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Submitted by aluta on Wednesday, 09 November 2005 Page Views: 23718
DiscoveriesCountry: United States
My favorite statement came near the end. The scientist said that traffic may not have gone only one way. People could have been going back and forth for a thousand years, he said.
Funny, that's close to what one of the Lenape descendants said to me years ago, the day I met him: "Why do they think the boats only went one way? Maybe people went both ways . . . "
Slow-moving as it was, the show offered a new look that challenged the orthodox Clovis First viewpoint that seemed so immovable for so long.
At the same time, I found this summation of a talk to be given at an archaeology conference this coming weekend:
>>Curtiss Hoffman, Organizer (Bridgewater State College)
Session: Stone Piles, Sacred Places, and Stuck Paradigms: A Reevaluation of the Evidence
The subject of stone piles and other stone constructions has been fraught with controversy throughout the history of New England archaeology. Early investigators tended to offer fanciful explanations for these constructions, often involving diffusion of pre-Columbian European explorers, and they sometimes liberally reconstructed sites to match their theories. These investigators were often untrained in academic archaeology, conducted unsystematic excavations, and tended to adopt and perpetuate theories of the racial superiority of Europeans which were antiquated even in their day. For these reasons, most of the small community of professional archaeologists in the region during the mid-20th century adopted a determinedly negative attitude towards not only the amateur researchers, but also the objects of their research. Stone walls, stone piles, stone chambers, and the like were simply not considered appropriate subjects of research – they were all assumed without question to be of post-Contact Euro-American origin. Since these professionals also were responsible for the training of the next two generations of archaeologists, these negative attitudes endure in some quarters of the regional academically trained archaeological community to the present. Many professional archaeologists are convinced that stone construction was the exclusive province of Euro-American farmers – whether for field clearance, wall construction, or farm beautification. This became the prevailing attitude at state historic preservation offices, often with negative consequences for site preservation, as development has continued to encroach into the upland areas of the region.
However, in recent years there has been a spate of discoveries of large, spectacular stone pile sites throughout the Northeast which do not appear to satisfy expectations for the three hypotheses above. Alternative explanations have tended to focus on archaeoastronomical alignments, again frequently meeting the scorn of professional archaeologists. And there the debate might have remained, had not the Native American community taken an active interest in preserving these sites, some of which they consider sacred places. More than any other factor, this has forced archaeologists to begin to reevaluate these sites and to discover creative new ways to study them, and to preserve them. This panel represents a joint effort undertaken in the town of Carlisle by its presenters, representing, respectively, local preservation planning, the Native community, and. professional archaeology. This cooperation is unique in the region for the study of these sites, and we hope that it provides a model for future endeavors of this sort.
It's been a long slog for people who have embraced certain points of view, but maybe their hour is coming round at last. I applaud those of the archaeological community for being able to look at and consider things beyond their old paradigms. The next decade should be interesting.
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