1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus Read online

  Not everyone wanted to play. Two years later Stuart J. Fiedel, a consulting archaeologist in Alexandria, Virginia, charged that Dillehay’s just-published final Monte Verde report was so poorly executed—“bungled” and “loathsome” were among the descriptors he provided when we spoke—that verifying the original location “of virtually every ‘compelling,’ unambiguous artifact” on the site was impossible. Stone tools, which many archaeologists regard as the most important artifacts, have no organic carbon and therefore cannot be carbon-dated. Researchers must reckon their ages by ascertaining the age of the ground they are found in, which in turn requires meticulously documenting their provenance. Because Dillehay’s team had failed to identify properly the location of the stone tools in Monte Verde, Fiedel said, their antiquity was up to question; they could have been in a recent sediment layer. Haynes, who had authenticated Monte Verde in 1997, announced in 1999 that the site needed “further testing.”

  The dispute over the Clovis model kept growing. In the 1990s geologists laid out data indicating that the ice sheets were bigger and longer lasting than had been thought, and that even when the ice-free corridor existed it was utterly inhospitable. Worse, archaeologists could find no traces of paleo-Indians (or the big mammals they supposedly hunted) in the corridor from the right time. Meanwhile, paleontologists learned that about two-thirds of the species that vanished did so a little before Clovis appears in the archaeological record. Finally, Clovis people may not have enjoyed hunting that much. Of the seventy-six U.S. paleo-Indian camps surveyed by Meltzer and Donald K. Grayson, an archaeologist at the University of Washington at Seattle, only fourteen showed evidence of big-game hunting, all of it just two species, mastodon and bison. “The overkill hypothesis lives on,” the two men sneered, “not because of [support from] archaeologists and paleontologists who are expert in the area, but because it keeps getting repeated by those who are not.”

  Clovis defenders remained as adamant as their critics. Regarding Monte Verde, Haynes told me, “My comment is, where are the photographs of these ‘artifacts’ when they were in place? If you’re trying to prove that site to other archaeologists and you find an unequivocal stone artifact in situ in a site that’s twelve thousand years old, everyone should run over with a camera. It wasn’t until after we brought this up that they dug up some photographs. And they were fuzzy! I really became a doubter then.” Such putative pre-Clovis sites are “background radiation,” he said. “I’m convinced that a hundred years from now there will still be these ‘pre-Clovis’ sites, and this will go on ad infinitum.”

  “Some of our colleagues seem to have gone seriously wrong,” lamented Thomas F. Lynch of Texas A&M in the Review of Archaeology in 2001. Proudly claiming that he had helped “blow the whistle” on other Clovis challengers, Lynch described the gathering support for pre-Clovis candidates as a manifestation of “political correctness.” He predicted that Monte Verde would eventually “fade away.”

  It didn’t. Dillehay’s team published more evidence of occupation—including, in 2008, a stone tool with bits of cut seaweed still on the blade (the Pacific coast was then about 55 miles from Monte Verde). Three years later, in March 2011, a research team led by Michael Waters from Texas A&M University announced in Science a remarkable discovery: fifteen thousand artifacts at a site in central Texas that predated Clovis by more than two millennia. Truly ardent Clovisites, like Low Counters, are “in a definite minority now,” according to Michael Crawford, a University of Kansas anthropologist—a conclusion that Fiedel, Haynes, and other skeptics ruefully echo. The Texas site had too little biological material to use radiocarbon dating, so the researchers employed optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), a technique invented in the 1990s that determines the last time minerals were exposed to sunlight. Because OSL is new, it could not have been used on earlier excavations—suggesting, as Waters acknowledged, that many pre-Clovis sites may have been already discovered, and mistakenly rejected.

  The ultimate demise of the Clovis dogma was inevitable, David Henige, author of Numbers from Nowhere, told me. “Archaeologists are always dating something to five thousand years ago and then saying that this must be the first time it occurred because they haven’t found any earlier examples. And then, incredibly, they defend this idea to the death. It’s logically indefensible.” Clovis-first, he said, was “a classic example of arguing from silence. Even in archaeology, which isn’t exactly rocket science”—he chuckled—“there’s only so long you can get away with it.”

  HUGGING THE SHORE

  Since Holmes and Hrdlička, archaeologists and anthropologists have tried to separate themselves from Abbott’s modern descendants: the mob of sweaty-palmed archaeology buffs who consume books about Atlantis and run Web sites about aliens in Peru and medieval Welsh in Iowa. The consensus around Clovis helped beat them back, but the confused back-and-forth ushered in by the genetic studies has provided a new opening. Unable to repel the quacks with a clear theory of their own, archaeologists and anthropologists found themselves enveloped in a cloud of speculation.

  The most notorious recent example of this phenomenon is surely Kennewick Man. A 9,400-year-old skeleton that turned up near Kennewick, Washington, in 1997, Kennewick Man became a center of controversy when an early reconstruction of the skeleton’s face suggested that it had Caucasian features (or, more precisely, “Caucasoid” features). The reconstruction, published in newspapers and magazines around the world, elicited assertions that Indians had European ancestry. Archaeologists and Indian activists, for once united, scoffed at this notion. Indian and European mitochondrial DNA are strikingly different. How could Indians descend from Europeans if they did not inherit their genetic makeup?

  Yet, as Fiedel conceded to me, the collapse of the Clovis consensus means that archaeologists must consider unorthodox possibilities, including that some other people preceded the ancestors of today’s Indians into the Americas. As if to prove his point, headlines flared in 2007 when a twenty-six-person scientific team led by the oceanographer James Kennett proposed that a comet three miles in diameter struck Canada eleven thousand years ago. The ensuing planetary catastrophe plunged the earth into cold for centuries, killing off many North American species in passing—the extinction event later blamed on “overkill.” The central evidence for the mammoth-killing crash, the researchers said, was a “carbon-rich black layer” in many Clovis sites that was full of charcoal (from the intense fires set off by the impact), iridium (an element that is rare on earth but common in meteorites), and microscopic diamonds (created by pressure waves from the enormous blast). Pushed by a worldwide media furor, a dozen scientific teams looked for similar evidence in other archaeological sites. All failed to find it. “Mammoth-Killer Impact Flunks Out,” reported Science in 2010. The negative conclusions, some scientists complained to me, never received as much attention as the original, incorrect proposal. A three-mile comet!—it was exactly the sort of extravagant notion that the whitecoats sought to consign to the historical dustbin. Now they may all be back. If Clovis was not first, the archaeology of the Americas is wide open, a prospect variously feared and welcomed. “Anything goes now, apparently,” Fiedel told me. “The lunatics have taken over the asylum.”

  Despite such misgivings, one can see, squinting a little, the outlines of an emerging theory. In the last few years researchers have focused more and more on a proposal linked to the name of Knut Fladmark, an archaeologist at Simon Fraser University, in British Columbia. As a graduate student in the mid-1970s, Fladmark was so surprised to learn of the paucity of evidence for the ice-free corridor that he wondered if paleo-Indians had instead gone down the Pacific coast by boat. After all, aborigines had reached Australia by boat tens of thousands of years ago. Nonetheless, most archaeologists pooh-poohed the idea, because there was no substantiation for it.

  By examining pollen in the ocean sediments near the Pacific coastline, researchers have recently learned that even in the depths of the Ice Age warm southern cu
rrents created temperate refuges along the shore—islands of trees and grass in a landscape of ice. Hopping from refuge to refuge, paleo-Indians could have made their way down the coast at any time in the last forty thousand years. “Even primitive boats,” Fladmark has written, “could traverse the entire Pacific coast of North and South America in less than 10–15 years.”

  Evidence for the coastal route is sparse, not least because archaeologists have never looked for paleo-Indian settlements on the shoreline. Future searches will be difficult: thousands of years ago, the melting glaciers raised the seas, inundating coastal settlements, if they existed. But it may not be impossible: in 2008 and 2009, archaeologists at the University of Oregon reported finding coprolites (fossilized human excrement) and a scraping tool that was older than Clovis in a cave just two hundred miles from the Pacific Coast. And in 2011, Mexican archaeologists scuba-diving through an immense water-filled cave network in the Yucatan Peninsula—caverns flooded by rising sea levels after the Ice Age—announced the startling discovery of the mingled skeletons of a human being and a mastodon in a pit at the end of an underwater tunnel four thousand feet long. (Because the cave system was inundated about 12,000 years ago, the researchers believe that the bones must necessarily be older than that, although testing was incomplete at the time of publication.) Still, the coastal route has little empirical backing; its supporters tend to endorse the idea mainly because it seems to make sense. In addition, the image of a seagoing people fits into a general rethinking of paleo-Indian life.

  Because the first-discovered Clovis site was a hunting camp, archaeologists have usually assumed that Clovis society was focused on hunting. Indeed, Clovisites were thought to have entered the ice-free corridor by pursuing game—“follow the reindeer,” as skeptics refer to this scheme. In contemporary hunting and gathering societies, anthropologists have learned, gathering by women usually supplies most of the daily diet. The meat provided by male hunters is a kind of luxury, a special treat for a binge and celebration, the Pleistocene equivalent of a giant box of Toblerone. Compared to its brethren around the world, Clovis society, with its putative focus on massive, exterminating hunts, would have been an anomaly. A coastal route helps bring the paleo-Indians back in line.

  Then as now, the Northwest Coast, thick with fruit and fruits de mer, was a gatherer’s paradise: wild strawberries, wild blueberries, soapberries, huckleberries, thimbleberries, salmonberries; clams, cockles, mussels, oysters; flounder, hake, salmon. (To get breakfast, the local saying says, take a walk in the forest; to get dinner, wait for low tide.) Perhaps the smell of candlefish fat, ubiquitous in later Northwest Coast Indian cookery, even then hovered over the first visitors’ fires. One can guess that their boats were not made of wood, because they had long lived on the almost treeless plains of Beringia. Instead they may have been made from animal skin, a readily available resource; though soft beneath the foot, fragile-looking hide vessels have been known to traverse hundreds of miles of open water. A visitor to the Northwest twenty thousand years ago might have seen such a craft bobbing over the waves like a long, floating balloon, ten or twenty men lining its sides, chasing minke whales with stone-tipped spears.

  All of this is speculative, to say the least, and may well be wrong. Next year geologists may decide the ice-free corridor was passable, after all. Or more hunting sites could turn up. What seems unlikely to be undone is the awareness that Native Americans may have been in the Americas for twenty thousand or even thirty thousand years. Given that the Ice Age made Europe north of the Loire Valley uninhabitable until some eighteen thousand years ago, the Western Hemisphere should perhaps no longer be described as the “New World.” Britain, home of my ancestor Billington, was empty until about 12,500 B.C., because it was still covered by glaciers. If Monte Verde is correct, as most believe, people were thriving from Alaska to Chile while much of northern Europe was still empty of mankind and its works.

  *I use the hedge words “basically,” “almost,” and “in essence” because sperm actually have 50 to 100 mitochondria, just enough to power them through their short lives. By contrast, the egg has as many as 100,000 mitochondria. When the sperm joins the egg, the egg eliminates sperm mitochondria. Every now and then, though, a few escape destruction and end up in the embryo’s cells.

  *A puzzle to Europeans, anyway—Indians seem to have been, as a rule, satisfied with traditional explanations of their origins.

  *Hrdlička’s complaint about the lack of skeletal evidence was unfair for another reason: paleo-Indian skeletons are extremely rare. In Europe, archaeologists have discovered scores of skeletons ten thousand years old or more. By contrast, fewer than a dozen reasonably complete skeletons of similar age have been found in North America (a few more exist in South America, although, as with the Lagoa Santa skeletons, their provenance is often unclear). “It’s a big mystery why we don’t find the burials,” the University of Vermont archaeologist James Petersen told me. “Some Indians will tell you that their dead all moved to a spiritual plane, and that’s about as good as any answer that we’ve got.”

  *Here and throughout I give the currently accepted dates, which are made with better techniques and more grasp of the vagaries of carbon dating than were then available to Haynes. Scientists discovered in the 1960s that the rate of C14 formation and intake varied more than Libby had thought. As a result, raw C14 dates must be corrected (“calibrated,” in the jargon) to obtain calendar dates, something archaeologists do not always make clear. In addition, they often write dates not as years A.D. or B.C. but as years B.P. (Before Present), with the present set by convention at 1950 A.D. Thus 2000 B.P. is 50 B.C. In an attempt to reduce confusion, all dates in this book are ordinary calendar dates—that is, radiocarbon dates corrected by the most recent calibration. Scientists usually report C14 dates with their potential error, as in 3000 ± 150 B.P. (1050 ± 150 B.C.). To avoid typographical clutter, I do not include the error spread, believing that readers understand the unavoidable uncertainties in measuring minute levels of residual radioactivity.

  6

  Cotton (or Anchovies) and Maize

  (Tales of Two Civilizations, Part I)

  BIG BUILDING

  “Would you like to hold a four-thousand-year-old textile?”

  Without waiting for my assent, Jonathan Haas slid the fabric into my hand. It was about two inches on a side, little more than a scrap, and aged to the color of last season’s straw. To my eye, it seemed carefully made: a warp of fine cotton threads, ten or fifteen to the inch, crossed at half-inch intervals by paired weft threads in a basket-like pattern known as “weft-twining.” Haas, an archaeologist at the Field Museum of Natural History, in Chicago, had plucked the fabric from the earth minutes before, two graduate students immortalizing the operation with digital cameras. Thousands of years ago it had been handled or worn by other people; bits of their DNA might still adhere to the fibers. (If so, I was contaminating it.) To be the first person in two hundred generations to see or touch an object—to reach across time with eye and hand—is one of the reasons why people like Haas spend their days sifting through ancient soil.

  Ordinarily, archaeologists label and store such artifacts immediately. But just as Haas removed the cloth from the ground, he was distracted by the excited shouts of a group of workers a hundred feet away. Haas clambered over the rough ground to take a look. Poking through the earth at the workers’ feet was something that resembled the edge of a dinner plate. Haas kneeled to inspect it. When he came back to his feet, his eyebrows had shot up like a pair of circumflexes. “What’s this doing here?” Haas asked the air. “It looks like unfired ceramics.” The site was supposed to be very old—well before the local invention of pottery. “Better have a look at it.” Reaching for the trowel in his back pocket, he had realized that the textile was still in his hand, and asked if I would mind hanging on to it.

  “Would you like to hold a four-thousand-year-old textile?”

  (Illustration Credit 6.1)


  Haas was standing midway up a sixty-foot hummock in a valley along the central coast of Peru, about 130 miles north of Lima. The valley was desert, withered and yellow-gray except for the crooked band of green that marked the course of the Fortaleza River. In the late 1990s Haas and Winifred Creamer—his wife and co-teamleader, an archaeologist at Northern Illinois University—assisted a research team led by a Peruvian archaeologist, Ruth Shady Solis, that had spent years investigating an ancient ceremonial center fifteen miles to the south. By carbon-dating some of Shady’s material, they helped establish that the Peruvians had uncovered the oldest known city in the Americas.

  Afterward, Haas, Creamer, and a Peruvian archaeologist, Álvaro Ruiz, drove a four-by-four through the back roads of the area between that excavation and the Fortaleza Valley. Called the Norte Chico, the region is studded with isolated knolls, twenty to fifty feet high and as much as two hundred feet long. These mounds had been flagged as possible ruins for nearly a century but never excavated because they seemed to have no valuable gold or ceramic objects. The Pan-American Highway had been laid right through them without causing an outcry. Haas, Creamer, and Ruiz had decided to drive through the area because they suspected that the mounds might be more interesting and numerous than had been realized. Ultimately, the three researchers determined that the Norte Chico held the remains of at least twenty-five cities, all of which they wanted to explore. On the day I visited, the team was unburying a city they called Huaricanga, after a nearby hamlet. Here the Pan-American Highway had, as it turned out, sliced through some of the oldest public architecture anywhere on earth.

  “You mean to tell me there’s no dental picks at all?” Haas was saying. “All these people and not one has a dental pick? I’d really like a pick for this thing.”