Features

Archeologist makes the case for burying
dominant theory of first Americans

This is the usual story of how people first came to the Americas:

People walked across a land bridge at the Bering Strait from Asia to Alaska about 12,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age. They then came south through what is now Canada through an ice-free corridor and spread across the continent.

Archeologist Michael Collins has presented his arguments for the earlier-than-previously-thought arrival of humans to the Americas on several television and radio shows.

It came to be known as the Clovis culture because archeological evidence was found in the 1930s at a site near Clovis, N.M.

That’s the theory that was propounded for most of the 20th century.

Michael Collins, a University of Texas at Austin archeologist, and others, however, have questioned the theory and unearthed evidence that indicates people were in the Americas thousands of years before the Clovis culture.

Their challenge to the so-called Clovis First theory has generated firestorms within the archeological community, but, over the years, it has gained in acceptance.

It’s an example of how continuing research, the persistent asking of questions and perseverance in digging for answers can shed new light on an entire field of science.

Questioning Clovis

The key evidence in the primacy of the Clovis culture in the Americas were the Clovis points, spearheads that had been made by men. They were flaked on each side with pointed tips. There were grooves on each side of the base so the head could be strapped to a spear.

Over the decades after discovery of the Clovis site similar evidence, including spear points crafted in the Clovis style, was found in the 48 states of the continental U.S. and into Central America.

The timing, the geology and the archeological record fit together nicely and neatly.

It was too nice and neat for Collins, a research associate at the university’s Texas Archeological Research Laboratory. He and others began to tease it apart thread-by-thread about 25 years ago.

“We need to back up, start over and explain the peopling of the Americas with a new and rigorous explanation,” he said.

Recovered from the Gault site in Bell County, these tools were used by humans thousands of years ago to kill game, cut wood and gather food.

The questioning of Clovis set off bitter conflict in the archeological community.

“If you want to get beat up, talk about pre-Clovis cultures in the Americas,” said Collins.

In the early days of the pre-Clovis movement, to suggest one had evidence of such inhabitants of the Americas was to “invite ridicule,” he said. “It was very, very difficult to get funding for research devoted to that topic.”

Collins has been one of those spreading the pre-Clovis message.

He was a key pre-Clovis source on the Nova program, “America’s Stone Age Explorers,” which aired last fall on PBS.

It didn’t hurt that his usual mode of dress—a blue work shirt, sturdy khakis, suspenders and strong work boots and a broad-brimmed hat to wear over his white hair—make him something of an archeologist from central casting.

The message, Collins said, is catching on. He estimated that about 80 percent of archeologists who study the Americas either accept pre-Clovis or think that it is feasible.

As archeologists kept digging into the Clovis First theory, they found evidence to strengthen their questions. Pre-Clovis sites began popping up. Monte Verde in Chile has been dated to 13,500 years, before the earliest Clovis evidence.

Fighting Clovis with Clovis

Collins worked on the Monte Verde site and that convinced him that Clovis First was wrong and that Clovis First evidence could be used to show it’s wrong.

 “I made a conscious decision that if you want to counter the Clovis First theory, what better database to use than Clovis itself,” he said. “Because people can’t just reject it out of hand. They’re going to have to look you in the eye and say ‘I don’t accept your interpretations for these reasons based on this evidence.’”

Over the course of three years, dozens of professional archeologists and volunteers recovered 700,000 artifacts from the Gault site.

He said the archeological evidence in the Americas doesn’t match with the Clovis First theory.

The widespread nature of Clovis—in the 48 states of the lower United States and into Central America—works against the Clovis First, he said.

“It doesn’t make sense that people could master the skills for survival in all those different environments in such a short period of time,” he said. “There has to be some cumulative knowledge.”

There were 1,500 Native American languages when Europeans made contact. When statistical analysis is applied to those languages, it indicates that some diverged more than 20,000 years ago, probably in this hemisphere.

Then there is the evidence of human remains, which do not appear to have the predicted sharing of Mongoloid features by Asians and Native Americans.

“You look at the very, very few bits of skeletal evidence that we have in the Americas greater than 10,000 years old, they’re not Mongoloid,” he said. “That has to be explained.”

Gault trip

As he sharpened his anti-Clovis points, the Gault site fell into his lap.

“That was the most fantastic piece of serendipity there ever was,” Collins said. “It is the poster child of Clovis contradictions to the Clovis First theory.”

Gault is in Bell County, about 50 miles north of Austin, on land that had two resources prized by Stone Age people. There were water and stone, which could be used to make spear points and tools.

TARL started an excavation in 1998 and Collins hit pay dirt.

“One of the things you would extrapolate from the Clovis First theory is that Clovis people were highly mobile, specialized big game hunters,” he said. “The Gault site indicates that they were there for at least 200-300 years. Not permanently, but off and on.”

The stone tools were worn to the nub, an indication of long-term habitation of the site.

“The site is full of worn tools made of the local stone,” Collins said. “That means they stayed at that locality beyond the use life of the tools they were making. Or, alternatively, they headquartered there, made the stone tools and took them out on some sort of subsistence round, came back and discarded them.”

There also are the remains of small animals—turtles, birds and fish—which indicates the Gault people ate more than mammoths and other big animals.

As they ended the Gault dig, the researchers were finding evidence of habitation 200-300 years before Clovis people should have been there.

“We either have evidence that you have to extend the starting date of Clovis back a couple of hundred years or that there was something there pre-Clovis,” he said.

More questions

After most of a century comfortable with the Clovis Theory of the Peopling of the Americas, archeology has more and more questions to answer and, so far, a new theory hasn’t been formulated. Until then, and probably after, archeologists will ask questions.

“That’s what makes this subfield of archeology so exciting right now,” he said. “It’s constantly changing. Every time something’s published we have to step back and say ‘My goodness, what are the ramifications of that for what we’re doing and thinking right now.’”

The questions are about how and when. Collins thinks he knows why they came.

“Human beings are curious,” he said. “Human curiosity has driven development since as far back in time as you can imagine.”

Collins said he agrees with the observation of the late French pre-historian Francois Bordes that the Americas were peopled because somebody wanted to know what was over that next horizon.

“It might just be that things were fine where they were and there was no reason to think they’d be better over there,” Collins said. “They were just plain curious. I’m sure our past would be entirely different if our species hadn’t developed that curiosity.”

Tim Green

Related Sites

Gault Site
Texas Archeological Research Laboratory
13,000 Years at Your Fingertips: Virtual museum showcases the rich cultural heritage of Texas