johnny. In the Saltville Valley, investigations of fossiliferous deposits of Quaternary age have been ongoing for some twenty years. Recently Jerry McDonald of the Virginia Museum of Natural History came across, resting on top of bedrock, a five-thousand-year-long sequence of sediments dating back to between 13,000 and 14,510 years B.P.

  Excavations at Saltville. The bone bed has yielded modified bone artifacts and stone tools in excess of 13,000 B.P.

  Excavations at Saltville. The excavator is working in a midden deposit associated with the edge of a Pleistocene-age pond.

  Modified bone tool from Saltville. This artifact may be a pressure flaker used for stone tool production.

  In a layer nearest the bedrock are the remains of a mastodon that may have been butchered and burned, which, if true, makes it one of the very few mastodons known to have been eaten by people. Associated with the mastodon's remains are two choppers or wedges of sandstone, a piece of bone deliberately grooved by a person, a heavily modified and extensively used bone tool, and some flakes made of nonlocal chert. Evidently, the bone tool is from a musk ox tibia and was directly dated to 14,510 ±80 B.P.

  Bone scraping tool from Saltville, made from a long bone of a musk ox (Bootherium bombifrons), dating to ca. 14,500 B.P.

  Ongoing excavations at Topper, South Carolina. The deposits shown span the entire Holocene and late Pleistocene.

  Archaeologists excavating Ice Age deposits at Topper.

  Archaeologists examining the deep stratigraphy at Topper. The upper units span the Holocene, while the lower are from the late Ice Age.

  Above the mastodon layer are two more layers that apparently represent two separate occupational interludes. One includes a column of weathered pieces of bedrock that seem to be man-made, for what purpose no one knows, and below that are some lithic materials and fragments of aquatic life—fish, bivalves, and the like—along with twigs that date to nearly 14,000 years ago. Again, this appears to have been the tool kit and the “table scraps” of some generalized foragers taking seasonal advantage of the place.

  Another pre-Clovis site, called Topper, is located on the Savannah River in South Carolina, on the border with Georgia. At the meeting in Santa Fe in 1999, Al Goodyear of the University of South Carolina described this site, pointing out that at one stage of excavations there, he had reached what was evidently a Clovis-era layer and had gone no farther, assuming,as so many colleagues did, that that was as early as human habitation went. But recent reports had impelled him to look a bit farther down on a high Pleistocene terrace above the river, which was associated with an outcrop of chert and a quarry site.

  Burin fragments from Topper.

  The site consists of one layer of sand about four and a half feet thick, underlain by another distinct layer ofsand about another three feet thick, underlain in turn by yet another distinct layer ofclaylike sand. In the upper layer are artifacts that date from Clovis times to the period of European contact. While in the bottom layer, Goodyear found an enigmatic assemblage of stone flakes, burins, microblades, and microblade cores, but no bifaces. Some of the chert used was nonlocal, meaning someone had brought it there, and there appear to be several distinct rock-chipping stations. This lithic suite, as it is called, dates back to at least 15,000 to 16,000 years ago, based on optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dates obtained from the sands.

  PROLIFERATING POSSIBILITIES

  Serious questions remain about Topper, Saltville, and Cactus Hill, and these sites will indeed benefit from continuing investigation and confirmation. Yet with such sites coming to the fore and Meadowcroft and Monte Verde already securely established as pre-Clovis, except in the minds offanatics, thedays of Clovis First are finally over and the old questions can arise, fresh and wonderful to behold. Who are those guys? How did they get here? When? Scenarios for pre-Clovis migration abound, ranging from the conservative to the freebooting. Brian Fagan, an indefatigable chronicler of American archaeology i
n both textbooks and popular books, as well as a professor of anthropology at the University of California at Santa Barbara and an early and vocal supporter ofMeadowcroft, expresses a cautious view in his latest college-level textbook on world prehistory. He assumes that most human activity on the continent dates from sometime after 20,000 years ago and that practically no one lived in Siberia before 18,000 years ago, neither of which are unreasonable suggestions based on a conservative interpretation of available data. Similarly, few people lived in frigid Beringia during the glacial maximum, but then, about 12,700 B.C. or 14,650 years ago, the temperatures in the far north rose rapidly and people began heading across the land bridge and south. Once under way, they ranged far and wide.

  Computer modeling, Fagan says, suggests that if people took the “least-cost” approach to all this pioneering—meaning that they took the least arduous routes into the unknown places that would provide them with food and good stone for tools—they would have needed only two millennia to settle the New World from polar bear land to penguinville. But this is a linear approach, and the sites of early human habitation do not necessarily obey linear rules. Indeed, they do not appear to be linear at all but rather are scattered thinly over huge regions, which suggests that people leapfrogged their way into the New World, settling some areas and ignoring others. Then, he suggests, Clovis people came along and filled in the blanks on the map. For by 11,400 years ago, North America entered into the Younger Dryas, the cold snap mentioned earlier, which could have caused wetter and more favorable game conditions on the Great Plains and in the Southwest and allowed Clovis folk to flourish, spread out, and adapt to a wide range of environments, its artifacts diversifying by what he calls “stylistic drift.”

  As Fagan says, this picture is “still little more than a theoretical scenario,” and indeed it leaves many questions unanswered. First of all, why would hunters and gatherers, who always live a relatively parlous life, go racing past a perfectly well stocked habitat and leave behind the possibility of an occasional reunion with relatives and old friends during which information could be exchanged and mating arranged? Why would people whoknew, for example, how to hunt larger or smaller herbivores “leapfrog” into a coastal area where they had to learn how to fish? And if the Clovis culture spread out from some good times on the plains in 11,200 B.P., why are there more Clovis sites in the Southeast of the present United States than in the West, and perhaps older ones to boot? And finally, where did the people at Meadowcroft in 16,000 B.P. leapfrog from?

  Perhaps the biggest problem I have with Fagan's otherwise quite plausible scenario is that he still has the initial percolation of humans into the New World pegged at about 14,000 B.P., which gives them only about 1,500 years to reach Monte Verde and another 1,300 years to populate the rest of the hemisphere. Despite the fact that this is a much longer time than Martin or Haynes allows for the penetration of the hemisphere, it is still, at least in my mind, too short to provide enough time to adjust and adapt to the 8,000 miles of mountains, rain forests, plains, and deserts with their ever-changing array of potential game and plant food resources. Remember, each new habitat offers not only potentially novel plant and animal foods but also new medicinal and/or poisonous plants at each step. One false bite and you're dead or hallucinating for a week. More seriously, Fagan's allotted colonization interval seems too short to account for the great diversity in technology and lifestyles that seem to be well established by 11,000 years ago, and further, his numbers seem too brief in comparison to the documented colonization rates for either interior Australia or Northern Europe during deglaciation. But, of course, all this may be simply chronological hairsplitting.

  Generally speaking, I think Fagan and I would both agree that people tend to proceed slowly and with a bit of caution into new territory, especially people such as most hunters and gatherers, who live by hard-won traditions. Another way of looking at this is called the return rate. According to this view, a group in a given hunting-and-gathering area is not likely simply to leave for new territory until the price is right—meaning that their territory is sufficiently depleted or altered that the cost of making a living there appears to be higher than the costs and dangers of trying someplace new where the old techniques, the old lore, may not be applicable.

  To oversimplify, guys who are used to sticking little spears in dying mammoths in some swamp are not likely to be able to reap an immediate harvest of meat from monkeys running around in the canopy of a rain forest. And the New World was made up of lots of huge and different ecosystems that had to be mastered if the continents were to be filled with humans. As we have seen and as Gamble has suggested, that process simply had to take a lot more than a few centuries or even a few millennia. The rapidity with which we today adopt whole new technologies can confuse us about the deep past and make us forget how slowly traditional human societies change. As a caveat here, of course, it is worth pointing out that there are still cattle ranchers in the American West who are doing things on the range exactly as their great-grandfathers did, and for no other reason than that that is what their great-grandfathers did.

  THE LATE PLEISTOCENE YACHT CLUB

  The big problem presented by the existence of pre-Clovis sites is that, for all anyone can tell, the ice-free corridor between the Cordilleran and Laurentian glaciers was open around early Clovis time, but it had been shut for several thousand years before that. The only likely solution is that they must have come by boat. You could presumably leave coastal Asia, say the islands north of Japan, which at the height of the glaciers were mostly connected, and paddle along the warm Japanese current north to Beringia, east to Alaska, and down the western coast of North America. But where would you put in along the west coast of North America when it was covered out to the edge of the continental shelf with the Cordilleran glacier? Happily, it now turns out that the Cordilleran glacier was never in total command of the coast. There were what scientists call “refugia” along the way, ice-free spots that sailors would think of as safe harbors where they could gather themselves, kill a few seals or whatever, and then be on their way.

  In this manner, paddling or maybe even sailing along by means of skin or woven plant fiber sails, people could have whisked down the coast in fairly short order. The idea of a coastal route was promulgated as early as 1960, even before the problems with the Clovis model and the ice-free corridor arose. From several angles, the notion is quite appealing. For one, the Clovis point, affixed to a bone shaft that in turn is affixed to a wooden shaft, is very similar to the Inuit harpoon. Couldn't the Clovis configuration have arisen from people who hunted fish and marine mammals withharpoonlike weapons along the food-rich shores of the continent? That may be getting pretty speculative, but it is a fact that people got to Australia at least 40,000 years ago, and they could have gotten there only by some sort of watercraft over open water. Why would such maritime folk have decided to go only south?

  With the Nenana culture evidently out of contention as a Clovis precursor, E. James Dixon, who has spent much of his professional career as an archaeologist poking into sites in Alaska, has recently become a champion of the coastal route. Initial colonization, Dixon says, could have taken place around 13,500 years ago by people moving down the west coast of the continent in small boats, presumably made of hides. Human remains have been found on one of the Channel Islands of California, Santa Rosa. There parts of a female skeleton were discovered a few years back and have been redated to between 11,100 and 11,500 years ago. Far to the south, on the Peruvian coast, two archaeological sites have recently come to light— Quebrada Tacahuay and Quebrada Jaguay—replete with the remains of fish and other marine animals. Clearly, some people had made an adaptation to a coastal, marine way of life only a few centuries after the time of the first Clovis hunters.

  According to the coastal theory, people could have traversed the entire length of the New World in about a thousand years, moving inland from there and eventually populating every place east to the Atlan
tic coasts. One would not reasonably expect to find a lot of archaeological sites along the coasts much older than those already found for the very good reason that the coast of pre-Clovis times is almost entirely underwater now due to the melting of the glaciers, which began about 14,000 years ago and continued for several thousand years before the ice and sea levels reached their present configuration. But even in three hundred feet of murky waters and the muck and goo of the continental shelf, all is not lost.

  In the 1990s, two Canadians—Daryl Fedje of Parks Canada and Heiner Josenhans of Canada's geological survey—used high-resolution sonar to complete a detailed bathymetric map of the landscape about 170 feet deep in Juan Pérez Sound, about a half mile off the Queen Charlotte Islands of British Columbia. Below them was a land of onetime river valleys, floodplains, and ancient lakes. The Canadians dredged up huge quantities of muck and found a stump of a pine tree and other woody remains thatdated via carbon-14 to some 12,000 years B.P. Elsewhere they found the shells of plentiful shellfish dating from the same era. In other words, here was a place that would have been habitable by herbivores and predators, including human predators, even before the ice had retreated far to the north. In a burst of amazing good luck given the nature of their task, they also spotted in some dredged-up goo a triangular, flaked blade of dark basalt about four inches in length. Clearly it is an artifact, and the associated sediment has been subsequently dated to about 10,000 years ago.