America Before the European Invasions

Alice Beck Kehoe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317876281
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Beginning with the immigrants from Asia, through inventions of agriculture, cities and kingdoms, American First Nations are integral to the history of the United States. They explored the continent, pioneered its waterways and mountain passes, cleared forests, irrigated deserts, and ranched its great plains.

Invading Europeans justifies their conquests by denying the evidence of American Indian civilisations. Using her familiarity with the archaeological remains and remnants, Alice Kehoe builds a fascinating prehistory, highlighting the research puzzles along the way.

This book presents an enthralling look at the depth and diversity of American history - before the Europeans and the deadly epidemics they brought with them decimated whole nations.

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FIRST AMERICANS

The Americas were initially populated during the Pleistocene Ice Age, at least fifteen thousand years ago. Many descendants of America’s First Nations consider their religious traditions, that they originated in a spiritual realm connected to this world, to be sufficient knowledge for the question of earliest population. A scientific worldview, by definition of science limited to empirically demonstrable data, cannot admit spiritually revealed knowledge. Thus there may appear to be strong differences between a First Nation’s accounts of its earliest history, and the narratives prepared by professional archaeologists and paleoanthropologists. Unhappily, some Indian champions feel challenged by European-derived science, and some archaeologists defend narrowly scientific explanations against any other beliefs. It is important to understand that theology and science need not conflict: an account of spiritual origins conveys religious knowledge and generally can accommodate the more limited empirically based interpretations developed by scientists.

Physical and genetic data link American Indians to Asian populations, supporting the obvious probability that humans entered North America from the nearest continental mass, Asia. From the early nineteenth century, geographers pointed to the Bering Strait, between northeastern Siberia and Alaska, as the likely route. A north polar projection map (not the common Mercator equatorial projection) or a globe will show that the Spitzbergen Peninsula from northwestern Norway ends close to Baffin Land in northeastern Canada, and zoologists note that reindeer moved along routes between Norway and northeasternmost Canada, but this region was heavily glaciated during Pleistocene ice advances and has always been less hospitable to humans than the North Pacific, warmed by the Japanese Current flowing north along the American coast and hosting a rich bounty of fish, sea mammals, and birds. Therefore, the North Pacific-Bering Strait region remains the most likely link between Eurasia, where modern humans gradually spread over more than a hundred thousand years, and the Americas where no earlier forms of humans, and no apes, have been discovered. Archaeological, biological, and linguistic similarities between northeastern Asian and northwestern American sites and populations support the picture of a series of movements of small human groups from Asia into America through the Bering region.

Asia has had human populations for over a million years, and in the Late Pleistocene, 40,000–10,000 years ago, it was home to a diversity of regional groups anatomically modern in all essential characteristics (such as brain size, upright posture) but differing like contemporary populations in facial features, coloring, and average size. What we now think of as “typical Asians,” the Chinese-Japanese-Mongolian populations with high projecting cheekbones and a fold over the nose side of the eyelid, spread over eastern Asia quite late, after some immigration into America had already taken place. Before the domination by “Mongoloids,” eastern Asia had more widespread populations resembling the historic Ainu of Japan, perhaps best described as “generalized Eurasian” – relatively light-skinned, dark hair, brown eyes, neither very tall nor very short, a range from which descendants could develop into Indo-Chinese, Polynesians, Siberians, and American Indians as well as the stereotyped “Mongoloids.” The few skeletons found in North America dating from the end of the Pleistocene, such as Kennewick Man buried along the Columbia River, are “generalized” like this rather than showing exclusively distinctive American Indian physical characteristics.

Evidence for Early Settlement

It has been conventionally held that during much of the Late Pleistocene epoch, what is now the sea channel Bering Strait was a broad land mostly covered with tundra. The Aleutian Islands would be the remnants of the southern coast of this land, called Beringia by geologists. Russian geologist Mikhail Grosswald¹ counters the conventional picture with evidence he interprets to indicate massive glacial ice lay over Beringia during the last major glaciation of the Pleistocene. According to Grosswald, only the few centuries 12,500–12,000 BCE (geologists’ Bølling-Allerød interstadial warm phase) would have opened a land bridge unencumbered by impassable ice. Whichever picture of Beringia is correct, its southern margins would teem with fish and sea mammals feeding on plants and microorganisms nourished by the rich flow of nutrients from glaciers’ melting edges.

For the past five thousand years, most of Beringia has been under water. The presently existing sea channel, only a hundred miles wide, is broken by two islands (the Diomedes) in the middle, and can freeze over in the winter, so it has not been much of a barrier to human movements – historically, Alaskan Yuit and Siberian Chukchi traded and raided back and forth, with some people born on one side marrying into communities on the other. Pleistocene Beringia may have bridged the present continents, but its submergence did not cut off travel between them.

For years, archaeologists searched for evidence of the earliest humans in the Americas in the interior valleys of Alaska, the Yukon, and Alberta. It was assumed that mountain glaciers like those in Alaska today covered the Pacific coast during the glacial advances of the Late Pleistocene, and that an “ice-free corridor” existed along the western High Plains between the huge continental glacier centered in eastern Canada, and the mountain glaciers of the Rockies and Coast Ranges. Searches found nothing older than terminal Pleistocene, 9000 BCE, for example the Sibbald Creek campsite in Alberta on the edge of Banff National Park. Further research by geologists failed to establish any significant ice-free corridor east of the Rockies during the last Pleistocene glacial maximum. A counter-hypothesis was advanced by British Columbia archaeologist Knut Fladmark, arguing that the post-Pleistocene rise in sea level that flooded much of Beringia also flooded the ancient Pacific coast, leaving late-Pleistocene (indeed, up to 3000 BCE) sites on the coastal plains now under water on the continental shelf. Fladmark of course could not produce site features or artifacts from these possible locations now covered by sea-floor muck and water.

The most controversial claims come from South America, so concern this book only peripherally. Pedra Furada, against a cliff face in interior northeast Brazil, has crude fractured stones and lenses of charcoal said to date 33,000 years ago, but this material looks like it eroded from the plateau edge down into a chimney-shaped cleft in the cliff. At the base of the cliff, excavations revealed a panel of little figures painted in red on the rock; these have been dated at 12,000 BCE by association with apparent occupation material below the panel, more feasible evidence for terminal Pleistocene habitation in northern South America. Other sites, in Ecuador, Venezuela, and Peru, are dated later, to 9000 BCE, filling out evidence for populating the Americas.

In the 1990s, discoveries including Kennewick Man in the Columbia River Valley and particularly Monte Verde in Chile turned scholarly attention back to Fladmark’s hypothesis, for the idea that the earliest Americans had utilized Pacific coastal resources led to postulating southward migrations from Beringia all the way to Chile. We know Asians used watercraft at least 40,000 years ago, because humans could not have reached Australia, as they did by that time, without means of crossing the water gap between Melanesia and Australia. Fishing and hunting sea mammals from boats would have produced a strong economic base for coastal northern Asians, who could have advanced eastward along Beringia and the Aleutians, or wherever the southern Arctic coast was in the Late Pleistocene, into Pacific Alaska without encountering any radical challenges. If their descendants continued exploiting coastal resources ever southward, some could have ended up in Chile within a couple of thousand years even if none were deliberately exploring long distances (and who is to say none of them were actively seeking out new lands?).

The Monte Verde site in Chile was excavated by the American archaeologist Tom Dillehay. Situated in a pleasant creek valley, the site evidenced wooden slabs possibly from huts, and simple but serviceable bone and stone artifacts, dated to 10,500 BCE. (The dating was based on radiocarbon, here calibrated with other measures of terminal Pleistocene age.²) A delegation of prominent archaeologists examined the site in 1997 with Dillehay after his report on the work was completed and, although some had been skeptical, they agreed after the visit and laboratory inspection that Dillehay’s work seemed scientifically sound. Subsequently, close examination of the published report fomented renewed debate over dating of the few diagnostic artifacts and Dillehay’s interpretation of the wood as hut planks. Such intense protracted debate typifies reports of humans in the Americas earlier than the 9000 BCE “Clovis horizon,” the oldest thoroughly documented archaeological evidence in the continent.

The most practical route from Asia to Chile would have been along the Pacific coast. Postulating sailing during the Pleistocene from Australia across the immense South Pacific to Chile would be a wild card. Unlike protohistoric Polynesians who used highly sophisticated navigational skills and watercraft to sail across the Pacific,³ Pleistocene humans probably lacked sails on their rafts and canoes. That no evidence has been found of settlements on the mid-Pacific Polynesian islands before Polynesian colonizations beginning in the second millennium BCE, argues against any likelihood of earlier crossings of the vast ocean. With the general consensus that Dillehay’s Monte Verde was the oldest professionally excavated, definitely human occupation site in the Americas, Fladmark’s Pacific route gained credence.

Accepting Monte Verde as an authentic human settlement more than twelve thousand years ago in southernmost South America upset conventional archaeology on two counts, that humans had come into the Americas earlier than the dates for the Clovis finds, 9000 BCE, and that these earlier people made artifacts less distinctive than the Clovis stone blades. In effect, Monte Verde opened the door to a raggle-taggle crowd of contenders for first-come: it had been simple to declare that the first-comers were virtuoso flintknappers (“knap,” “to break with a snap,” as in chipping flint) leaving signature masterfully chipped stone blades at their sites; now archaeologists had to consider sites with nondescript artifacts like those at Monte Verde. The geological context and chronometry (methods of dating) would be more critical than ever in evaluating possibly early sites, and these can be tricky. For example, a child’s skeleton found in a Pleistocene layer in a cliff face in southern Alberta turned out to have been buried by pushing it into a cleft in the cliff which then filled up with soil, practically obliterating the cleft. Radiocarbon dating indicated the child is a few thousand years old, closer to us than to the Pleistocene. Radiocarbon dating itself runs into odd effects just at the end of the Pleistocene, due to strong and relatively rapid fluctuations in global climate when the glaciers released incredible floods of their meltwater, changing evaporation rates and thereby the amounts of radioactive carbon rising into the air. Increased cosmic ray penetration of the atmosphere at this time of extraordinary global changes may also have added unusual amounts of radioactive carbon to the air. Organisms at this time probably breathed in more of the carbon isotope, leaving a greater amount in their bodies when they died and so more when the amount was measured millennia later. Paleoindian material can be as much as two thousand years older than the radiocarbon count calculates and, to further confuse researchers, materials from each side of the climate flip-flops can measure the same although they may have existed a thousand years apart.

Clovis and Other Mammoth Hunters

Finding butchered mammoth remains securely identifies a Paleoin-dian site – the animals became extinct in North America about 11,000 BCE (by Stuart Fiedel’s revised calibrations of radiocarbon dates). The type site at Clovis, New Mexico, Blackwater Draw in northwestern Texas at Lubbock, and the Murray Springs, Naco, and Lehner sites in Arizona were among the first excavated to establish the association of Clovis stone blades with slaughtered mammoths. Butchered mammoths with nondescript stone tools, such as two in southeastern Wisconsin, clearly belong in the Paleoindian period, confirmed by radiocarbon dates and geological context. Archaeologists cannot tell whether the butchers’ artifact tradition did not favor the Clovis style, or instead it merely happened that the butchers’ Clovis blades were taken along to the next camp, or not fallen in the excavated sections of the sites.

Clovis style is remarkable for its beautiful stone blades, frequently made on pleasingly colored, fine crystalline material quarried in blocks that often were carried hundreds of kilometers to ensure the quality of Clovis artifacts. To manufacture the blades, artisans first struck large flakes off the blocks, using the sharp flakes for everyday cutting and scraping tasks, then with exquisite control struck long ribbon-like flakes across the faces of the formed blade to thin it evenly. Finally, the hallmark of the Clovis style was produced, an oval channel running up the face of the blade from its base: the “fluting.” Fluted bases uniquely mark Clovis and the similar but later and shorter Folsom style blades, Clovis associated with mammoths and Folsom with large extinct species of bison. The fluting channel was expedient for hafting the blade to its shaft, in tongue-and-groove manner. Unfluted but still exquisitely ribbon-flaked stone blades continued the Fluted Tradition technique into the early Holocene, to around 8000 BCE.

All known Paleoindian habitation sites seem to have been camps, generally on ridges where people could watch for game animals coming to streams or marsh edges; besides mammoths, mastodons, musk-oxen, horses, camels, bears, antelopes, deer, and small game were killed. Paleoindians could live surprisingly close to the margins of the great glaciers, because nutriment-rich meltwaters supported rich grazing for mammoths and other prey for hunters. Archaeology indicates communities were composed of a few families, moving at least several times a year. Small campfires with broken or worn-out stone and bone tools indicate household activity areas, probably in or beside tents or wigwam-type dwellings. Stacks of butchered game bones suggest storage caches of meat; other cache clusters contain complete or partially finished stone artifacts and sometimes red ochre. There is one grave known, in a small rocksheiter in Montana, with a Clovis artifact cache beside it.

Essentially, Paleoindians were, in global terms, Late Paleolithic people, fully modern anatomically but without agriculture and permanent villages. They lived by hunting, exhibiting high skill in manufacturing weapons and in strategies for moving into range to use their spears, either propelled by hand throw or with the added leverage of the atlatl (spear-thrower board), or thrust directly into the animal. Changing camps to follow game movements and harvest plant foods in season, their habitation sites look meager. Their nomadic life was well adapted not only to surviving on the abundant game of the Late Pleistocene, but also to adjusting to the tremendous shifts in climate and environments of the terminal Pleistocene. Clovis blades are found throughout the United States, proving the makers’ remarkable capacity to enter and exploit new habitat zones, filling the continent with human families.

The Early People

Skeletons from early Holocene times are few...