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<< Other Photo Pages >> Monte Verde - Ancient Village or Settlement in Chile

Submitted by bat400 on Thursday, 26 November 2015  Page Views: 15172

Multi-periodSite Name: Monte Verde
Country: Chile Type: Ancient Village or Settlement
Nearest Town: Puerto Montt, Chile
Latitude: 41.504S  Longitude: 73.204W
Condition:
5Perfect
4Almost Perfect
3Reasonable but with some damage
2Ruined but still recognisable as an ancient site
1Pretty much destroyed, possibly visible as crop marks
0No data.
-1Completely destroyed
1 Ambience:
5Superb
4Good
3Ordinary
2Not Good
1Awful
0No data.
no data Access:
5Can be driven to, probably with disabled access
4Short walk on a footpath
3Requiring a bit more of a walk
2A long walk
1In the middle of nowhere, a nightmare to find
0No data.
no data Accuracy:
5co-ordinates taken by GPS or official recorded co-ordinates
4co-ordinates scaled from a detailed map
3co-ordinates scaled from a bad map
2co-ordinates of the nearest village
1co-ordinates of the nearest town
0no data
3

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Monte Verde
Monte Verde submitted by bat400_photo : Sitios arqueológicos Monte Verde y Chinchihuapi. View along Chinchihuapi Creek. 30 September 2012, 15:36:49 Author Rodolfo Ditzel Lacoa This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. (Vote or comment on this photo)
Ancient Settlement in Los Lagos State, Chile. Discovered in 1976 from "cow bone" eroding out of a bank, Monte Verde is one of the best documented and most accepted “pre-Clovis” sites in the Americas. In the peat bog on both sides of Chinchihuapi Creek finds of stone tools, non-local plant remains, animal bones, and the wooden foundations of huts indicate a year round settlement of at least 30 individuals. Radio-carbon dating of objects within artifact bearing strata indicate dates to 13000 years ago, with indications of nomadic camping to 17000 years ago.

The people who lived at Monte Verde organized their homes in rows parallel to the creek, and set wooden planks in regular rectangular “foundations” and appear to have used both communal hearths and small clay “braziers” inside individual dwelling areas. A separate structure features a "U shaped" foundation of gravel.

The inhabitants appear to have lived by hunting both large and small animals and gathering a wide variety of plant foods, some carried to the site from many miles away. The organization of the site and a lack of “intrusions” into the sites or artifacts from later time periods imply that the Monte Verde site was build and occupied in a relatively short time period and vacated within a short time period, perhaps from flooding.

ENVIRONMENT
This area of Chile is temperate and humid with a mix of forests, open grass and dunes, and lakes. The creek bed where Monte Verde is sited is a tributary of the Maullin River. The site is approximately 50 km from the Pacific Ocean, but traveling due south, away from the creek, the Gulf of Reloncavi is only 20 km away.
13000 years ago forest cover was sporadic, broken by large areas of bogs, lakes, and freshwater marshes. Closer to the coast lines dunes and salt marshes would predominate. Animals would have included large game animals such as mastodon and paleo camelids, and well as many varieties of birds, fish, and small mammals.

ARCHAEOLOGICAL RECOVERY
A thin cap of peat bog covers Monte Verde and much of the site was found by either erosion from the creek and the area having been cleared of trees and brush to make a clear way for logging trucks. Mastodon bones washing into the creek lead to the site being brought to the attention of instructors at the Universidad Austral de Chile. Surveys eventually determined the site to show human activity.
Artifacts include the remains of the dwellings, which may have been tents erected over a wooden pole framework, with the edges held down by the wooden foundations. Some stakes have been found preserved in the bog, with thin lashings still attached. Stone tools (flaked and ground) a mortar, and a digging stick have been found within the wooden foundations. Spherical stones with a shaped groove may be bola stones. No highly worked stone points have been found.
Flotation techniques have revealed the remains of edible leafy vegetables, seeds, nuts, fruits and tubers. Additionally remains of reed plants found only in brackish coastal waters (Scirpus californicus) and seaweeds indicate wide ranging resource gathering.
Mastodon bones make up most of the bones found at Monte Verde, but other bones are from frogs, rodents, birds and camelid have been found along with fresh water mollusk shell. The mastodon bones are disarticulated and come from only portions of the animals – mainly ribs.

Radio carbon dating has been made of both culturally modified wood and charcoal from hearths. Adjusted ages from the tests yields dates 11,700 to 13,400 years ago. More recent finds from the site include “chaws” of seaweed and saltwater algae coating and imbedded in stone tools. The saltwater plants have been dated to 14,000 years ago.

IMPORTANCE
Monte Verde represents one of the most well documented and accepted sites that contradict the "Clovis First" theory of the human migration into the Americas. It’s controversy lies in the rigor of dating analysis. Although some critics (C.Vance Haynes, Stuart Fieldel) have complained that that the management of finds leaves doubts and confusion of their place among carbon dated finds, the chief researchers, Tom Dillehay and Mario Pina, and their associates counter that such doubt is either a willful misreading of the published research or an unfamiliarity with wet preservation of artifacts.

More intriguingly, the site as described is referred to as “Monte Verde II.” An earlier component, deeper than the tent settlement consists of less dramatic artifacts of broken cobbles and charcoal. This site, “Monte Verde I” has been dated to 33,000 years ago. It has not been extensively discussed or promoted by the Monte Verde researchers and reviewers indicate that the less obvious “human origin” leaves these older finds as definitely unproven as cultural finds.

The site is protected by the Chilean government.
REFERENCES

Dillehay, Tom D., Monte Verde – A Late Pleistocene Settlement in Chile, Vol 1 and 2, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989.

Stuart Fiedel, "Artifact Provenience at Monte Verde: Confusions and Contradictions," Scientific American Discovering Archaeology, October 1999.

Mann, Charles C., 1491, Knopf, 2005. [Description of a not entirely successful review of the Monte Verde site by a congress of "greybeards".]

National Monuments Council Av. Vicuña Mackenna n°84, Providencia Santiago - Chile , “Monte Verde Archaeological Site” United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization World Heritage List Submission, http://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/1873/

Price, T. Douglas, and Feinman, Gary M., “Monte Verde”, Images of the Past, Mayfield Publishing Company, 1993.

Note: New clues emerge about the earliest known Americans, see the latest comment on our page
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"Monte Verde" | Login/Create an Account | 4 News and Comments
  
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Re: Monte Verde by davidmorgan on Tuesday, 30 April 2019
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Street View

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New clues emerge about the earliest known Americans by bat400 on Tuesday, 24 November 2015
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Stone tools, cooked animal and plant remains and fire pits found at the Monte Verde site in southern Chile provide greater interdisciplinary evidence that the earliest known Americans were established deep in South America more than 15,000 years ago. The research, led by led by Tom Dillehay (Rebecca Webb Wilson University) appears in the Nov. 18 issue of PLOS One.

In 2013, at the request of Chile’s National Council of Monuments, Dillehay and a team of archaeologists, geologists and botanists performed an archaeological and geological survey of Monte Verde to better define the depth and breadth of the site.

On this visit, Dillehay’s team explored key areas around MVI and MVII. Though it was not intended to be a comprehensive reexamination of the site, their findings did yield new insights. “We began to find what appeared to be small features scattered very widely across an area about 500 meters long by about 30 or 40 meters wide,” said Dillehay.

The stone tools discovered by the team were similar to what Dillehay had previously found at Monte Verde. “One of the curious things about it that is that unlike what we found before, a significant percentage, about 34 percent, were from non-local materials. Most of them probably come from the coast but some of them probably come from the Andes,” said Dillehay. Prior research had revealed evidence of Andean plants in the area, providing further support for a highly mobile population.

Stones, bones, plants and fires.

The team recovered a total of 39 stone objects and 12 small fire pits associated with bones and edible plant remains, including nuts and grasses. The bones tended to be small fragments, broken and scorched, indicating that the animals had been cooked. The Monte Verde site was unlikely to have been able to support the kind of vegetation that those animals needed to eat, so they were likely killed and butchered elsewhere. The objects were radiocarbon dated and most were found to range in age from more than 14,000 to almost 19,000 years old.

The wide scattering suggests that the people who created these features were nomadic hunter-gatherers who might have camped for only a night or two before moving on. Dillehay believes they may have come through Monte Verde because the terrain was more walkable than the surrounding wetlands, with access to stone for tools.

Rain, ice, soil and ash

A key goal during this visit was to better understand the geological and environmental context of the site. At the end of the last ice age, Monte Verde was a sandur plain—a runoff area situated about six kilometers away from a glacier, crisscrossed by a network of shallow streams and brooks fed by rain washing off the glacier, as well as melting snow.

“It appears that these people were there in the summer months,” Dillehay said. “Each one of these [burned] features and the bones and stones associated with them is embedded in thin, oxidized tephra”—a type of geological layer formed by airborne ash particles from nearby volcanoes that only form in rainy, warmer temperatures. But though the glaciers had begun to retreat by 19,000 to 17,000 years ago, it was still an extremely challenging environment, Dillehay said. “We’re looking at people in some really cold, harsh areas, even in the summer months.” Only later [~15,000 years ago] did the climate warm enough for the kind of longer-term settlement found at MVII.

New questions

Put together, these findings support the paradigm shift toward an earlier peopling of the Americas, although questions inevitably remain about how the hemisphere was settled. It underscores the importance of long-term interdisciplinary research. “We now realize that the geology and the climate and the archaeology are much more complex than we ever calculated,” said Dillehay.

For more, see Vanderbuilt University New Release, No

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Re: Monte Verde by DrewParsons on Friday, 23 December 2011
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The Puerto Montt museum contains finds from this site but is closed for renovation work for the next two months with reopening scheduled some time after February 2012.
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Seaweed Shows Ancient Americans on the Move by bat400 on Saturday, 23 August 2008
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originally submitted by coldrum


One of archaeology's most interesting questions is, "When and how did the earliest humans first arrive in the New World?" During the past decade, fresh and challenging answers have emerged. Much of the new data comes from the work of Tom D. Dillehay of Vanderbilt University and his colleagues who study Monte Verde, an ancient site in Chile.

They recently reported new findings in the journal Science that suggest strongly that early humans in North and South America were using boats to work along the shoreline; the Pacific Coast was an inviting way to move from Asia and southward from Alaska.

In 1976, Dillehay began work at Monte Verde. Later he published reports which included shockingly early human occupation dates of about 14,000 years ago. Other archaeologists more readily accept such early dates now than they did when he first reported them.

The Monte Verde site has living huts, animal processing areas, and extensive plant and animal remains, including mastodons, attesting their value to early humans.

Dillehay and others recently published new findings from Monte Verde: new species of marine algae, and a stone tool with algae remains. This new evidence was analyzed by radiocarbon-14 dating, and is about 14,000 years old.

The results provide several important increments in our understanding of early humans in the New World.

First, the radiocarbon dates provide additional and compelling evidence that humans arrived in the New World at least as early as 14,000 years ago. This point had been under continual debate by archaeologists over the past decade.

Second, the algae itself -- including its appearance on a stone tool -- suggests that early humans in the New World were well aware of coastal marine resources, and were accustomed to relying on them for food and medicine.

Monte Verde, at nearly the opposite pole from Alaska, could be our best model for the culture, the behavior, and the intelligence of the earliest people in the New World.

For more, see the article by Walter Witschey.
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