Video
The Pleistocene Human Colonization of Interior North America
Transcript
Karen: Hello and welcome to the second ArcheoThursday webcast. I’m Karen Mudar, a senior archeologist in the NPS Archeology Program Office and I’m responsible for [crosstalk 00: 01: 32] mix-up today, so I'll take responsibility for it. Sorry. everybody.
Today, Dr. David G. Anderson, University of Tennessee, will present “The Pleistocene Human Colonization of Interior North America.” Anderson will focus on when, where, and how human beings entered the Americas during the last Ice Age. Many ideas have been proposed, some more plausible and better accepted than others. I've been following the debate from a distance as I’m sure many of you have as well so it will be enlightening to hear from someone assessing these things more closely.
He argues that the routes that early people took can be inferred from the examination of the archeological and environmental record and they're not as obvious as you might think. David has conducted extensive archeological field work in much of the United States and in the Caribbean. He is a tireless researcher and has produced 350 publications and meeting papers and over 45 books and technical monographs. He is also the founding director of the PaleoIndian Database of the Americas which is available online and, as he's mentioned, a former Park Service archeologist.
It gives me great pleasure to have David here with us today as he and I were in graduate school together at the University of Michigan many years ago. David, thank you for accepting our invitation to speak.
David: Thank you, Karen. I’m glad to be here and if you hear a train in the background, our office is in the football stadium and our Alabama game is on Saturday and everybody is going nuts here getting ready for it. I apologize for the occasional noise, but it's great to be here. I’m very happy to be a part of this series and I really enjoyed working with the Park Service so it's great to be able to talk with you all.
Anyway, diving into it. The first evidence for widespread settlement in the North America dates to about projectile points of the Clovis tradition are found widely dispersed over the landscape. These points are characterized by a distinctive form of basal thinning setting or fluting and are easily recognizable. The manufacturing procedure only occurred during this early period furthermore and was never adopted again in all of later pre-history. This makes sites of this time fairly easy to recognize. How much earlier in the Pleistocene were the America settled and when did this occur and how did this occur?
Did people enter and then dispersed over the landscape? What routes did they use? A number of entry routes have been proposed. Some were likely and supported by types, more types and greater quantities of evidence than others. Currently, the 2 most widely accepted scenarios have New World populations originating in eastern or northeastern Asia and then passing through the Pacific, the northern Pacific region in the vicinity of the Bering Land Bridge, either over land or along the coast.
From here they travelled south into the Americas either using watercraft or on foot or both. In this paper, routes the colonists might have used coming into the western half of the continent from Asia and dispersing over the landscape from there are emphasized. Models which argue for the colonization of east or north and South America from Africa or Europe across the Atlantic are noted here but are not discussed in detail although I do mention them later in the talk.
If movement of early people from east to west occurred as may have happened during Clovis times, if this technology originated as I argue in Eastern North America, then population dispersal could have been in the opposite direction at least for Clovis folks along the movement pathways considered here.
One thing that's becoming increasingly clear in recent years and that is that people were present in the Americas prior to the widespread appearance of Clovis technology. Settlement at least 1500 years earlier than Clovis has been demonstrated at the site of Monte Verde in coastal Chile excavated by Tom Dillehay where numerous well-preserved human remains and archeological remains are found including presumed tent peg shown here wrapped with twine and a human footprint also shown here and unusual bifaces.
A small settlement is inferred, whose people made use of both coastal and interior resources. The presence of this site and indeed increasing numbers of early sites across South America [crosstalk 00: 09: 47] supports a date for colonization of about 14- 15,000 years ago as well as the possibility that the first people may have moved down the Pacific coastline. Genetic evidence by the way is also indicating an entry sometime in the neighborhood of 15- 17,000 years ago.
People were also present in interior central Alaska several centuries before Clovis at sites like Broken Mammoth and Swan Point in the Nenana and Tanana rivers areas of central Alaska, both of which date to circa 13,500 to 14,000 calendar years ago. Thus, people were likely living near the entry point for the Ice-Free Corridor at about the same time as the earliest widely accepted dates for their presence in South America.
The questions that immediately arise are when did people go through The Ice-Free Corridor and how did they reach and begin to move along the Pacific coastline south of the ice sheets covering portions of North America during the Pleistocene. If they came in either through the Ice-Free Corridor or along the Pacific coast. When was that possible? The discovery and dating of early sites south of the ice sheets provides one way to answer these questions.
Evidence for human presence older than about 13,000 years in age, archeological assemblages popularly known as pre-Clovis sites, have been recorded in a number of locations in the Americas south of the ice sheets. In the Pacific Northwest, an early human presence is documented by the Manis mastodon kill site in Washington and you see an x-ray of a bone with a bone point in it in a vertebra of the mastodon.
Another form of evidence and those are what they look, human paleofecal remains, have been found at Paisley Caves in Oregon which dates to about 14,000 years ago. Other well-known pre-Clovis sites in the Americas include Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania where over 50 radiocarbon dates have been found in logical order. This is a view of Meadowcroft. You can see on the right in the slide.
The site was exclusively excavated by a team of researchers under the direction of Jim Adovasio and has generated insights as well as debate into the early settlement of eastern North America to this day. At Cactus Hill in Virginia, blades and bifaces were found below Clovis and deposits that may date between 16- 18,000 years ago.
At the Topper site in Allendale County, South Carolina, an unusual smashed core industry was found by Al Goodyear that appears to derive from the quarrying of local chert outcrops. This industry characterized by bend break tools and a few flakes and flake tools has generated appreciable debate in recent years in part because of the great age attributed to it and some dates have been as far back as 50,000 years. The Topper Site also has produced a remarkable Clovis assemblage in stratified context, one of the densest and best preserved assemblages found in the region. Over 600 square meters of the Clovis component have been examined to date.
Another pre-Clovis site is the Page-Ladson site in Florida. Well inland from the mouth of the much reduced Gulf of Mexico, it's close to the Gulf right now that's 20,000 years ago. You can see Florida was much larger andhe Gulf was much smaller. At that time, the continental shelves were much larger than they are at present. At Page-Ladson, a mastodon tusk was found apparent cut marks on it together with a few small flakes and cobbles or cobble fragments. These are the flakes and cobble fragments.
These objects were found in sealed deposits upwards of 14,000 years old, approximately 14, 000-15,000 years old. They're quite a number of radiocarbon dates on them and this site has been the subject of study for many years. A wonderful book was put together by Dave Webb a few years ago and it's being re-excavated right now by a team of researchers.
Arguably the best documented and dated pre-Clovis site in the interior of North America is the recently reported Debra L. Friedkin Site in Texas where flakes blades and bifaces were found in deposits approximately 15- 16,000 years old, some 2,000 to 3,000 years before Clovis. This site is extremely well dated with some 60 OSL dates, however, as is the case with all pre-Clovis sites, there's still appreciable debate attending the interpretations.
While the age in archeological associations of most pre-Clovis sites found in the Americas have been subject to challenge and I would say all pre-Clovis sites have been subject to challenge, some challenge, most scholars now accept that human presence in the Americas, at least a few centuries to perhaps a few millennia before Clovis has been demonstrated. Precisely when this took place and along which routes initial entries took place, however, remain unknown.
Unfortunately, no unequivocal diagnostic projectile point forms or other artifact types have been recognized that help us easily identify pre-Clovis occupations. Examples of possible early points thought to be a pre-Clovis age include the Miller Lanceolate shown here, the one found from Meadowcroft Rocksheler.
Early triangular points found at Cactus Hill in Virginia in deposits below Clovis and again dated to 15- 16,000 years old. The unifacial minimally flaked on one side extensively flaked on the other Page-Ladson Points from Florida. All of these points unfortunately are somewhat similar to later PaleoIndian and Archaic forms and are difficult to sort from these later types when found in surface context.
At present, all we know is that appreciable variability characterizes pre-Clovis, Clovis and immediate post-Clovis chipped stone bifaces and associated industries in North America as shown from these examples from Florida alone. Far more field work and analysis will be needed before we can easily recognize and date these early occupations. Indeed, the evidence from the Manis mastodon site suggests bone or ivory points may have been used by pre-Clovis populations in North America fairly widely, a perishable technology unlikely to be well preserved save in unusual circumstances.
How did people reach interior North America and get to places like the east and southeast where dense fluted point concentrations occurred in the Clovis era and the map shows fluted point distributions]. In North America, you can see they're predominantly in the eastern part of the continent that this is a dataset that is all fluted points, Clovis, Clovis variants, and un-typed fluted points.
One primary route that has been long suggested was that these first people came through an opening in the ice sheets in western Canada. This makes perfect sense given that people were present in interior Alaska some 14,000 years ago. Interestingly enough, there's been research conducted by Ted Goebel and colleagues in Alaska as well as a lot of other people that is indicating that the Alaska fluted points up here post-date Clovis by perhaps 500 to 1000 years and they reflect a migration back up the Ice-Free Corridor, so stay tuned with that.
Geologic maps indicate the Ice-Free Corridor was open by open by about 14,000 years ago, although how easily it could be traversed is subject to appreciable debate. It is unlikely, however, that human populations living in late-glacial landscapes in central Alaska would have been greatly troubled by a circa 1200 kilometer journey passing through the corridor.
In any event, by 13,000 years ago in Clovis times, this corridor was several hundred kilometers wide particularly at the southern end as you can see there and was easily traversable. What happened once people passed through this corridor and reached the interior of North America? Topographic features like the occurrence of rivers, mountain ranges and passes or environments with rich paleosubsistence or toolstone resources, unquestionably shaped movement pathways.
Maps depicting the PaleoIndian radiation showing peoples moving in straight lines, however, or radiating out uniformly over the landscape like this figure without any regard for topography are unrealistic. Least-cost movement pathways provide more logical and efficient routes and have to be considered.
Once people are arrived at the mouth of the Ice-Free Corridors, human populations moving south would have encountered several major east and south trending drainages like Missouri, the Platte, the Arkansas, the Canadian and the Red. These would funnel people moving along them through the central plains and into the Mississippi Ohio river system. These tributaries encompass much of eastern North America. People travelling down the Mississippi would have reached the Gulf Coast and could have passed on to Florida and then up along the Atlantic Coast.
Resource-rich regions in the Americas could have served as staging areas, places where people stayed or settled for longer periods of time and likely formed the core of permanent occupations in these regions. Such locations would have been ideal bases from which the exploration and settlement from the rest of the region could have occurred. Populations moving out from such staging areas or locations would know where people and resources were located in the event they got into trouble. They could have returned to these places to share information, maintain mating networks and ceremonial and kinship networks.
Dense concentration of Clovis and immediate post-Clovis fluted points have been found in a number of such areas of North America supporting this approach to the colonization and settlement and there is actually a SMallwood paper evaluating this model that is going to appear in the latest issue of American Antiquity.
Populations coming through the Ice-Free Corridor orfrom further west if they came in from the Pacific coast, an entry model I'll be talking about next, may well have continued eastward and follow the shores of a massive periglacial lakes that were present in southern Canada and the upper midwestern United States. They could have exploited the aquatic resources that would have been present in these bodies of fresh water and the plants and animals near their margins.
Once these people got further east, additional resources would include the marine mammals and other game of the Great Inland Champlain and St. Lawrence seas. It has been suggested by scholars like Fiedel, Dincauze and others that people followed migrating waterfowl south through the Ice-Free Corridor and then beyond and that they perhaps followed other migratory animals as well.
Elephants appear to have been a particular target as reflected in probable pre-Clovis age mammoth kill sites like Schaefer and Hebior in Wisconsin, possibly Hiscock in western New York, and other possible kill butchery locations well to the south like Burning Tree in Ohio and Coats-Hines in Tennessee and Coats-Hines, incidentally, has dates of about 12,000 radiocarbon, 14,000 calendar result of recent work.
A decline in spores associated with large herbivore dung and a spike in charcoal particulates indicative of increased burning occurred after about 15,000 years ago in northeastern North America. This is about 2000 years before Clovis. These offer additional complementary and independent lines of evidence by which the timing of human entry might have occurred.
The Pacific Northwest may have also witnessed settlement by people coming out of the Ice-Free Corridor who moved to the west instead of to the east. If this happened however, they probably met peoples who had reached that area by moving along the coast as discussed in what follows. In recent years, in fact, it has been suggested the Americas were first colonized, at least from the west, by people moving down the Pacific coastline well before the Ice-Free Corridor opened. The presence of early populations in South America before evidence for widespread populations in North America, in fact, suggest rapid movement, people moving much further and faster along coastlines than in the interior.
In this view, the Pacific Rim and perhaps all coastal environments were considered a mega patch of choice by early populations following arguments developed by Beaton, a scholar who wrote a paper on that about 20 years ago. That is special resource areas that occurred widely were targeted by these early populations. They were well adopted to the coastal area and focused on them. They may have been so well adapted to coastal environments that they have little incentive or inclination to move inland.
Along the Pacific coast of the Americas, the rich marine resources associated with offshore kelp forests may have been one such mega patch what Erlandson and his colleagues have named the “Kelp Highway Hypothesis.“This argument helps reconcile the presence of early populations in southern South America at a time when there was only very limited evidence for people in interior North America. If people were content to stay on or near the coast, it would help explain why the record of settlement in the interior is so sparse until 13,000 years ago.
The Clovis adaptation appears directed to the exploitation of interior resources and that may be what triggered its rapid radiation. That is, the Clovis adaption may have been the first highly effective means developed by which interior portions of the continent could have been exploited.
To understand movement in coastal areas, precise determination of late Pleistocene sea-level fluctuations is critical given the circa 120 meter or 400 foot rise since the last glacial maximum that occurred. Evidence for Pleistocene coastal adaptations in the Americas unfortunately is fairly minimal with loss to sea level rise a certainty, although underwater archeology is showing that some sites may survive in relatively undisturbed contexts in offshore waters.
Our understanding of the colonization of the Americas will remain incomplete until we know the role coastal areas played. High resolution bathymetric data can be used to infer possible migration routes of Pleistocene populations throughout the world and is here used to examine the colonization of the Americas.
The earliest movements into the Americas from eastern Asia likely took place in the vicinity of Beringia, the exposed land mass connecting Asia and America during the late Pleistocene. Whether this movement was over land or along the coast is unknown but migration along the southern margin of Beringia is certainly likely, more likely than along the northern coast or perhaps even through the interior, although again, we know people were in central Alaska 13,000 to 14,000 years ago.
A remarkable number of islands were present along the southern margins of Beringia throughout the late Pleistocene and environmental conditions on them may have facilitated this early movement. Possibly, there were warmer conditions and richer maritime resources than exist in the area at the present. These islands were closely spaced, furthermore, allowing for movement between them without losing site of land. The south coast of Beringia thus would have offered a navigable waterway route into the Americas with numerous islands and bays and facilitated and, indeed, mandated a maritime adaptation.
A route through the archipelagos of southern Beringia and out into the Aleutians from the east would have likely been far less danger- excuse me. If you go along the coast going into the Aleutians from the east from Alaska is likely to be far less dangerous than crossing from west to east from Kamchatka, even during periods of greatly reduced sea level. Even at the last glacial maximum, there were sea-level, there were open water gaps over a hundred kilometers in extent in the Aleutians chain. That doesn't seem to be the likely way people would have come in. It's suggested as a possibility but it just doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.
Considerable uncertainty exists as to how productive the now submerged Beringian archipelago may have actually been for human populations. However, up to several months of open water free of sea ice and providing a rich habitat for marine life has been inferred by scholars like Erlandson, Brigham-Grette and others.
Beringia may have thus been occupied for millennia and could have been where the apparent lengthy separation of Old and New World populations occurred that is indicated by mitochondrial DNA evidence, what has been called the Beringian Standstill. That is, the expensive Beringian archipelago and perhaps portions of the Aleutian chain may offer possible locations where early populations may have been present, in addition to or instead of, in interior Beringia. The genetic evidence indicates Old and New World populations were separated for some time perhaps as much as 5 to 10,000 years prior to initial colonization south of the ice sheets.
One piece of evidence that may have thrown some cold water onto this model - pun intended given where it takes place - is the late survival of mammoths on small islands exposed as Beringia flooded, at least until human hunters arrived in the mid-Holocene. This suggests that early Beringian populations were not the skilled mariners that may have, that some have assumed, at least not until the mid-Holocene when these islands were first visited, and the mammoths quickly exterminated.
What happens further south when people go coastal? Assuming rapid movement coupled with minimum travel to the interior, they could have moved south very quickly. The first major drainage into the interior south of the Cordilleran ice sheet, western Canada would have been the Columbia. This would have been the first route employed by coastal populations that could have - t doesn't mean it did but could have taken them deep into the interior of North America since the head waters of the Columbia and the Missouri are close to one another.
Early sites are found in and near at the Columbia River like the pre-Clovis Manis mastodon kill site and the East Wenatchee Clovis Cache, shown here, as well as many sites of the Western Stemmed Tradition. But, there are few drainages extending deep into the interior further south below the Columbia along the west coast of the United States. The large rivers that are present like the Sacramento or the San Joaquin didn't go very far to the east. They essentially run to the Central Valley and you have mountain ranges like the Sierra Nevada and the interior draining Great Basin lakes and beyond that.
The extent of these western drainages encompasses roughly the same area as that occupied by the Western Stemmed Projectile point horizon that some have suggested may be a signature of inland movement by coastal populations and some have also suggested this tradition may be comparable in age to Clovis perhaps earlier, perhaps later. This is highly debatable, indeed, there are a number of papers discussing this that are appearing right now.
Once you get across in the Sierra Nevada, however, movement further east may have been facilitated by the numerous pluvial lakes that were present in the region in the Late Glacial Era. These lakes would have facilitated movement in portions of California. You see the large lakes in the Central Valley and also in the southwest which was appreciably more vegetated and wetter than at present.
Another way for coastal populations to get into the interior of North America and this is something that has not been discussed very much prior to this. I found one reference by a paper somebody wrote in 1956, just mentioning the possibility, this is assuming folks didn’t travelled down the Columbia River or across the Great Basin, is via the Colorado and Sonora Rivers. When early people moving down the west coast reached the end of Baja, California, they literally ran out of land and that's the "oops" in the slide. Unless they had watercraft capable of making a circa 130 kilometer crossing to Sonoma, Mexico and were even aware of the possibility, they had to turn back to the north.
Moving north along the east side of Baja at the northern end of the Gulf of California, they would have encountered the mouth of the Colorado River. Some populations may have chosen to follow this mammoth waterway into the interior where, with comparatively little over-land travel, they would have been at the headwaters or upper reaches of major east-flowing drainages. From the upper Colorado, for example, it is a comparatively brief distance to the Arkansas, Platte, and Missouri systems, which would have funneled people into eastern North America. Near the mouth of the Colorado, interestingly the Gila River flows eastward across southern Arizona and New Mexico, and may have offered a particularly rapid route to the Rio Grande, and from there to the Brazos, Pecos, Canadian, and Red rivers and on to the Gulf of Mexico.
Some people may have moved south from Baja along the western coast of Sonora, Sinoloa, and the western coast of Mesoamerica eventually reaching South America. Some people may have crossed Mesoamerica from the Pacific to the Atlantic since there are several places where such a crossing is fairly easily accomplished although that again requires people to have reasons to go inland. From there, once across into the Atlantic, they could have moved north and east along the Gulf Coast to Florida and then from Florida on around to the Atlantic seaboard.
Now, if you look at the conditions 20,000 years ago in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, you can see that short ocean voyages would have permitted access to most of the islands in the Caribbean which were greatly enlarged, the Bahamian shelf, for example, shows one example north of Cuba. Another possible route to South America could have been through these islands, the greater and lesser Antillean chain although I would note that there's no convincing evidence for Pleistocene occupation in this area.
Given the marked reduction in the extent of open water that needed to be crossed to reach Sonora in the vicinity of islands in the northern part of the Gulf of California no more than 25 kilometers of open water crossing, people may have crossed over to Sonora in this area. There are a large number of PaleoIndian points and sites that are found, Clovis sites in fact, that are found in Sonora in this area and suggest that people may well have taken advantage of this route. From a Sonoran coast, people could have moved northward along the coast and encountered the Colorado as well.
Multiple pathways into the east can thus be reached from the Colorado and its tributaries like the Gila, as well from the Sonora River. Some of the earliest populations in the interior of North America, save,perhaps, from areas in the Pacific Northwest and in California, may have thus been reached from the Colorado River basin. The Debra L. Friedkin site in Texas is one such possibility that is along this route or at least close to it. We must, thus,consider the possibility that eastern North America with its remarkable fluted point tradition could have been initially settled from the southwest.
A particularly useful means of determining how people may have moved over the landscape is least-cost pathway analysis. A number of insights result from the use of this procedure. First, pathways differ appreciably depending on where you start or enter the continent. Some pathways run through major site and artifact concentrations, such as major river valleys in Eastern North America. Examining these routes with other kinds of information such as morphological or genetic data or linguistic diversity data may also suggest how people moved or settled early.
A least cost pathway analysis in South America, for example, suggested movement east of the Andes might be a viable means of travel. Interestingly enough, this is an area of great linguistic diversity suggesting ancient settlement. I was at a conference and we showed this map to a bunch of linguists as well as archeologists, cultural anthropologists so they got excited. We were wondering why is it running east of the Andes. The Pacific Coast is a very rough terrain and one of the linguists said, "Well, that's an area where there's tremendous linguistic diversity and we've always wondered why it suggested ancient settlement."
Finally, knowing when and where shorelines, ice sheets, and pluvial lakes were and how their boundaries change through time is critical to reconstruct in migration pathways. Approximately a quarter of the coastal landscape of the southeastern United States was gradually submerged in the late Pleistocene. Likewise, much of the upper Midwest and Northeast was under ice or massive periglacial lakes and seas and pluvial lakes occupied large portions of the Great Basin, the Southwest and California. These physiographic features may have proven formidable barriers to early populations moving over the landscape.
Archeologists have long explored the margins of these features for early sites and in recent years, have been examining this is the margins of things like the Champlain Sea in Vermont, there are fluted points along it, suggesting maritime exploitation of the marine mammals. The lakes in the Southwest and the Great Basin along the shorelines and places like Bonneville Estates Rockshelter, you find evidence for people perhaps there when the lakes were present.
Along in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, research by people like Mike Faught and his colleagues have been following the Aucilla River out into the Gulf of Mexico. Of course, it was dry land at the time and it was called the Paleo-Aucilla River and archeological sites have been found at appreciable distances out into the Gulf of Mexico. Work is most recently being directed to much deeper waters, including the shoreline during the last Glacial Maximum in waters some 400 feet deep. Former terrestrial sites found intact at such depths would be pretty conclusive evidence for early entry by people into North America especially if you found a hearth preserved in what is now clearly an underwater setting.
Former terrestrial sites found intact at such depths would be conclusive evidence for an early entry. Artifacts found in the areas once covered with ice sheets or pluvial or periglacial lakes almost certainly had to be younger in age. While those submerged by rising sea levels barred by varying loss date before the areas. Excuse me. Sites that are now submerged has to date before the time sea level rose and covered them. Archeology can thus help us date geological features and the latter can help us understand when people reached certain areas.
Possible movement patterns can also be discerned by examining the occurrence and density of sites and artifacts over large areas. Gradual versus rapid patterns of movement have been hypothesized along the inferred movement corridors in the Americas. There are 2 models that have been proposed: the String of Pearls where people move basically into adjoining areas. They move slowly over the landscape. As a result, they fill up an area and then they move on. Of course, there would also be expanding outward as well. An alternative model is a Leap-Frog model in which people move very rapidly over the landscape targeting resource-rich areas.
At least for the Clovis period, the dense but widely separated concentrations of projectile points found in North America suggests these populations used a Leap-Frogging strategy, that is, move rapidly between widely separated locations rather than gradually expanding over the landscape. It seems logical to expect even earlier populations in the Americas to employ such a strategy, moving rapidly over the landscape looking for a especially favorable areas to occupy, to regroup, and either settle into or move on.
The dense concentrations of Clovis fluted points in the east has in fact been used to argue for an origin of the technology in this region and a radiation outward to other parts of the continent. This is something I personally think is viable, especially since Alaskan Fluted points appear to be later in time and there is no evidence whatsoever, other than one point with an impact fracture on the tip, for fluting in Northeast Asia.
However, these same distributions had been used by Stanford and Bradley to argue that American settlement and Clovis culture originated much further to the east in western Europe. This is a very controversial idea. The Solutrean or Ice-Edge Hypothesis has been proposed in various times in the past by archeologists who noticed similarities between the European Upper Paleolithic and North America PaleoIndian material culture.
If people did arrive in this fashion, however, they left no genetic signature in extant Native American populations. Convergence in the material culture may or may not indicate cultural contact and that's where we are with this right now. It’s a subject of debate, a lot of discussion in the popular media and we'll see what happens in the years to come. This idea has been proposed a number of times in the past and most recently in the last few years.
By recording primary artifactual data on the occurrence ... By recording primary data on the occurrence of early sites and assemblages, we can resolve where and when people were present on the landscape. My colleagues and I have been building a PaleoIndian database of the Americas or PIDBA for about 20 years. We make this data available to all online and by so doing, we believe that we can learn a great deal about the early settlement of the Americas.
By recording information about individual artifacts and sharing the data and that's critical, we can all benefit. Some 10,000 artifact forms like those illustrated here from Georgia have been completed in Eastern North America to date and more are being compiled all the time.
Karen: Okay. [crosstalk 00: 43: 14]
David: Knowing where artifacts are found in relation to landscape features and specific times is also critical. Looking at the occurrence of projectile points on the modern landscape may give misleading results when they are plotted against ancient land form features. In the upper Great Lakes in the slide, for example, plotting all fluted points against the location of topographic features 13,000 years ago gives results suggesting Paleoindian people live underwater as in the case of Lake Erie or on top of ice sheets.
This same distributions plotted against land forms present a thousand years later, however, when the ice sheets and periglacier great lakes had shrunk, give more logical results and I'm going to flip back and forth between them to show you the changes. Archeology and geology can thus complement each other. In the present case, it's clear that Midwestern Fluted points, at least some of them, post-date Clovis times, perhaps by as much as a thousand years given these distributions.
Documenting where artifacts are actually found on the landscape instead of where we think they might occur is a better way to proceed. Archeologists have been producing maps of where Fluted points and indeed many point forms and other artifact types occur in North America for decades as this map produced in 1937 by John Cotter, a very distinguished Park Service archeologist, shows - this was a map he produced at that time in 1937.
Until the early 1990s, however, when this more recently intuitively derived map was created, it was not possible to easily link artifacts and site files over large areas. We are now at the point where analyses can proceed at regional and continental scales giving us a much better picture of where and when people were present on the landscape.
As we have seen, the picture of early colonization of the Americas is becoming more detailed and better understood all the time. Thank you all very much for listening and before I take questions, I'd like to thank my colleagues in the National Park Service and others who've gotten onto this program for listening and thank you, Karen, and your staff for hosting this session. I guess now, we turn to questions. Anybody there?
Jeremy: Hey, Dave. This is Jeremy Swift.
David: Hey, Jeremy.
Jeremy: I'm curious. It's been a few years since I've kept up with the literature. What's the latest on some of the pre-Clovis stuff at Topper and Gulf? That was a big topic of discussion 4, 5 years ago but has there been any peer review literature out there from Topper out yet?
David: The Debra L. Friedkin is another name for the Gulf Site and the paper that appeared in Science a couple of years ago. Mike Waters and a number of colleagues provides a description of the pre-Clovis occupation at Debra L. Friedkin which is just a couple hundred meters from the Gulf site. There's just different parts of the same locality being excavated by teams from different universities.
In terms of the Topper site, one of my colleagues, Shane Miller, produced a monograph a couple of years ago on the Clovis occupations there and there are students who are working on the pre-Clovis assemblage. Megan King just completed her master's thesis last year and [Doug Zain 00: 46: 48] is working on his dissertation right now on the pre-Clovis assemblages from Topper. Again, there are lot of people like Ashley Smallwood, Derek Anderson, Shane Miller, and of course, I'll give you who directs the excavation, who are working on the Topper assemblages from that.
Jeremy: Have they gotten any other dates out of that pre-Clovis area at Topper to suggest that 50,000 year date really made a lot of people question whether there was contamination or something else going on there? So, have they gotten any other dates out of there or artifacts that were in datable stratigraphy?
David: A lot of the pre-Clovis materials and it's an unusual industry although they do appear from a Megan King study to be unequivocal flakes. The question is how they got to depth. Deposits that are somewhere between 14, 15 and 20 or so thousand years, it's what's called the Pleistocene sand deposits, they are deeper deposits much more compact clays and silts and that that's where the early dates came from and there are still some occasional flakes in that and then a number of very odd items bend-break objects or tools that are present.
Again, there's an effort to generate OSL or optically stimulated luminescent dating. A number of samples have been taken that I believe are being processed now from the site. That should help resolve the age of the deeper deposits. Now, the 50,000 year dates came 3 or 4 meters below the surface in what's called the Pleistocene terrace and they actually weren’t 50,000. They were radiocarbon dead. It will be interesting to see what the OSL dates come out. If they come out 2, 300,000 years old, then you have to say well whatever is with them is very clearly pre-emergence of our species much less PaleoIndian.
We're waiting to see what the dates are and in the meantime, there are people continuing to work with the assemblages.
Jeremy: Any use-wear from those bend-break tools that came back conclusive?
David: Very little. Marvin Kay did a study about a decade ago and found very little evidence for use-wear that was convincing although he did find I believe 1 or 2 ... It could be likely there had been some tool forms like a graver were found at depth that have use-wear on them. A part of the problem with Allendale chert is it weather or patinates easily.
So, many of the artifacts don't have good preservation or evidence for use-wear. However, that is something that's being explored and the results at least for some artifacts do indicate use-wear. I, personally, since I'm overseeing the students doing the work, I've looked at the materials pretty carefully just macroscopically looked at the collections. I’ve been out to the site many times. Al Goodyear is a long time friend. He was my best man 30 years ago. I go out there a lot. I live near there in South Carolina.
I don't have much doubt that there are artifacts at depth in those deposits. My question and minimally there are small flakes, my question is how they got there. I think it's just as likely they could have got in through disturbance processes; tree roots washing in but we don't know. That's why it takes a concerted effort by a lot of people. Mike Waters has looked at the geoarcheology by the way and he has a good paper describing and dating the deposits, about 3 years ago that he produced. If you want more information on that.
Jeremy: All right. Thanks.
David: Sure. Thanks, Jeremy.
John: David, this is John Jamieson. Can you hear me?
David: Hey, John. How are you doing?
John: Yeah, fine. Long time no talk, my old office mate.
David: Yes. You were right next door. Good to hear from you from SEAC [Southeast Archeological Center.
John: Yeah. I guess my question is since it's pretty well agreed upon, it seems to me that there was a pre-Clovis phenomenon. What's the speculation on their subsistent strategy since they apparently had not been speculating, had not developed the tool kit that the Clovis culture had?
David: Well, the sort of the standard model, and I believe Dave Meltzer, Bruce Smith and others proposed this about 25 years ago, is generalized foragers and that also applies to some extent for Clovis populations as well although with Clovis at least we have some pretty unequivocal kill sites in the Americas - 14 or varying numbers depending on which sites you accept. The pre-Clovis populations, we have so little well-preserved paleo subsistence evidence from them. I mean, we have very little on them the way of sites, period.
One of the best locations is Monte Verde. That's in southern South America though but they appeared to have been gathering quite of wide range of plants and animals.
There is seaweed from the coast. There's other plants that were eaten. There's also evidence for larger mammals as well there. So, in terms of what these folks were likely eating, we don't know, but one thing that is occurring, the Manis Mastodon sites, Hebior and Schaefer, the Coats-Hines site is indicating that pre-Clovis people or at least people 14,000 years ago or so may well have been targeting these large mammals and particularly mammoth and mastodon.
The decline in Sporormiella for example, in the northeast and increasing charcoal particulates suggests something unusual going on, that maybe people targeting these large animals. There have been papers, Nicole Waguespackand Todd Surovell have written papers as have others on Clovis and pre-[inaudible]. It looks like even Clovis populations were eating a wide range of plants and animals albeit again targeting some large animals at least on occasion.
Clovis populations were likely doing the same thing. There are pretty increasingly convincing evidence for kill sites of large animals that are pre-Clovis in age. It looks like Coats-Hines is 1. Manis appears to be another. Hebior and Schaefer are looking pretty good. Again, with just small samples, it's hard to really argue and we really do need to collect the Paleo subsistence information - more flotation, fine screening, things like that.
John: Thank you, David. I want to thank you for this excellent presentation. It's fantastic and I'm glad these presentations are going to be posted online. Thanks a lot.
David: Yeah. You're welcome, John. Thank you. I have a written version of this paper that will be published. I'll be happy to provide it to people and perhaps I can send a PDF of that to Karen as well so that people that want references, additional information can have that. Anybody that wants to email me, is welcome to do so and particularly, if you want to send primary data on early occupations to the PIDBA website, I'll think highly of you forever if you do that.
Description
David G Anderson, 10/18/2012, ArcheoThursday
Duration
49 minutes, 55 seconds
Credit
NPS
Date Created
10/18/2012
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