Ten Things I Learned at Clovis & Beyond
As I sit in my hotel room on a crisp night in Santa Fe, New Mexico, my mind reels from the impact of the Clovis and Beyond conference. From October 28 through 31st, 1999, nearly 1,200 people converged on the Sweeney Conference center, to discuss, debate, and scrap over just who were the first people to colonize the American continents. They also came to show their goodies; a whole room was set aside to bring together for the first time people who, like me, are fascinated by the hidden history of the American continent migration.
Since my brain is still reeling, I'll restrict this column to a brief list of the top ten things I learned in the last 48 hours. In the long tradition of top ten lists, I'll start with the minor shocks and end with the major earthquake of the weekend.
10. Various attendees were extremely displeased with the presentation of the Monte Verde criticism in Scientific American's Discovering Archaeology this month. Researchers such as Monte Verde excavator Tom Dillehay objected to the essays on three points: the personal and borderline insulting tone of the =Stuart Fiedel critique; the location of that critique in a non-academic and non-peer-reviewed venue; and the limited amount of time Dillehay received to respond in the same issue. The science of archaeology may be reaching toward open peer review, but we're going to have to learn to be polite about our differences before it becomes advancement of the science.
9. The ethical issues surrounding the Kennewick Man controversy are clouded by the uneven and ad hoc implementation of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). There are no guidelines in NAGPRA to deal with unaffiliated cultural remains such as Kennewick Man (i.e., remains which cannot be attributed to any one modern culture), particularly with respect to how much study needs to be performed, who does it, and the final dispensation of the remains. In many cases, it is up to the local administrator to decide who gets the bones and when, and s/he has no guidelines to make that decision. The unaffiliated remains include the oldest skeletal material in the Americas, and they are our best lines of information for learning who the Paleo-American people were. Because of this legislative black hole, they are at risk of being lost forever. Many are already reburied, including Buhl woman from Idaho, Spirit Cave from Nevada, and the Pelican Lake and Browns Valley skeletons, Minnesota.
8. New results from mitochondrial DNA (MtDNA) investigations suggest at least five separate waves of migration from founding populations of the old world are in evidence among the Native American populations today; however, this data does not conclusively state which founder population might have been first or when "first" might have happened. Partially matching gene haplotypes are found in modern day north Asians, south Asians, Pacific Rim peoples, and Indo-European peoples; but additional colonizations have not been ruled out yet.
7. George Frison, who was named Archaeologist of the Century, would have named H. Marie Wormington Archaeologist of the Century, had anyone asked him.
6. There are a lot of Clovis sites in North America; none are north of British Columbia. The earliest dates on Clovis occupations seem to be in the southeastern United States at the Aucilla River sites in Florida. There are no clear technological precursors to Clovis in Asia any closer than the Lake Baikal region, at several localities at a site called Stud'onoye, some 2700 miles west of the Bering Strait, somewhere in the neighborhood of 17,200-18,800 years ago, and there is nothing even remotely like it in between.
5. There are numerous pre-Clovis sites in South America--but none appear to be the progenitors of Clovis. By the time of the first Clovis sites, around 11,500 years ago, all areas of South America were settled; from coastal Venezuela Taima-Taima site of 13,000 years before the present; Andean Colombia Tibitó site of 11,700 ybp, Peruvian Andes sites of Pachamachay (11,800 ypb) and Pikimachay (14,000 ybp), Monte Verde at the southern tip of Chile at 12,500 ybp; the Patagonian grasslands sites of Los Toldos of 12,600 ybp, Piedra Museo 12,200 ybp, and Alero Tres Arroyos, 11,800 ybp; Brazil's Lapa de Boquete at 12,100 ypb, and the Amazonian rain forest site of Pedra Pintada, 11,100 ypb.
4. One possible reason for the long-term belief in Clovis as the first culture in the Americas may be the result of poor preservation of non-lithic materials such as wood, ivory, bone, textiles, and other perishable items. Evidence for the existence of these types of materials are present at Meadowcroft Rockshelter and Monte Verde, but have been largely ignored in the severe criticism of these two sites over the decades since their first identification.Yes, Adovasio is still ticked off.
3. Clovis wasn't first in North America either. There are sites predating Clovis in several locations around the North American continent, including in Wisconsin at the Schaefer (12,300 years before the present), Hebior (12,500 ybp), Mud Lake (13,400 ybp), and Fenske (13,500 ybp) mammoth butchering sites; in Virginia at Cactus Hill (15,700 bp) and the Saltville site (14,500-13,500 years bp); at Meadowcroft Rockshelter, Pennsylvania (16,000 ybp); at La Sena, Nebraska (18-19,000 years bp) and Lovewell, Kansas (18,000 years bp); and at Big Eddy in Missouri (12,000 bp). And that doesn't even mention any of the older sites yet in South America, such as Pedra Furada (32,000) or Monte Verde I, (33,400 ybp) or or Bluefish Caves (23,000 ybp) in Canada.
2. But some researchers still believe in Clovis first.
1. For the last fifteen or twenty years there have been occasional comparisons of Clovis technology to the Middle Paleolithic Solutrean cultures of the Iberian peninsula. Dennis Stanford gave the banquet speech at Clovis and Beyond, hypothesizing that Clovis in the Americas represents colonization of the eastern American seaboard by boat across the North Atlantic, following along the ice shelf that in the late Pleistocene stretched from Ireland to Nova Scotia. All of the tools and techniques of Clovis can be found in Solutrean assemblages, including thin projectile points, wedges, very long thin bifaces, outré passé flaking, red ochre, gouge-eyed needles, bone and ivory projectiles points, bevelled ivory foreshafts, decorated bone rods, limestone palettes. And the journey would have been 2,500 miles by boat along the ice shelf.
The Clovis and Beyond conference was a tremendous success, and you will hear more in this space concerning the findings.
See ya next week!
