PALEO-INDIANS: THE FIRST SOUTH AMERICANS, ROUTES AND CONTROVERSIES
Lesson objectives: describe the evidence of the earliest human presence in South America, the sites and artifacts, and compare competing interpretations and controversial sites.
Where did the first South Americans come from and when did they arrive? We might use the term Paleo-Indian to mean earliest Americans on both continents. Moseley's (2001:22-23) chart calls this time the Lithic Period , meaning stone, but now we have more than stone artifacts even this early. Paleo-Indian also has become a problem term, and not only because of the inappropriateness in origin of the word Indian; it is often associated with diagnostic chipped stone projectile (spear) points dated to a specific early time span in North America, but now we have what might be called a pre-PaleoIndian or pre-projectile point evidence, or at least something earlier than the Clovis horizon in North America. Clovis is a diagnostic type of projectile point with a flute, a channel flake up the center of the point, usually on both sides. It was for a long time thought to be associated with the cultural adaptation of the earliest people, specifically, big game hunting, especially mammoths. Clovis is dated in North America as extending from about 11,500 to perhaps 10,900 years ago (and these are radiocarbon years; after calibration with tree-ring dating it comes out to about 13,500-12,900 calendar years ago or 11,500-10,900 B.C. Students who do not understand radiocarbon date calibration should consult your introductory archaeology text, e.g., Ashmore and Sharer 2000). It is extremely important to remember that in understanding the earliest humans in South America, archaeologists had traditionally viewed the problem in terms of the North American data because 1. North America was (supposedly) better known, certainly better published, 2. North America was where the first humans had to have passed first, and 3. North Americans (many with their own ethnocentric viewpoints) were the ones doing the interpreting of South America also (sometimes ignoring the work of South American researchers). Now South American sites are crucially important, and this is an exciting time to study the peopling of the Americas because of so many recent discoveries and analyses ø not to mention controversies.
So how did people get to South America? There were only two ways to move, walk or take the boat. They probably did both (show possible routes on National Geographic [2000] map, Peopling of the Americas) . The typical explanation for the earliest humans' entrance into the New World is that people crossed from northeast Asia, Siberia, into North America, during the Pleistocene when sea levels were lower and there was a land bridge; they kept walking and made it to South America. This year the coastal hypothesis is back in favor, the idea that the earliest peoples made their way slowly down sheltered coasts of both North and South America. Though sea level has risen and no doubt drowned just about all the evidence, there are a few North American sites supporting this hypothesis. At any rate, they must have come through North America first, to a greater or lesser degree, not across the wide Pacific from Japan, even though many of the South American dates are earlier than the earliest ones from North America. Bruhns (p. 43) says they must have moved into South America down the mountain chains because those environments support large herbivores. This has been our stereotyped view of the first Americans, Big-Game Hunters extraordinaire, very macho, with big chipped stone points and lots of meat. But we need to examine this model closely.
What was the Pleistocene environment like when they arrived? The Pleistocene or Ice Age was a time when much of the water in the ocean was tied up in glaciers, ice sheets up to a mile thick, covering the northern part of the northern hemisphere (see map). In South America there was no continental ice sheet, but mountain glaciers covered large valleys (some of these still exist today but they are much smaller). Sea level was perhaps 100 meters lower, the climate was much colder and drier in general. But the north part of the west coast of South America may have been warmer and wetter, with mangroves farther south, more lomas vegetation. The Amazon rainforest is thought to have been smaller, drier, and more open during the Pleistocene; experts keep changing their minds about this (e.g., Adovasio 2002:195) but new data from ice cores taken in the high Andes (Krajick 2002) suggest even the vast jungle was less resistant to major climatic change than previously expected.
The Pleistocene lasted till about 10,000 years ago, but there were plenty of people here before it ended. Bruhns describes the possibility of rapid environmental change, more or less rain, higher and lower temperatures; we are still trying to reconstruct local climates in different regions. Remember we need to trust archaeology and paleoclimatology to get data on long-term climate change and even short-term change, since we have historic records that only go back a century or two. Even with historic records, we forget how rapid change can affect culture. Where we live, in central peninsular Florida, is seeing rapid change from orange groves to housing developments; many of the groves were originally frozen out. But over a century ago orange groves covered northwest Florida for years until the freezes came and moved them farther south.
We know that South America's first people were Asian in genetic affiliation . Because of possibly a genetic founder effect, they appear all to have been of type O blood, and to have other distinguishing genetic characteristics. Of course they had at least ten to 15 millennia to evolve in South American environments as well, so we get high altitude adaptations and such. Perhaps only one large group made it down through the narrow isthmus of Panama overland, bringing along the basic things seen throughout the hemisphere such as chipped stone technology, dogs, hunting and gathering methods, perhaps moieties and other traditional social systems. The textbooks always tell you what animals were available to them. Pleistocene fauna were big and spectacular because they are now mostly extinct. In South America they were mastodon, glyptodon (a huge armored creature --giant armadillo 6-7 feet long), giant sloth, horse, camel forms including bigger camels and paleollama (show pictures in Adovasio 2002; Lynch 1999), large flightless birds, and many others. The stereotype adaptation for these first peoples was running after herds of these beasts, based on the North American evidence of Paleo-Indian points found at mammoth and bison kill sites. Now even in North America the stereotype is dying out as we realize that would have been quite a risky way to make a living all the time.
What is the traditional archaeological evidence of the first South American people? What are the diagnostic lithic artifacts ? Chipped stone technology produced lanceolate (lance-shaped), pressure-flaked, well made points of various types all over the continent. Moseley divides Peru into 3 lithic traditions (map p. 86) but the rest of the continent has a much wider variety. Bruhns notes that we must recognize the great diversity of adaptations related to local environments. We know people were indeed sometimes hunting herd animals and big game, but we must recognize the shortcomings of those stereotypes. Hunting is not as reliable as gathering plants and small protein resources such as eggs (animals run or fly away). Most hunter-gatherers known ethnographically eat more plants than meat. Tired old stereotypes of men hunting and women gathering don't work because now we know women hunt in some cultures (Dahlberg 1981), and often both men and women do similar subsistence activities (we do not assume a division of labor based on gender unless there is some way of documenting itø very hard to do in archaeology). Hunting is not as reliable as fishing either, but we have few data on coastal adaptations because presumably the earliest ones are far underwater now due to rising sea levels. Stone is scarcer in the tropics, but there are very distinctive points there too, we will see. Variations on the lanceolate points occur at sites all over the continent, and the traditional way of teaching culture history discusses each of them and their associated sites. But we will first get to newer findings that expand our view of cultures named after point types.
The Monte Verde site in northern Chile, among others, has changed our views of the peopling of the Americas in general, not to mention of the adaptations of the first inhabitants. Fagan's (1997) article summarizes data from this site in northern Chile, which was not accepted for 20 years by the archaeology establishment based in North America. First of all, the site had dates earlier than Clovis, and it had no diagnostic points. Second, it did not support the big-game-hunting specialization model of the first Americans, since it had evidence of gathering lots of plants and seafood, as well as terrestrial animals, and preserved artifacts of perishable materials, but the stone tool assemblage was minimal. Most of the experts in Paleo-Indian studies thought only in terms of projectile points, "real" archaeological markers, as opposed to items such as . They disputed the claims of Tom Dillehay, the excavator, and required higher standards of proof than for most North American sites. Dillehay's (1989, 1997) monumental 2-volume work detailing the investigations describes the struggle for acceptance of the very early dates and how a prominent archaeologist visited on a day when excavations were exploring a culturally sterile stratum, then thought the site had nothing to offer and spread this opinion widely. This is a good case in which to see how science is self-correcting, though it sometimes takes time and lots of effort if your findings disagree with both the most popular current theories and the most famous current practitioners.
What are the artifacts and ecofacts from Monte Verde? Located on a small creek 60 km (36 miles) from the ocean, on the cold, wet coastal plain, this site was inhabited by people who constructed rectangular rowhouses (having a common wall in between) of wood, perhaps covered in hide that was staked like tents. The 12 rooms were 3-4 m long, with clay-lined fire pits and 2 large hearths apparently for common cooking or heat. On the west side was an isolated, wishbone-shaped building with a rear platform and open front facing the hearths. Most of the interesting plant remains came from this unusual structure, some in chewed wads, many species that may have been used for medicinal purposes, as well as burned animal skin, and most of the mastodon remains (was it a hut for game processing? a shaman's home?). Monte Verde was a rare open-air site (as opposed to a cave or rock shelter), and was spectacular because the creek backed up, which resulted in the formation of a peat bog that covered and, because of the wet, anaerobic conditions, preserved everything that would normally rot fast. Other items recovered include wooden artifacts such as stakes and mortars; twine and cordage; diverse plants such as 11 wild potatoes, roots, seeds, nuts, leafy vegetables; animal remains including mastodons (MNI or minimum number of mastodons was 6), paleollama, and smaller things such as amphibians, reptiles, birds, even bird eggshell, and animal hide and 38 meat fragments (show pictures from Dillehay 1997, Fagan 1997, Gore 1997). Biotic remains, numbering some 20,000 specimens of 55 taxa, were of species from many different types of environments (coast, marsh, forest), including some areas up to 400 km away, and all seasons of the year, suggesting sedentary settlement.
There were very few stone tools, but they included some bola or sling stones (ground stone balls, possibly weights for attaching to thongs and throwing around the legs of running animals ø we have them at ancient Florida sites too), a few chipped stone pieces, a couple basalt points, and some crude-looking cobbles with flakes removed, but no classic Paleo points. There was even a preserved human footprint. In all, the reconstructed lifestyle was very different from (and far more variable and sophisticated than) that in the model of nomadic hunter-gatherers always eating steak. An even bigger problem was the radiocarbon dates placing the site at over 13,500 years oldø older than nearly all the North American evidence and a millennium before Clovis. A much earlier layer that even Dillehay was unwilling to consider a cultural zone, but could have been, was dated to between about 33,000-34,000 years ago.
One reason Monte Verde is now more accepted is that sites with similar perishable items and with more evidence of collecting and fishing are now known from North America from pre-Clovis times (e.g., Adovasio 2002). Another reason is that Dillehay had to bring a whole group of doubting famous North American archaeologists (as well as a few Chilean and other South American scholars) down to see the site themselves and then pass judgement (Gibbons 1997). I like to think that another reason is that current intellectual trends in archaeology make us more aware of the scientific imperialism of seeing everything of importance in South America as having to have originated in the North. Nonetheless, there are some specialists who still will not accept the antiquity of this site (Lynch 1999), and a detailed critique of Dillehay's work was curiously published in a multi-page insert of a popular magazine, Scientific American Discovering Archaeology (November-December 1999; also curiously the magazine is now out of business, apparently). The author, an archaeologist named Stuart Fiedel, detailed errors in the 1300-page Monte Verde report (Dillehay 1989, 1997) in maps, tables, descriptions of artifacts and such. Even though the report had won a 1998 Society for American Archaeology award for its care and detail, Dillehay, like any archaeologist, had to admit there could always be minor problems when such a massive amount of data are processed. Still, the Fiedel piece was not peer-reviewed science (Pringle 1999a), and caused an uproar because of its timing, coming out right before a big conference on the peopling of the Americas. We are spending a lot of time on this because it is important to see how archaeological knowledge is produced, interpreted, contested, and either accepted or rejected. It is a shame that personalities get in the way and that one scientist's work and integrity must be considered threatened if another one finds conflicting results. On the other hand it is an exciting time to be doing such research, with so many fascinating and controversial findings.
What far earlier site in Brazil is also contested, and why? The movie and readings noted the interior northeastern Brazilian rock shelter site of Pedra Furada that is claimed to be perhaps 32,000 years old or more. Paintings on the rock walls (show picture from Guidon 1987) may be associated with several different cultural layers deposited below them. Fragments of painted rock from these walls were found with quartz and quartzite stone tools in stone-lined hearths that yielded radiocarbon dates ranging from 32,000 years ago (or earlier) to 17,000 (and later). While Monte Verde is now accepted by the majority of archaeologists as a pre-Clovis type of site, Pedra Furada has had far less acceptance. A major reason is the extreme age proposed, and another reason is that some people consider many of the artifacts to be just be natural rocks. It does not help that the work is being done by Brazilians and French investigators led by Ni P de Guidon (who is both a woman and French, 2 reasons perhaps for her not being taken seriously by established American investigators!).
What about the earliest humans in the Amazon? We examine the work of Roosevelt, great-granddaughter of president Theodore (who also had jungle adventure, though not as much or as scientific), whose work is described in the articles you read (Roosevelt et al. 1996; Gibbons 1966). One stereotyped attitude she came up against was the notion that tropical forests cannot provide enough food to support people, especially starchy foods. This view always amazes me, since not only is the contrast with barren deserts and mountains, but also the tropical forest has the highest species diversity of any ecosystem! Also, again, she was bucking the models of early Americans based on lanceolate projectile points and large fauna. She and her Brazilian and other coworkers investigated caves in northern Brazil, an area called Monte Alegre. In a cave called Caverna da Pedra Pintada the sandstone walls were painted with red and yellow handprints, human figures, animals, and geometric shapes. Excavating the floor below, they found very different kinds of stone tools, including the small smoky quartz stemmed point featured on the cover of the Science article, some 30,000 stone flakes, and all associated with hearths full of thousands of fruits, seeds, and small and large fish and animals (also pictures in Dorfman 2002). With 56 radiocarbon dates and other high-tech studies, Roosevelt demonstrated the cultural remains to range from 11,200 to 10,000 years in age, so contemporaneous (more or less) with Clovis that is going on in North America. The subsistence picture at this site is enormously diverse: shellfish gathering; collecting fruits, nuts, palm seeds (cracked open by humans, not gnawed by animals); fishing with spear, harpoon, net, trap, and/or poison; obtaining rodents, birds, large and small mammals, amphibians, snakes, and turtles; in general, broad-spectrum tropical forest and river foraging. Her current work includes diving in the Xingu River region (photo in Dorfman 2002) to obtain similar, larger stemmed stone points and wooden artifacts suggesting spearing of large aquatic species such as dolphins or manatees.
What are the larger implications from the early Amazonian adaptation seen in this work? Roosevelt (e.g., 1999) emphasizes that the earliest people there were already manipulating the forest for their own ends, that long-term adaptation to the humid tropics developed very early, and that the forest and ecosystem is very anthropogenic, the biodiversity may have been enhanced by human activity. Her results enlarge the view that the radiation of peoples throughout the New World was a very complex phenomenon, and that projectile points are just a few of the several regular stone tools people used. Though she did not get the preservation of perishables seen at Monte Verde, she is able to show forest dwellers especially emphasizing forest plant products and aquatic resources. None of the plant remains were from dry or cool environment species. People got into the hot jungle and did just fine very early ( I think our failure to accept this reflects our inability to accept any environment these days in which we have to sweat, our view that people just could not do anything worthwhile if it was too hot!). Roosevelt's work is of course also challenged by many who do not accept her dates or see her tools as anything new or different. Some have said that we can hardly use one site to revise all of American archaeology, but of course we have been doing this all along, since we found extinct fauna associated with lovely lanceolate points at Clovis and Folsom, New Mexico. Interestingly enough some of those who support the Monte Verde data do not support or even mention the Amazon data. We will look at scientific controversies like these as we go through the course, but such debates are very heated when the subject is the oldest or the first. Meanwhile, the work we've summarized so far seems to have been done with rigorous standards, large batteries of chronometric dates, careful standards of proof that meet or exceed those of more conventional Paleo-Indian sites where lanceolate points are the major finds. There is no reason that people could not have been in the continent far earlier than originally thought, and doing many different things besides big-game hunting to get along.
What Paleo-Indian sites and projectile points characterize the rest of South America? Your texts detail these well. Among the earliest are others at the southern end of the continent. Junius Bird in the 1930s went to southern Chile, and worked at Fell's Cave and Palli Aike Cave in Tierra del Fuego, where established a cultural history sequence that has at times been unaccepting of newer data (Lanata and Borrero 1999). At these sites he got large mammal bones, horse, sloth, guanaco, with fluted, fish-tailed lanceolate points (illustrated in Moseley 2001:91). Later radiocarbon dating showed them to be in deposits over 10,000 years old. This area, near the Straits of Magellan (see your map), connects easily to both the Atlantic and Pacific, and is the southernmost region where humans have lived in the world. While Moseley suggests such points are relatively rare, Bruhns (p. 48) mentions that they are found widely, and as far north as Guatemala. In reality, they occur as far north as northwest Florida (Dunbar 1994); perhaps there was diffusion of such very specific lithic artifact types (possibly from south to north?) though Moseley (p.92) says perhaps they represent a second wave of immigration into South America. Whatever their origin, fluted fishtailed points occur also at Los Toldos site in southern Argentina (see map in Bruhns, p. 44), with other bifacial tools, bone awls and spatulas, all dated to about 9000 B.C. and, interestingly, overlying even earlier cultural deposits with thick unifacial tools and remains of extinct fauna. In the northern Andes, high plains and páramo, wet high grasslands (lower than the puna), there are rock shelter sites with seasonal occupations characterized by projectile points, burials, and small fauna such as deer, peccary, agouti (modern, not Pleistocene fauna). El Inga site in Ecuador near Quito produced 21 fishtail points. In Venezuela the famous Taima-Taima site is characterized by distinctive, leaf-shaped El Jobo points (see picture in Bruhns p. 52). Several other sites are also representative of open air occupation near water holes by people who are clearly hunting, though these points may be knives as well as spears. In coastal Peru sites as early as 9500 B.C. occur near tar seeps where perhaps hunters waited for large game to get mired; post-Pleistocene levels at these sites show early shellfishing evidence, as is found on the Ecuadorian coast.
What are Paijan points? They are long, thin, and stemmed, and very delicate; a nice diagram (Bruhns p.54, Moseley p. 94)) shows how they are made from nicely formed bifaces. They have been given dates from 12,000-7000 years ago in coastal Peruvian valleys, and it is unclear if they are associated with extinct animals. They may have been for spearing fish, as they are needle-nosed and often have broken tips, but since coastal sites are drowned, the inland sites where they occur may have been temporary habitations for people who made them, if they moved back and forth seasonally. The points and many other stone tools such as scrapers and knives are even associated with land snails, as well as small animals and seafood. This adaptation on the Peruvian coastal plain seems to have been very successful, if circumscribed, and the distribution of Paijan tradition sites coincides with the distribution of later sites on the coast where we wee monumental architecture and fairly settled life based on a fishing subsistence.
Moving 80 km from the coast to the mountains, a well-documented early site is Guitarrero Cave in northern Peru, dug by Thomas Lynch (see nice photo in Bruhns, p. 56), which has good stratigraphic data, organic preservation, and dates as early as 10,000 years ago ( Lynch 1980 ). This high, sierra location is in the Callejon de Huaylas, a great long Andean basin (see your maps). Cave deposits showed procurement of small game and birds and deer in earlier levels, and evidence of early plant cultivation and camelid pastoralism in later levels, and probably documents the beginnings of a pattern of seasonal transhumance (moving from higher to lower elevations and back again over the year, often with the herds). Lauricocha Cave, south of Guitarrero, in the puna, also has seasonal occupation evidence that was well stratified and dated to as early as 7500 B.C., from the end of the Pleistocene and into the Holocene. Deer and camel were hunted here, with different projectile points, and later there appears to be evidence of early camelid domestication. In the high Andes, John Rick worked at Pachamachay , a site in the puna that documents the movement over time from obtaining diverse resources to economic specialization as camelid hunters (probably vicu Z a). Scotty McNeish dug near Ayacucho at Pickimachay Cave , which had sloth bones and tanged points; he wanted to claim this as the earliest South American site but many think the dates of 12,000-20,000 years came from ecofacts that came from the cave roof. In central Chile the Taguatagua site dated to 11,400 B.P., produced mastodon, horse, unifacial tools. Bruhns (p.62) notes sporadic finds of Paleo-Indian materials in Uruguay, Paraguay, northern Argentina, southern Brazil. Lagoa Santa is a famous Brazilian cave that had what were once claimed to be the earliest human remains, though this has been disproved. Many southern Brazilian sites have petroglyphs (rock art) that is hard to date but there is some Paleo-Indian evidence. Two sites recently in the news, Quebrada Tacahuay and Quebrada Jaguay , on the far south coast of Peru produced fish, shellfish, and marine mammals; though this is the desert coast, quebradas or ravines here have small seeps and springs that attracted people who provided the earliest surviving evidence of maritime adaptations, some 10,000-11,000 years old.
How can we summarize the adaptations of the first South Americans ? There are many good summaries of differing viewpoints on the subject (e.g., Adovasio 2002, Dillehay and Meltzer 1991; Dillehay 2000). Yes, some groups were big game hunters in some environments, perhaps after the initial colonization, and like in North America, they probably helped along the process of extinction for Pleistocene fauna by overkilling (what motivation might there be for conservation? We have great evidence from Pacific islands now that as soon as humans arrive, the largest species soon become extinct; this is not a coincidence). There is even some evidence (Adovasio 2002:199) for the persistence of Ice Age fauna such as horses in South America long after they were gone from North America. But there is nothing like a Clovis horizon in South America, and the evidence is very good that long before Clovis, probably as early as 15,000 years ago, different human groups in different environments were subsisting in a variety of ways, with the emphasis upon variability and flexibility, perhaps more simple tools (at least those of stone). This includes harvesting coastal resources, a large number of plants, hunting camelids in the highlands, horses and other grazers on the pampas and savannas, perhaps going after large animals such as mastodon only when it was easy, such as when they were stuck in a bog and easy prey. There were probably many different entrances of human groups into South America, at different times and along different routes. Possibly some hunting specializations came later. The jungle was just as hospitable as the highlands or coast, if not more so. There is more rock art known from the eastern side of the continent. At rare sites where they are preserved all over the New World, artifacts made of plant fiber are far more common than those of stone. So it may be a while before we can find all the evidence we need to understand the different possibilities for the earliest South Americans. Probably more wet sites will be the best to investigate for this, and more sites done with meticulous modern methods, including fine screens and soil flotation. Meanwhile, those who use early universal human adaptations to big-game hunting as justification for modern (male) aggression cannot use the South American data for support.