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, Nov 18, 2015.
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