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Southern archaeologists revise history |
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Written by Xiuhcoatl
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Nov 14, 2005 at 03:05 PM |
Note from Xiuhcoatl: The following article contains some bullshit by
European archaeologists who are still trying to prove they arrived on
our land first.
Southern archaeologists revise history
Excavations suggest new human timeline in U.S.
Written by By MIKE TONER
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 11/14/05
A wave of archaeological revisionism, fueled in part by unfolding
discoveries in South Carolina, is challenging long-held views about the
first Americans – who they were, where they came from, when they
arrived, and even what happened after they got here.
Generations of students have learned that hardy hunters — ancestors of
today's Native Americans — crossed a land bridge from Siberia into
Alaska as the last ice age was ending 13,000 years ago and, within
several centuries, had spread out across much of North and South
America.
But increasing evidence from archeological excavations and new analyses
of prehistoric human migrations is testing that once widely accepted
view of "coming to America."
"I think we had human activity here 40,000 to 50,000 years ago," said
University of South Carolina archaeologist Albert Goodyear, who has,
over the last few years, found signs of prehistoric toolmaking from
deeper and deeper excavations along the Savannah River in Allendale
County, S.C.
"The old ideas on New World origins are based on informed speculation
and not supported by evidence," said Smithsonian Institution
archaeologist Dennis Stanford. "Through time and repetition — and in
the absence of clear alternatives — the theory became dogma, and
ultimately ideology."
New set of questions
As doubts about the "dogma" grow, Stanford and other scientists at a
recent conference in Columbia are airing a host of emerging new
theories. Did they come by land or sea? And if by sea, was it via the
Pacific or the Atlantic? From Siberia, or Iberia? Or perhaps by way of
Australia? Did they inhabit Alaska first or the American South? Might
they have been here 20,000 years ago, or even 40,000 to 50,000 years
ago? Did their hunting prowess drive the woolly mammoths and other ice
age "megafauna" to extinction, or were human populations decimated by
some global catastrophe that also extinguished other species in North
America around 12,000 years ago?
For a half century, archaeologists have held that the first Americans
were the people who made a distinctive style of stone tools – broadly
fluted, carefully crafted blades and projectile points first found near
Clovis, N.M.
Although Clovis points have since been found throughout the country,
they always occur at sites generally dated to between 12,500 and 12,900
years ago — soon after the opening of an ice-free corridor through
western Canada that is thought to have provided these "first Americans"
with ready access to the interior of the continent.
"Like other archaeologists, I didn't believe there was anything
earlier," said Goodyear, who found a Clovis "tool factory" on a
hillside near Martin, S.C. "And we didn't look for what we didn't think
was there so we didn't find anything earlier."
In recent years, however, several locations along the Eastern Seaboard,
in Central America, and in southern Chile have yielded archaeological
evidence — some persuasive, some disputed — that humans were widely
distributed in America long before Clovis technology and the people who
developed it.
Sites with simpler man-made tools have been unearthed in a cave at
Meadowcroft, Pennsylvania, in a sand dune at Cactus Hill, Virginia, and
in a river bottom in northern Florida.
Radiocarbon dates place the presence of humans at those sites somewhere between 14,000 and 17,000 years ago.
Spurred by such discoveries, Goodyear decided to dig deeper at his site
— wondering if the large outcropping of flint-like chert might have
attracted people to the banks of the Savannah River in an earlier time.
The deeper he went, the further back in time he went. Over the last
several years, he has unearthed what may be the oldest hints yet of
humans in North America — a thin strip of burned plant material that
could be an ancient hearth, and chipped and flaked chert that he
believes are the oldest tools ever found in North America.
"I think we had human activity at 40,000 to 50,000 years ago," he said.
Some archaeologists have attempted to explain such dates by suggesting
that there were earlier waves of immigrants from Asia who trickled down
the coast of Alaska and California, perhaps even to South America.
European origins?
Genetic and linguistic similarities between today's Native Americans
and the people of Siberia strongly support the notion that, at whatever
time they arrived, the first Americans came from Asia.
But Stanford and Exeter University archaeologist Bruce Bradley contend
that archaeological evidence of Asian origins is less convincing. They
say most of the prehistoric sites in eastern Siberia, the likely
jumping-off point for immigration to America, are younger than Clovis
sites in America. Even more perplexing, they say, is that stone tools
found in Siberia have little in common with finely crafted Clovis
points.
But Stanford and Exeter say made-in-America Clovis technology does
resemble stone tools of the Solutrian culture, which arose in southern
France and northern Spain 15,000 to 20,000 years ago.
How did they get here? Stanford said the ice age climate was so cold
that Solutrian hunters in skin or wooden boats could have easily
followed seals and other game along the ice front connecting northern
Europe with Labrador — perhaps reaching the shores of North America by
accident.
Stanford said his theory explains why Clovis archaeological sites in
the eastern United States tend to be older than those in the western
states and Alaska. He thinks Clovis people moved out of the Southeast
into the west and north as the ice sheets covering North America
retreated.
But Stanford conceded that while the "Solutrian solution" may reveal
the origins of Clovis culture, it doesn't explain the primitive tools
being found in South Carolina, which — if the dates are correct and the
tools really are tools — reflect human activity thousands of years
earlier.
While scientists ponder where Clovis culture came from, others are
trying to explain where it went. Based on the tools by which we know
them, Clovis people took the country by storm in a matter of a few
centuries — and then faded quickly from the archaeological record.
Richard Firestone, a nuclear scientist at the Department of Energy's
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, thinks that the Clovis era may
literally have ended with a bang – a supernova, a star that exploded
somewhere in the galactic neighborhood 41,000 years ago and unleashed a
rain of cosmic debris that reached the earth about 13,000 years ago.
He said heightened levels of radiation and microscopic magnetic
spherules recovered from nine Clovis sites in North America, including
the one in South Carolina, suggest a major impact of space debris at
about that time.
Firestone said the impact, perhaps a large comet ejected by the
supernova, wasn't as big a cataclysm as the one blamed for the demise
of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, but he believes it was
sufficient to disrupt human and animal life over a large part of North
America.
Firestone's theory has been challenged by other physicists, but it also
competes with more mundane explanations for the decline of Clovis
culture.
Some archaeologists contend that the disappearance of mammoths and
other big game at the end of the ice age left the hunters with nothing
to hunt. Some suspect they may have failed to adapt to a changing
climate, or been decimated by disease.
"The more we know, the more we realize how complex the situation is,"
said University of Tennessee archaeologist David Anderson. It's clear
that we're going to have to start thinking of the peopling of the
Americas as a process, not an event.
"The fact is that we don't have a simple story to tell, but that's what makes this an exciting time for archaeology."
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Archaeology 