Doing a thesis for my writing class and have chosen the         antiquity of
the first Americans as my subject. Clovis or    pre-Clovis, and why?

        I have begun my research with "Clocking the First Americans,"
        an article in the Annual Review of Anthropology vol. 24, 1995
        but I would like at least a couple sources on the cutting-edge
        of the debate. If you'd like to stir up a debate here or just
        cite a few sources for me I would greatly appreciate it...

        Thanks,

        Clint

Scotty MacNeish dug a cave in southren New Mexico a few years ago and found
evidence of very early man, circa 35k bp.  Some of the dates and some
fingerprint impressions in clay were reported in American Antiquities last
year.  The full report is still in preparation as far as I know.  The site is a
pretty amazing place and should add some fuel to to the fires of discussion
about the entry of man into the Americas.

Steve

 BY JANIE BRYANT, The {*filter*}ian-Pilot
     Copyright 1996, Landmark Communications Inc.

     SUSSEX COUNTY -- About 13,000 years before Moses led the
     Israelites out of Egypt, people were gathering around a fire in
     what is now Sussex County.

     Or at least that's what two archaeologists believe. The two have
     spent the past four years digging for clues to {*filter*}ia's
     prehistoric past at a site called Cactus Hill.

     With radiocarbon dates that place their finds as far back as
     16,000 years, the site is one of the oldest found in North and
     South America.

     Many American archaeologists believe the earliest human occupation
     of North America was 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.

     Earlier human occupation would have been extremely scarce, and
     finding signs of that occupation would be like looking for a
     needle in a haystack, according to E. Randolph Turner, director of
     the {*filter*}ia Department of Historic Resources' regional office in
     Portsmouth.

     Cactus Hill, Turner said, ``is one of a handful of sites dating to
     this early period in all of North and South America. This is truly
     unique -- it's of international significance.''

     The department's statewide Threatened Sites Program, based in
     Portsmouth, has funded much of the research and tests done on
     materials found at the site.

     In October, Cactus Hill was the lead story in The Mammoth Hunter,
     a publication of Oregon State University's Center for the First
     Americans.

     ``It's already pulled interest from some of the top people in the
     discipline,'' said Michael F. Johnson, one of two archaeologists
     excavating at the site. ``They're just waiting for more dates. And
     I think there are plenty of them there.''

     Johnson works for the Fairfax County Park Authority and surveys
     Ice Age projectile points for the Archeological Society of
     {*filter*}ia. He first heard about Cactus Hill from a collector who
     wanted him to record some Clovis points she had found. The points
     are named for the New Mexico site where they were first found in
     association with the extinct mammoth of the Ice Age.

     For decades, most archaeologists have believed those prehistoric
     fluted points were the tools of the earliest people to live in
     North America, Johnson said.

     The collector told Johnson where she found them, and he contacted
     Joseph M. McAvoy, a materials scientist whose company does
     archaeological research in that area. The Cactus Hill site is
     about 100 yards from the Nottoway River, near a sand pit in a
     swamp-surrounded area owned by a large paper company and leased by
     a hunt club.

     McAvoy, who has written a book on Clovis settlement patterns,
     already had done some excavation at Cactus Hill but also was
     working on other sites at the Nottoway River.

     McAvoy and Johnson began independent excavations on several areas
     of Cactus Hill in 1993. Each had volunteer help from colleges,
     chapters of the Archeological Society of {*filter*}ia, as well as
     other individuals interested in archaeology.

     ``We found a really nice Clovis working surface where they had
     dropped all the tools and points and stuff, but we didn't find a
     hearth, and we went down to the next level below Clovis and we
     did,'' McAvoy said. ``We found a scatter of white pine charcoal,
     and we said, `Here's our hearth.' These guys must have been
     digging little basins and building their fires down in these
     basins below the primary working surface.''

     McAvoy said they also noticed that there were some quartzite core
     blades with the hearth.

     ``When the radiocarbon date came back, it wasn't at all what we
     had expected to see in terms of a Clovis date,'' McAvoy said. ``It
     was 4,000 years older than Clovis.''

     At that point, the two researchers started taking a more careful
     look at the levels below Clovis.

     The ``basic tenet of American archaeology and most archaeologists
     is that when you get down to Clovis, there really isn't anything
     below it,'' McAvoy said. ``So when you get down to Clovis . . .
     you're very satisfied, and the average archaeologist probably
     wouldn't have a tendency to say maybe we should dig six feet
     more.''

     The rarity of such sites has made it hard to arrive at a consensus
     among archaeologists about who were the first people in North
     America.

     ``That's been the big fight in American archaeology for a long
     time,'' Johnson said. ``In the 1970s, an archaeologist found this
     sequence that we've got, up in the Pittsburgh area in a rock
     shelter called Meadowcroft.''

     It was difficult for those in the field who believed there were
     people earlier than Clovis, he said, because there was nothing to
     go on but the one site at Meadowcroft.

     Cactus Hill, he said, ``is really sort of confirming what was
     found way back then, and it's doing it in spades, since we have
     found this sequence on several parts of the site.

     ``I'm into it now, whereas before I really didn't know,'' he said
     of the theory that people were in North America long before the
     Clovis period. ``I'll tell you, it changes your whole way of
     thinking.'' Standing at the site, McAvoy says that thousands of
     years of windblown sand probably rounded out what was once a
     steeper ridge.

     That ridge probably drew prehistoric people who were seeking a dry
     camp site with enough wind to give them a reprieve from insects,
     Johnson said.

     During the Ice Age, a glacier was probably only 500 miles from the
     site, and, in the summer, the wind blowing off the melting ice was
     producing quite a bit of precipitation, he said.

     ``In the summertime back then, the bug problem would have been
     awful,'' Johnson said. ``So, you're going to seek the most
     windswept area.

     ``And the only soil around there that's really well-drained is the
     sand, or would have been then. You don't want to be sleeping in
     water -- particularly cold water.''

     McAvoy believes the core blades -- the artifacts found in the
     pre-Clovis level -- are an ``intermediate type of tool to produce
     other tools from bone or wood.''

     But the analyses that can tell how the tools were used has just
     begun.

     McAvoy said the Department of Historic Resources plans to publish
     a 500-page volume next year on the research at the site.

     A major symposium on the work will be conducted in March at the
     1997 Middle Atlantic Archaeological Conference in Ocean City, Md.

     Following a series of papers presented by scholars conducting
     research at the site, Dr. Dennis Stanford, chairman of the
     Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution, will
     summarize and critique the findings.

     ``We learned a lot about change,'' McAvoy said. ``We learned not
     only about how the material culture of people changed over, say,
     15,000 years, but we learned a lot, too, about how the forest
     itself had changed.''

     The forests at the site, 15,000 or 16,000 years ago, were
     apparently made up of conifers such as white pine, he said.

     With the glaciers taking up much of the ocean water, the Atlantic
     around that time was probably 80 miles farther to the east, he
     said.

     ``So trees that might grow only now in the highest part of the
     Appalachian Mountains, we could find then at Cactus Hill,'' McAvoy
     said.

     Then, with climatic changes, the forest changed to a series of
     hard southern pines, he said. The findings from earlier hunting
     cultures, from 4,000 to 9,000 years ago, were exciting, too,
     McAvoy said.

     ``We found enough of those artifacts to indicate to us that Cactus
     Hill was a fairly well-used location,'' he said.

     Today, Cactus Hill is a remote area off winding roads that wrap
     around swamp land not far from the rural town of Waverly.

     But it isn't hard for the archaeologists to see how it drew people
     thousands of years ago.

     ``You have to understand the area around Cactus Hill,'' McAvoy
     said. ``It's primarily low and swampy, but here where the site is
     located is a very high sandy hill.

     ``And it's right next to a `grocery store,' '' he said, referring
     to the clay bottom wetland to the south. ``That natural basin
     apparently for a long period of time has been an area that has
     produced a variety of plant foods, which in turn would attract a
     large number of animals.''

     It appears from bones found in unearthed fire pits that early
     Americans made meals out of everything from deer and fish to a
     large cat -- probably a bobcat, McAvoy said.

     They seemed especially fond of turtles and wild turkey, a bird
     that still can be heard gobbling near the river.

     Another draw to the site, in addition to food, was the materials
     needed to make hunting tools. Quartzite cobbles were exposed in
     the shoals and
...

read more »

Try the Aucilla River Prehistory Project Web Page At:
                http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/natsci/vertpaleo/arpp.htm