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The First Americans

Page 32

by James Adovasio


  Indeed, all the old questions remain unanswered: who, when, and how. But the very existence of such a high level of cultural variability in preClovis times, and for that matter in Clovis times as well, strongly suggests that there were multiple incursions into this hemisphere by people who were probably diverse genetically, using the ice-free corridor when it was available, the less formidable coastal route, and one of the other routes before the last glacial maximum as well as after it. Multiple routes would, of course, accord with both the linguistic and genetic evidence that several groups migrated here several times over the millennia.

  A WHOLE NEW WORLD

  Today, the study ofthe early peopling ofthe New World is vibrant and alive with possibilities. The questions with which we began this book and this chapter—who were those guys, when did they get here, and how?—remain without definitive answers. What we can say is that we have peeled back a lot of layers of ignorance over the past century or so. At the very least, we now know better who those guys weren't: they were neither the lost tribes ofIsrael nor the Atlanteans, they weren't Neanderthal-like, and they didn't get here only a few thousand years ago. They weren't a single band of anyone, much less a band of fifty or a hundred turbocharged hunters.

  Today there are multiple routes to explore, multiple times to pin down, multiple groups of people who were potentially those early pioneers. Whereas a hundred years ago the archaeologist's quiver had very few arrows, today an expanding host of new disciplines and subdisciplines is brought to bear on the old questions, each in turn raising new questions to the answers, which then raise even more questions. Are we getting close toanswering the basic questions of who, when, and how? Who knows? It is not at all impossible that some students who are now undergraduates in college, thinking about a career in archaeology, or maybe some kids in high school, thinking mostly about the opposite gender, will become famous for having found the unmistakable traces of the very first Americans. If so, I hope it will be one of my students, although I would not wish on any of them the kind of vituperative and pestiferous melee that I have dealt with over the past three decades. Perhaps now that the Clovis curtain has been pulled down and its only remaining proponents are considered extremists, the field of early-man studies can go forth more in the European manner proposed by Doug Price—without such acrimony, but instead with a cooperative spirit.

  I would not count on that. And lest everyone start feeling all warm and fuzzy, there is another big problem to which I have alluded here and there in this account and that still plagues most studies of the peopling of the Americas, especially the North American studies. It is embodied in the question “Who are those guys?” as well as in the phrase I let slip just a paragraph back—“early-man studies.”

  It is all very well to establish where the first Americans came from and how they got here and when, but a far more important question in the long run is surely this: How did they go about the business of living and succeeding in a new land? For a century in New World studies and more than twice as long in the Old World, the lifestyles question has been focused on what males did. There are several reasons for this gender myopia. First, up until recently it was mostly males doing the archaeology. Second, the archaeological record, by nature, has preserved stone tools, the traditional province of males—or so we would like to believe—at the expense of more perishable items, the likely realm of females, and it has strongly shaped our interpretational biases to this very day. If we have ignored the role of females despite the best efforts of a whole recent cadre of feminist archaeologists, what of children and old people of either sex? In the Clovis scenarios, they are largely ignored, except to be imagined as something of a drag, slowing down the great intercontinental bloodbath.

  This gender bias is changing, slowly perhaps, but fast enough that a new view is inevitable, and this is not necessarily only because more women are involved in archaeology, though that certainly is a great part of it. (After all, the answers you get often depend on the questions you ask.)The new view, though, is also a result of the facts. As early as the 1960s, the late Walter Taylor noted that in his excavations in a series of dry caves in Coahuila in the 1940s, finished perishable fiber artifacts were four times more common than artifacts of wood and twenty times more common than stone tools. This same ratio has been found again and again in hundreds of dry caves, rockshelters, and other contexts where conditions favored the preservation of all of a group's technology. Much the same ratios of fiber, wood, and stone artifacts are found in hunter-gatherer societies of more recent times, even in Arctic and sub-Arctic settings.

  And for the archaeologist who attends to this common aspect of the hunting-gathering life, an entirely new picture emerges. At least as far back as the late Pleistocene, there is plenty of evidence that people were making things out of plant fiber, weaving it into baskets, cordage, nets, sandals, and textiles in both the Old World and the Americas. The oldest such artifactknown so far from North America is the piece of basketry found at Meadowcroft dating between about 12,800 and 11,300 years ago. There is also a far older Meadowcroft perishable that is between 19,000 and 17,000 years old, a single element of what appears to be intentionally cut birchlike bark similar in shape to the strips later employed in Meadowcroft plaiting. If this single strip is indeed what we think it is, it is not only the oldest piece of perishable technology in the hemisphere, but it makes a pre–late glacial maximum arrival practically a certainty.

  Artist's reconstruction of late Ice Age net hunter emphasizing plant fiber–based technology and the role of women in Ice Age economies.

  Elsewhere throughout the Americas, from Clovis-era sites and those that are younger, sophisticated fiber artifacts have turned up in quantity. Little doubt can remain that such artifacts were an important part of the armamentarium of the first Americans. Cross-cultural studies of hunter-gatherers and other tribal people suggest that the making of fiber artifacts—textiles, basketry, nets, and so forth—is associated with both sexes. Among the Hopi, women make baskets and men do the weaving, but otherevidence suggests that in pre-market societies, basketry, and weaving in particular, is normally the labor of women. So we may take the presence of such materials in an archaeological site as signs of the presence there of the women of the band—a presence which has almost universally been overlooked. The existence of this “soft” technology—as Bob Bettinger of the University of California, Davis, calls it—has profound implications for our understanding of these people's behavior and even social organization. The presence of such artifacts dating back into the late Pleistocene and before suggests that perhaps the ability to make use of plant fibers in order to produce useful objects was one of the first major steps in the development of modern humanity as we understand it.

  Cache of Clovis points and assorted tools from the Anzick site, Montana.

  Even without such wide-ranging speculation, the existence in the late Pleistocene of the kind of knots needed to make nets, what are called sheet bends or weaver's knots, is highly suggestive. Hunting with nets is a communal affair. It takes relatively less expertise to succeed and is a lot less dangerous than confrontational hunting of the sort accomplished with spears and javelins. As a result, net hunting uses the entire group—women, children, and geezers, as well as the hunting-age men. Ethnographic studies have shown that it takes a long time for a young adult male to becometruly proficient as a hunter; only after ten or fifteen years, between the ages of twenty-five and thirty, do men in several South American tribes today learn enough to reach their maximum hunting efficiency. On the other hand, net hunting permits virtually all hands to help garner much-needed protein without putting women and children at risk. Netting also suggests large harvests of meat in a short period of time, which in turn would permit large gatherings, feasts, ceremonialism, dancing …a heightened camaraderie. By keeping perishable artifacts and the role of women in mind, we are able to present a less testosterone-infused and ultimately more likely alternative to the Clovis big-game
model.

  Funeral of Clovis First.

  THE GREAT ADVENTURE

  Someone once wrote that the movement of humans into the New World would be the last great continental-scale colonizing effort of our species until we quit this planet for another. Whoever those first colonists were and whenever they got here, imagine the adrenaline rush of realizing you were embarked on a trip into country where no one had ever been before. (Would the first Americans have known that was what they were doing? Probably they would have realized it before too long—after all, they would not have seen any thin columns of smoke rising on the horizon ahead.) After a while, it would dawn on you that you and the members of your group were strangers in a very strange land, all alone in this place with its exotic plants and animals and its utterly new landforms.

  That is the kind of rush that most of us will never experience, and indeed, most of the details of that ancient, dangerous, arduous adventure will remain unknown—lost, forever fragmentary, a matter of guesswork based on small, adventitious clusters of evidence that have long lain mute in the ground and remain, to a greater or lesser degree, enigmatic. But that such things, these dim tracks and artifacts of so distant a past, can still speak to us, however haltingly, and that they still have so much more to say… that is the great adventure available to us.

  AFTERWORD

  As this book goes to press, it is worth noting that the Kennewick issue remains unresolved and as contentious as ever. A hearing was held in federal appeals court in Portland, Oregon, on June 19–20, 2001. Attendees included not only all but one of the aggrieved plaintiffs in Bonnichsen et al. v. the United States of America, representatives of the claimant tribes, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Department of the Interior, but also interested third parties such as the Society for American Archaeology, the press, various Native American activists, and yours truly. The presiding magistrate, John Jelderks, valiantly attempted to unravel what Paleo-Indian scholar Brad Lepper has called the “Gordian knot controversy.” He very diligently explored the opposing positions on a variety of issues, the most basic of which were the appropriateness of Bruce Babbitt's decision to repatriate the Kennewick remains and, more fundamentally, the reality of the alleged cultural affiliation between Kennewick and the claimant tribes.

  Jelderks made it clear—at least to this not very impartial spectator— that he was not very sympathetic to the government's position and yet at the same time he took exception to some of the scientists' positions as well. Given the notoriety and gravity of the case, as well as the fact that the outcome will almost surely be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, Jelderks warned that his decision would be carefully considered and not delivered any time soon. This prophecy has proven accurate.

  Whatever the outcome, I can only reiterate that the Kennewick remains will probably not fundamentally alter our understanding of the chronology of the peopling of the New World, no matter what the final disposition is.

  On another, still-unfolding, front—and to my mind, a far more exciting one—are the continuing excavations at the Gault site. Gault is a very large and deeply stratified open site covering more than thirty acres on the Edwards Plateau of central Texas. To date, it has yielded abundant archaeological evidence of human occupation extending back to at least Clovis times, ca. 11,200 years ago, as well as tantalizing hints of even older occupations. Though collectors have plundered Gault's Archaic and more recent horizons for more than eighty years (often with the active collaboration and encouragement of past landowners), the deeper, older deposits have largely escaped despoliation.

  In 1990, David Olmstead, an amateur archaeologist, recovered in a deep excavation two Clovis points associated with elaborately incised stones, which were brought to the attention of the University of Texas at Austin in 1991. University of Texas archaeologists ultimately confirmed the existence of a deeply buried Clovis component at Gault, which in turn led to extensive professional excavations by scholars from a variety of academicinstitutions and the Texas Archaeological Society. The work there has gone on under the overall supervision and coordination of Mike Collins (he of Monte Verde fame) and the auspices of the Texas Archaeo-logical Research Laboratory.

  Mike Collins, director of the excavations of Gault.

  At the time of writing, not only have the archaeologists on the Gault excavations team identified and explored later Paleo-Indian manifestations like Folsom and Midland but, perhaps most significantly, they've recovered almost 500,000 pieces of worked stone, as well as bone, ivory, and animal teeth, attributable to Clovis times. Gault is the largest collection of Clovis materials from any one site in North America, and according to Collins's estimates, it may even have yielded half of all the Clovis material found in stratified context in all of North America!

  This density of material is by no means reflective of the pattern of a few artifacts left by a handful of highly mobile mammoth hunters, as predicted by the Clovis Firsters. Instead, it clearly indicates the presence of a large and perhaps even semisedentary population exploiting not just—or even mainly—mammoths, but rather a great diversity of local resources, which at any other later time in the site's history would be synonymous with a generalized Archaic lifestyle. As Collins speculates, Paleo-Indians were probably drawn to Gault for the same reasons as their Archaic “successors,” namely that the location of Gault at an ecotonal boundary or frontier between ecological zones provided a richly diverse and abundant supply of broad-spectrum resources for hunter-gatherers at all time periods.

  Ongoing excavations in the Clovis horizon at the Gault site.

  About 27.5 inches below the Clovis occupation there are flakes that are most likely of pre-Clovis ascription. While this is certainly worth noting, it is the sheer size of Gault's Clovis occupation that in both Collins's view and my own seriously undermines the traditional view of Clovis First. Gault is no overnight campsite for a small band of highly mobile Clovis elephant killers. Nor for that matter are Shoop in Pennsylvania, Thunder-bird and Williamson in Virginia, or Carson-Conn-Short in Tennessee. No, these are very large Clovis base camps reflective not of ephemeral populations thinly spread across the landscape, populations who got here “yesterday” in Ice Age terms, but unambiguous evidence of the residential phase of colonization by groups who may have first ventured here 5,000 or even 10,000 years earlier. Indeed, large sites like Gault are the visible evidence of Gamble's residential phase of colonization.

  As Collins said in Santa Fe, this is an exciting time to be an archaeolo-gist. Places like Gault and others yet to be discovered ensure that the great adventure can only continue.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  What follows are the main sources used in the process of compiling this book. A number of sources were helpful throughout, and they are listed first under the head “General.” The rest are listed chapter by chapter. A complete bibliography of the entire subject of the early peopling of the New World, including technical reports, reviews, books, and popular accounts, would go on for more pages than taken up by this entire book and would serve little purpose in this context.

  I am told that I sometimes seem a bit contentious about the work that has gone on these past several decades at Meadowcroft Rockshelter, so, by way of providing readers with a chance to pursue my claims for this site further, I have included as complete a list of Meadowcroft publications and papers as I could compile as of this writing. They include not only works produced directly under my supervision or with my collaboration and participation, but also a limited number of popular treatments produced by journalists.—J.M.A.

  GENERAL

  Carlisle, R. C. Pittsburgh: Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh, “Americans Before Columbus: Ice-Age Origins.” Ethnology Monographs, vol. 12.

  Daniel. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, G. A Hundred and Fifty Years of Archaeology.

  Dillehay, T. D., D. J. Meltzer. Boca Raton, Fla.: CRC Press, The First Americans: Search and Research.<
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  Fagan, B. M. New York: Thames and Hudson, The Great Journey: The Peopling of Ancient America.

  Fagan, B. M. New York: Thames and Hudson, Ancient North America: The Archaeology of a Continent.

  Meltzer, D. J. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, Search for the First Americans.

  Willey, G. R., J. A. Sabloff. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, A History of American Archaeology, 3d ed.

  OVERTURE: NOT FOR THE TIMID OF HEART

  Deloria, V., Jr. New York: Scribner, Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact.

  CHAPTER ONE: GLIMPSES THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

  Driver, H. E., Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, The Americas on the Eve of Discovery.

  Grayson, Donald K. New York: Academic Press, The Establishment of Human Antiquity.

  Grayson, Donald K., R. C. Carlisle, Pittsburgh: Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh, “Americans Before Columbus: Perspectives on the Archaeology of the First Americans.” In “Americans Before Columbus: Ice-Age Origins,” 107–123.Ethnology Monographs, vol. 12.

  Grayson, Donald K., P. S. Martin, R. G. Klein, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, “Nineteenth-Century Explanations of Pleistocene Extinctions: A Review and Analysis.” In Quaternary Extinctions: A Prehistoric Revolution, 5–39.

  Henige, D. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, Numbers from Nowhere: The American Indian Contact Population Debate.

 

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