| Author | Pre-Clovis sites on Portal |
bat400
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|  Posted 10-01-2007 at 14:25
Several sites are now on the Portal that have finds that (if accepted) are evidence against the "Clovis first" model of the peopling of the Americas. All of these sites are in the eastern half of the United States - most are on the east coast.
Paw Paw Cove, MD has yielded "Clovis" type points, but not yet dated in situ: http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=16096
The following sites have artifacts and features that pre-date the "Clovis" culture:
Meadowcroft, PA: http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=15158
Big Eddy, MO: http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=15845
Cactus Hill, VA: http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=16091
and the earliest (and most controversial,) Topper, SC: http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=16109
[ This message was edited by: bat400 on 2007-01-10 14:29 ]
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Aluta
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|  Posted 10-01-2007 at 23:34
Nice, bat400. I'd never heard of Topper (except a TV show that was on when I was young) . That is a very early date! I'll be interested to see what follows in the years to come.
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bat400
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| Posted 11-01-2007 at 18:12
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On 2007-01-10 23:34, Aluta wrote:
Nice, bat400. I'd never heard of Topper (except a TV show that was on when I was young) . That is a very early date! I'll be interested to see what follows in the years to come.
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Ah, but you have (cue dramatic music...) even if you don't remember it! Click on the Topper site link I include in the forum post and once there click on the link I gave to the 2004 breaking news on it's earliest date. You'll see that you yourself submitted the CNN news article to the Portal. 
I think their a pretty cool group of sites!
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bat400
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| Posted 11-01-2007 at 18:14
And they just keep on coming!
Another possible Pre-Clovis site in Minnesota
http://www.walkermn.com/placed/index.php?sect_rank=1&story_id=229282
in the news today.
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Andy B
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| Posted 12-01-2007 at 23:25
Thanks Bat. I missed the importance of these sites as I don't usually post reports of stone tool findings in the UK - there are just so many of them.
It's good to have such a breadth of international knowledge on the Portal.
[ This message was edited by: Andy B on 2007-01-12 23:26 ]
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bat400
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| Posted 13-01-2007 at 06:30
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On 2007-01-12 23:25, Andy B wrote:
Thanks Bat. I missed the importance of these sites as I don't usually post reports of stone tool findings in the UK - there are just so many of them.
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And I didn't intend them to take any sort of importance over sites where you can visit an actual "structure" or "feature" of some kind. They're only of particular importance in that they are breaking up a 50 year old "Model" of how the Western Hemisphere was "peopled." The "Clovis police" (as I've seen them called) are slowly given way to piles of evidence of earlier settlers.
However, perhaps I've committed a faux pas in creating actual sid sites (instead of just news stories) on some of these. Only Meadowcroft, Big Eddy and Topper are sites that definitely match Portal Categories (rock shelter, a periodic settlement/habitation, and quarry, respectively.) Excuse my excitement! I'll lay off the sid creation if only tool finds are there. 
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Andy B
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| Posted 13-01-2007 at 09:03
No problem. Like you say we can't be a 100% comprehensive finds database, that's the job of the county archaeology units.
It's good to add prehistoric monuments that have been destroyed though, if we're fairly sure of their location.
Some of us even submit photos of these
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Aluta
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| Posted 13-01-2007 at 10:26
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On 2007-01-12 23:25, Andy B wrote:
Thanks Bat. I missed the importance of these sites as I don't usually post reports of stone tool findings in the UK - there are just so many of them.
It's good to have such a breadth of international knowledge on the Portal.
[ This message was edited by: Andy B on 2007-01-12 23:26 ]
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As you probably know, the tool finds are equally common here. When I was young, there was barely a farmer who didn't have his arrowhead collection. People use that as an excuse not to protect any sites--Indian stuff is so common, why protect it?--unable to distinguish an important site from a couple arrowheads they found on a walk. I guess some important sites were lost that way over the years, though.
But as bat400 says, the longstanding paradigm of "Clovis first" (Clovis being a particular style of spear point) is starting to fall, a consumation devoutly to be wished for many, as for decades all claims, even some by hitherto-respected scholars, of pre-Clovis finds no matter how well researched, were thrown out and even mocked only because they claimed people were here before the Clovis people, who were supposed to have arrived over the Bering land bridge.
Now a couple of curious things have happened. The most obvious is the finding of numerous carefully researched and well-recorded pre-Clovis sites, but on top of that we have the finding of Haploid X DNA in certain eastern woodland Indians of the Algonquin families, the recent discovery that the Bering land bridge was inundated at a date too early to allow all the accepted dates to work, and the curious finding that the only old world people making Clovis-like points were not in Asia but in of all places France.
The haploid X issue and the Clovis in France issue may not in the end turn out to be significant. Either or both could turn out to be a red herring. The Haploid X could have reached the Americas, as the old school insists, through Asia with the connecting peoples in between dying out for some unknown reason. The Clovis-type points (these didn't just look like Clovis. There are enough working chips and scraps to show they were made in precisely the same way) could just be a result of more than one people discovering a technology independently, which does happen.
However, the result of all this new evidence has forced the re-examination of the Clovis-first paradigm and in fact the whole idea that America was populated only over the Bering land bridge. For a long time there has been a school of thought that pointed out the great variety not only of cultures and languages but of physical types in the New World and said that if the Aborigines, for example, and the Polynesians could have crossed the seas many tens of thousands of years ago, then why couldn't anyone else have done the same?
If you study the records of early European explorers and settlers, you find that the eastern Indians were always described as looking like Europeans except for their black hair and dark eyes, as looking like Italians, in fact, as described by some early arrivals. The darker skin colour dissipated if they were kept indoors and not allowed to use bear grease as a tanning agent. There's no way you can say that of western Indians who even today look very Asian in many cases. The early visitors from Europe were keen observers reporting back to a large and curious public. I don't think they would have reported wrong about this. Some South American peoples had a Polynesian look as well.
In the interest of full disclosure I must say that some people still claim the Haploid X evidence is the result of European contamination of the DNA samples, in other words some post-conquest blood got into the test samples. This is a hard argument to support, however, because Haploid X is the only of several uniquely European bloodlines found and it is not all that common, even in Europe, while others more common were not found in the testing.
Well, I've gone on a bit. I don't pretend to be the most knowledgeable person on these topics, but I thought it would be good to round up some of what is going on. In interested circles here, it is like a huge iconic statue that you thought would stand forever coming down, and there are many who are seeing it with some satisfaction, myself included. That special, Stone Age Columbus, of a couple years ago, while not especially well made, was a watershed moment. I will never forget watching it and thinking I hadn't believed I would live to see the day.
I only wish the film made partially at Oley Hills by Ted Timreck who has made other specials for National Geographic would be released for television. It's been shown around at small gatherings--although I haven't seen it--but so far, I don't know why, it hasn't made it to the big time.
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bat400
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| Posted 20-02-2007 at 01:25
Feb 20 on US Public Broadcastng Service's show "NOVA". The peopling of North America.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/stoneage/
Posted later that night.
This was a pretty good show, I thought. It laid out several theories, described simply and cleanly the evidence for those theories, and listed pros and cons against each. It side stepped the sound and fury of some of the implecations of the theories which drag in the un-tidy issues of race. All in all pretty good (except for a big of "overuse" of some of the footage of the recreations and computer generated maps of land masses covered in ice.)
[ This message was edited by: bat400 on 2007-02-21 04:29 ]
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bat400
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| Posted 15-03-2007 at 15:43
The interpretation of the Walker Hill finds as Pre-Clovis were recently attacked by the MN State Archaeologist as being nothing more than "nature-facts." The archaeologist who led the dig has fired back with a public letter that vaguely hints that the statement was motivated by financial concerns and not archaeology.
http://www.megalithic.info/article.php?sid=2146412776
Obviously, the formal presentation of the findings will be eagerly awaited.
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