Bunch of Amateurs (23 page)

Now, 16,000 ± 150 years later, we were once again gathered here for story time. But Adovasio was not alone in trying to tell this story. Helping him, sort of, was the fat guy in front of me. He was just one of the crowd, like me, but he had spent much of the tour loudly explaining—allegedly to his long-suffering girlfriend, but really to the confederacy of dunces that was the rest of us—just how much he knew about this place. He wore a fanny pack the size of a car tire cinched above pastel shorts, robin’s egg blue socks, and black tennis shoes. His XXL T-shirt declared:
KLINGON ASSAULT GROUP
.

He had already sneeringly uttered the phrase “politically incorrect” several times to signal that he was no victim of conventional wisdom but a man of daring opinions. He had let everyone in the place know
that he very well intended to ask Adovasio the tough questions. So now the time had come: “Professor Adovasio, does working here in the rock-shelter in western Pennsylvania keep you safe from resentments with Native Americans?” He made an interrogative honking noise.

“No,” Adovasio insisted, “Native Americans have an intense interest in this site.” Adovasio segued quickly into a shaggy dog story about a certain Indian gentleman who was nothing but supportive. I looked at the dozen or so of us, all white folks in their forties and fifties, and none of us seemed a bit mystified about why Native Americans might be resentful. Perhaps that was why Adovasio didn’t feel obliged to really address this issue. His work, after all, suggests that the Native Americans were
late
getting here and that before Asians crossed the Bering Strait to settle North America around the commonly agreed time of thirteen thousand years ago, there were other people—from somewhere else—already here. He also knew that even more fresh evidence now suggests that these earliest people, and hence the true First Americans were, in the scientific jargon, “Caucasoid.” That is, white people who looked just like the Klingon ± 200 lbs.

Our continent’s creation story about the Asian hunter-gatherer crossing the Bering Strait is only about a century old and owes its origin to a black cowboy named George McJunkin. He had escaped slavery and fled out west. He taught himself book learning and herded cattle while pondering the world about him. An amateur scientist, McJunkin was said to ride a horse fixed with a big rifle scabbard in which he holstered his telescope.

McJunkin was well read enough to know that some old bones he found in Clovis, New Mexico, in 1908, were extinct animals. Twenty-five years later, experts investigating McJunkin’s discoveries found embedded in some of the bones of these ancient bisons a flat, rounded arrowhead with a bit of fluting at the base to assist fastening it to a spear. It would eventually become known as the Clovis point—the oldest spearhead ever found on the continent.

What makes the Clovis point so special is that it is found in massive numbers all across the continent and reliably enough at a level where organic material radiocarbon dates to roughly twelve thousand years ago. How massive? Take Bell County, Texas. The area north of Austin—known as the Gault site—must have been a well-known pit stop among the Clovis tribes. The place has yielded more than a million stone artifacts, more than half of them from the Clovis era.

“The whole idea of archaeology is that there must be enough redundancy in the record,” Richard Burger, a professor of anthropology at Yale, told me. Why? Because there is no other way to prove the case in archaeology, no other path to certainty.

“Archaeologists can’t do experiments,” Burger said. “Unlike lab science, we can’t mix carbon and sulfur and conclude that such and such happens. So we have something else that approaches that. We take advantage of redundancy so that the evidence repeats itself in broad patterns. With Clovis, this happens with confidence.”

In the last two decades, though, the confident tellers of Clovis Man’s story have been challenged by academic renegades devoted to identifying a new “First American.” There are at least four major sites (and some minor ones) in the Americas that claim to have found man-made objects dating tens of thousands of years before Clovis time. These theorists argue that while Clovis Man might still have crossed the Bering Strait thirteen thousand years ago, there is evidence that somebody else was already here. Given their natural caution, academics generally stop right there.

In the meantime, though, less credentialed theorists have stepped
forward to identify the pre-Clovis somebody. This new theory holds that white people settled this continent first and that Native Americans are just another crowd of later visitors, like Leif Eriksson’s Vikings and Christopher Columbus’s Spaniards. Most importantly, the way this theory has leached out of cautious academia and into the pop culture as wild-eyed fact suggests that America’s neurosis about race has taken up a new and potentially toxic location—deep in the heart of our continent’s creation myth. This discovery has happened not on the front page of the newspaper but in the rumor mill at the edge of archaeology, on the covers of pop science magazines, and in the whispers of self-employed anthropologists and unmoored amateurs.

For any new story to get told, there has to be an opening, a sudden tectonic jarring of all the conventional wisdom of a discipline, a kind of tilt between an old worldview and a new one. And that’s where we are now in the subdiscipline of ancient American archaeology, poised between two views held (as always) by mossbacked conservative traditionalists on the one side and young agitated revolutionaries on the other.

The voice of skepticism and orthodoxy is best embodied by Professor C. Vance Haynes of the University of Arizona. He comes by his skepticism honestly. He once bought into a claim quite similar to Adovasio’s, back in the 1950s at a site called Tule Springs in Nevada. He, too, thought the Clovis line had been breached. He was convinced by extensive evidence of “hearths” filled with charcoal and
animal bones, revealing a human encampment dating back twenty-eight thousand years. But later, when Haynes conducted precise tests of the charcoal, he realized that it was merely organic matter turning into coal. All of it was wrong. “You begin to see how easy it is to misinterpret things,” Haynes said.

Very easy. When you look at the evidence and the fights around it, you can understand why. First, arrowheads are cool things. Every little kid who has ever dug one up knows this. Arrowheads are symmetrical and beautiful objects. Their flutes, their chipped edges, their flared tails have all been studied, categorized, and given handsome names, dozens of them. The Madison point dates from
A.D
. 1400, the Whitlock much further back, at 400
B.C
. Keep going with Haywood points at 5000
B.C
. and deeper still to Cascade points at 8000
B.C
. (or so) and finally to the oldest, the Clovis point. To hold in your hand a weapon that is five hundred, a thousand, five thousand years old is humbling and, just … neato.

The style of these points, as you travel back in time, become noticeably less arrowheady. Instead of tooled edges, it is clear that they were flintknapped—i.e., beat at with another stone. A beveled edge might be replaced by a straight blade. The barbs near the base get more rounded. Those graceful fishtails disappear and then you get a simple stone point with a groove banged out at the bottom, the telltale primitivity signifying Clovis time. Beyond that, it is hard to tell whether the evidence is or is not man-made. In fact, archaeology has a term for naturally occurring objects that appear to be artifacts: geofacts. One archaeologist told me that in the old days, they’d dynamite a cave ceiling and then let naïve students in. When the students returned to class excited by their find of “ancient arrowheads,” the teacher would then school them in the ambiguities of geofacts.

So it’s easy to understand how much it pains the young cubs of contemporary archaeology when they have to listen to their older colleagues, the establishment, say that the entire array of pre-Clovis evidence is a pile of geofacts.

And not all that big a pile either. While all the evidence of Clovis man would pack a railroad car, according to Vance Hayes, all the good physical evidence of pre–Clovis man “would fit in a foot locker.”

The dates are a mixed bag ranging as far back as fifty thousand years ago to more recent sixteen-thousand-year dates. There are no broad patterns, there are no similarities, and there is no redundancy. So when you look at the individual artifacts themselves, it can be pretty underwhelming.

Add to that the messy business of obtaining dates. Rocks cannot be carbon-dated. The organic material they are found nested in can be, though. But that material can be easily contaminated by rain, by burrowing animals, by time. Plus, radiocarbon-dating sounds precise, and the idea of it—that carbon-14 molecules throw off electrons at a metronomically consistent geological pace—is more exact than the reality. Almost since the discovery of radiocarbon dating, scientists have been noting phenomena that cause variations with the regularity of carbon’s internal clock—sunspots, stray comets, the 1945 atomic bombs—such that they require applying a “correction factor.” Thus, for any ancient evidence to be confirmed, the punk rockers of archaeology have to look for affirmation from their elders, the Lawrence Welk orchestra. Worse, the old fogeys, like Vance Haynes and others, are essentially being asked to confirm a theory that overturns their entire life’s work. This combination of murky evidence and professional oedipalism can mean only one thing: academic food fight.

So in prehistoric archaeology there’s a lot of dialogue between the conservative traditionalists and the rebel theorists that, boiled down, typically goes like this:

Actually, that’s not much of an exaggeration. In Adovasio’s book
The First Americans
, he quotes a friend who said, “ ‘If they don’t believe the evidence, fuck ’em’—definitely not scientific discourse but not ill considered, either!”

From its opening line—“ ‘Damn,’ I said.”—Adovasio’s book quivers with the fury of a scolded teenager. His own site, the Meadowcroft Rockshelter I visited in southwest Pennsylvania, has been roundly dismissed by elders who note the existence of nearby “coal seams” (yet another factor that throws off C-14 dating) and groundwater seepage. C. Vance Haynes is among those who have wrinkled their noses at Meadowcroft. On page 216 of his book, Adovasio dismisses him as the “grinch of North American archaeology.” Anyone who has questioned Adovasio’s own site at Meadowcroft is a “gnat.” Every page is dipped in upstart snark.

And no love is lost among the rebels themselves. When a Parisian archaeologist discovered an amazing site called Pedra Furada in Brazil, the initial reports were breathtaking. Besides numerous pieces of pre-Clovis evidence, there were cave paintings said to be even older than the images at Lascaux in France or Altamira in Spain. The Pedra Furada drawings depict hot Pleistocene Era group sex. Brazil’s tourist bureau developed plans to capitalize on the find. Then Adovasio himself came down as part of an expert panel which, sorrowfully, declared it all wrong. Adovasio wrote that he saw nothing but “almost surely broken rocks that had fallen into the rockshelter,” i.e., geofacts. He dismissed the find of “ancient fireplaces” as “nothing more than material blown in from nearby forest fires.”

And so it goes. The entire subfield of pre-Clovis is a tiny shark tank where attacks are constant and the chum that keeps bobbing away from them is the unquestionable piece of evidence that convinces all the skeptics that somebody else was here before Clovis.

Of course, the language of this brawl is academic and Latinate, mostly fought with the manly sesquipedalianisms of science jargon. Here, tree rings are “dendrochronological samples.” A rock is a
“lithic,” and a rock that’s clearly been flaked by human hands is “an indubitable lithic artifact.” Bits of stone chipped off to make a tool are “percussion flakes.”