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Tom D. Dillehay

Autor(a) de The Settlement of the Americas

12 Works 156 Membros 1 Review

About the Author

Thomas D. Dillehay is T. Marshall Hahn, Jr., Professor of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.

Obras de Tom D. Dillehay

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A difficult read, and somewhat over my head. For one thing, The Settlement of the Americas isn’t about the settlement of the Americas, it’s about the settlement of South America. North America is scarcely mentioned except as a means for initial inhabitants to get to South America, and very brief discussions of Beringia, the supposed “ice-free corridor” between the Rockies and the continental ice-sheet, and the Clovis culture.

Secondly it took me a long time to read because the material is pretty dense; I should have taken notes while I was going along.

The reason it’s over my head is I know next to nothing about South American prehistoric archaeology, and this is not a popular introduction but a scholarly treatise. Author Thomas Dillehay is famous/notorious for being the principal investigator at the Monte Verde site in Chile, and attracted considerable (and often critical) attention for his interpretation of that site. Basically, Monte Verde is an open air settlement site latter covered by a peat bog. The anoxic peat waters tend to preserve organic remains, and Monte Verde has an abundance of things that are normally long gone from prehistoric archaeological sites – plant remains, wood, and animal tissue – in addition to the normal stone tools. Post hole traces show the remains of a structure – a tent, perhaps – divided internally by partitions. That would have been interesting enough, but the site is also very old – 12500 BP (other material dated since the 2000 publication of The Settlement of the Americas has pushed that date back even further, to around 14000 BP; and see below).

Dillehay scarcely mentions the controversy that date initially caused, but I remember seeing articles in Science, Archaeology, and similar journals. The conventional wisdom was that the initial inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere, the “Clovis” people, had arrived about 11200 BP or so, had come from Siberia by way of Beringia, moved into the rest of North America by way of an “ice-free corridor”, and were strictly big-game hunters (really big game – mammoths and now and then a giant ground sloth). There were various claims for “pre-Clovis” sites in North America, but they were all pretty dubious (in fairness to the critics, some of the “pre-Clovis” advocates were deep in serious woo-woo; there were claims of Miocene sites and Oldowan tools in California, for example). Thus the Monte Verde site posed all sorts of problems to existing paradigm: it was too old by more than 1000 years, it was almost at the southern tip of South America, which implied that the crossing from Siberia was much older still (or, equally unsettling, that the inhabitants had come from somewhere else); and it showed structures, extensive use of plant material, and other features that didn’t fit with the nomadic mammoth hunter idea. I didn’t help that Dillehay had continued excavating below the apparent bottom of habitation at the site, dug through a meter or so of sterile soil and come up with an even earlier site – MV-1, which has some stone tools that may or may not be in place, some apparent hearths that contain charcoal that may or may not have washed in from elsewhere – and a date of 33000 BP. (Dillehay is pretty suspicious of MV-1 himself)

Therefore, Dr. Dillehay came in for the kind of scientific criticism that consisted of extremely polite and exquisitely scholarly ways of saying he was an idiot. He hadn’t excavated properly, his stratigraphy was incorrect, his C14 material was contaminated, his record keeping was poor, the artifacts discovered were not actually associated with the material dated, and so on. (It didn’t help that the site was not exactly easily accessible to North American university professors; it wasn’t even that accessible to South American university professors). Dillehay persisted in meticulous excavation – it took about 12 years to fully expose a site smaller than the average suburban garage – and dragged whatever critics he could get to see for themselves. Eventually the body of evidence was so overwhelming that the critics were silenced (if perhaps not convinced).

So that’s background; Dillehay spends less time discussing it than I have. Most of the book consists of seemingly endless lists of other South American sites, from Columbia to Tierra del Fuego, with eventually tedious discussion of their radiocarbon dates, the tool industries associated with them, and faunal remains present. Dillehay is always very cautious in presenting this material – particularly stressing that association of stone tools with faunal remains doesn’t necessarily mean that the tools users killed the fauna. There are a number of South American sites with mastodon and glyptodont bones coupled with stone artifacts, and some of the bones show “cut marks”, but Dillehay carefully notes that natural processes can simulate “cut marks”. Similarly he notes that stone tools can migrate downward at a site, working their way out of their original stratigraphic context through natural soil movement.

Finally Dillehay gets to the really interesting part: What Does All This Mean. Well, to me – and I caution this is the only book I’ve ever read about early prehistoric South American archaeology – it would seem to mean that the “Clovis hunters from Siberia” paradigm is as dead as a mammoth. Although there do seem to be times when there was an “ice-free corridor”, they don’t seem to synchronize with the purported migratory periods. There are no Clovis points known from Siberia or “Beringia”, the oldest known Clovis site is from Florida, and there are no undisputed Clovis sites from South America at all. The earliest tools from South America seem dramatically different from Clovis technology, even when the age is similar. It’s not even clear that the Clovis people were mammoth hunters; although there are dozen or so mammoth butchery sites associated with Clovis tools, there’s only one unequivocal mammoth kill site. Lastly, Dillehay points out that there’s no particular reason to believe that there was a “Clovis” people or culture; there is an assortment of similar-looking stone tools widely dispersed over the US (and a few from Mexico and southern Canada) but no particular reason to believe that everybody using those tools shared other cultural elements. The classical “Clovis first” assumption that the “Clovis people” were an initial band of migrants – perhaps as few as 25 – that marched across Beringia, down the “ice-free corridor”, and practically sprinted over the rest of the New World, slaughtering megafauna as they went – seems untenable. Dillehay mentions a potential cause – the “Clovis first” hypothesis has become so ingrained that archaeologists never bothered to look beneath Clovis deposits; Dillehay’s own experience with MV-1 perhaps being an example of what can happen if you keep digging. Dillehay also cautiously suggests that North American chauvinism may have contributed, with the efforts of South American archaeologists being ignored or dismissed (I note that the acceptance of continental drift was hindered by a similar problem, although it was Northern Hemisphere versus Southern Hemisphere. The paleocontinent of Gondwanaland was pretty obvious to Southern Hemisphere geologists and paleontologists as early as the 1920s, but since they were all either colonials or “other breeds” they could be casually dismissed).

(I’ll present a suggestion of my own – a lot of Clovis sites have been discovered because somebody first noticed mammoth bones weathering out of a gully and then investigated further; even the Monte Vista site was discovered when someone found a mastodon tooth. If there was a pre-Clovis people that specialized in – for example – rabbits as prey animals, it’s pretty likely that their sites would be overlooked. Mammoth bones attract attention – rabbit bones don’t).

Dillehay admits that there’s not really much to replace the “Clovis first” hypothesis – although there are all sorts of tantalizing hints. One possibility is maritime movement along the coast; Dillehay argues that the coastal environment was full of exploitable resources, even – perhaps especially – during glacial times. Thus the band of terrestrial migrants chasing mammoth might be replaced by people in skin boats skirting the coastline, perhaps splitting off small groups to either settle or press inland. A problem with this – perhaps a convenient problem – is sea level rise since the Pleistocene would have flooded all the coastal archaeological sites; I note that very few of the South American sites Dillehay mentions have evidence of the use of marine resources such as shellfish, fish bones, or marine mammal bones .

There are other, considerably more speculative possibilities; the little available genetic information can be interpreted to suggest the ancestral New World populations are more similar to Southeast Asians than Northeast Asians (i.e., Indochina rather than Siberia). (Dillehay, cautious as ever, points out that the comparisons have been between ancient genetic material from the New World and modern material from the Old or between modern populations from both places; and he doesn’t go so far as to explicitly propose a sort of “reverse Kon-Tiki”). Dillehay mentions such studies are handicapped by a lack of ancient material; he notes, with an annoyed tone, that pre-Clovis and Clovis people didn’t bury their dead in archaeologically convenient locations (without drawing what I thought was the obvious conclusion: that they didn’t bury them at all).

Similarly, there are some very tentative suggestions that early North American stone tool industry – I.e., what little can be called “pre-Clovis” – has some similarity to the European Solutrean industry – which dates from around 18000 to 22000 BP. Once again, Dillehay comes short of an explicit suggestion that Europeans could have skirted the edges of North Atlantic sea ice in primitive boats and reached North America. Paleolinguistic students have argued it would take a very long time (40-60 Ky) for the language of a single group of migrants to develop into thousands of New World languages known (or extinct); an alternative would be multiple groups of migrants (the “three wave” hypothesis, with Eskimo-Aleut, Na-Dene, and everything else is popular). It should be noted that paleolinguistics is a somewhat dubious field on its own.

All this is quite a bit of material to struggle through; it would have been easier if Dillehay hadn’t gone into so much detail on every single early South American site. The book would have benefited by including much of this material in tabular or graphic form rather than in dense text, especially to show regional relations with dates and tools industries. Although there are a number of maps, they’re all very large scale –the entire South American continent with a lot of little black dots for site locations doesn’t tell you very much. Other illustrations are few and not very useful – despite repeated mentions, there’s no depiction of a Clovis point, for example. My problem is I don’t know if there’s any better discussion of South American archaeology anywhere – I have nothing to compare to. Thus, recommended for the curious willing to work through it.
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Marcado
setnahkt | Dec 29, 2017 |

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Obras
12
Membros
156
Popularidade
#134,405
Avaliação
½ 3.6
Resenhas
1
ISBNs
25
Idiomas
1

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