Dr. Tom Dillehay
Appearances
The Ancients
The First South Americans
Yeah, I was. I mean, it was difficult at times with people, you know, Thomas Kuhn wrote a book called The Structure Scientific Revolution, talking about paradigm change in science. And he says that well-entrenched models and theories like, he doesn't talk about Clovis, but we could say Clovis takes a long, long time. to overthrow those theories with a lot of evidence, a lot of persistence.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
There's personal attacks involved, people attacking the data. It took us about 30, 35 years to convince people. And what made it easier for me, well, it wasn't easy, let me say that, was that I was doing other projects too. And so it was kind of like my default projects that kept my mind pretty straight. And I just, the preponderance of evidence eventually at Monte Verde convinced the discipline.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
But following Kuhn, the paradigm never completely falls until, as he says, the last diehard proponents of the old theory die away.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
Yeah, first of all, back then, the site was about 50 kilometers away from the Pacific coast, located in the headwaters of a small stream called Chinchuapi that was, at the time, probably about five meters wide. And it was located in a open forest, what we call a cool temperate rainforest.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
And what you could see back then, certainly in today from Monte Verde, are three snow-capped volcanoes, all of which are active. So the setting was quite nice, but... In that area was boggy terrain, several creeks as well, a pretty well-endowed forest with a lot of resources. The animals would have been the mastodons we talked about, the American horse, ground sloth, and smaller game as well.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
But the resources we found at the site and excavated, plant remains, eggshells from birds, and other edibles, come from a radius stretching all the way out to the coast. up into the Andean Mountains, 30 kilometers to the east.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
So it looks like these people were moving up and down a river that was located about five kilometers away called the Mauyin River, up and down that river that connected the Andean Mountains in the east to the Pacific coast. And in fact, we found 16 different species of edible seaweeds at the site. So it's pretty strong evidence these people were beachcombers.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
You know, they were roaming the beaches and picking up seaweed, much like the indigenous people do today in the area. Those people are called Wiliche. And exploiting a lot of the wood products, too. We had 13 different species of wood. Some were used in this construction, like pole frame of this tent-like structure I mentioned. Others was used for firewood, others for tools and so forth.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
Yeah, it is. We found two structures at the site. One was isolated about 30 meters away from this longer tent-like structure. And this was wishbone shaped, where they piled up sand and rock as a foundation and pushed poles into it. And those poles were inclined toward the centerpiece and draped with animal hides. I'm talking about paleolama and mastodon hides. And it collapsed, obviously.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
So what we found inside that hut was just one item, five masticated cuds full of medicinal plants. So what we think was is probably a medicinal hut. And located 30 meters away was the foundations of timbers, branches of trees laid out kind of a rectangular fashion. Think of it like an ice tray formation. and they were staked into the ground.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
There were stakes that the heads were pounded flat, and the points that were down into the push into the ground were burned to harden the tips. And in there, and amongst that, we found small fire pits, we found edible plants, medicinal plants, chunks of meat from the mastodons that were killed, bone tools, stone tools, and wood tools as well.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
The kind of trash that you would expect if you were camping somewhere for a long period of time. You see, all of this had collapsed. And what we found in both those structures on the floors were tiny microscopic pieces of hide that was preserved because the structure obviously had collapsed over time.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
We estimate, in looking at the plant remains that mature during all periods of the year, that people at Monty Bear II probably live there at least 10 months, but probably close to one year.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
Yeah. I mean, when you look at the plant remains, we had 73 different edible and medicinal plant remains there, including the seaweeds. And you look at the use of the woods for different functions, firewood, making tools. There's one tree species called maki, and it's very flexible. So when the wind blows, it kind of adapts to the wind and the structure would sway a little bit, probably.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
The point being, these people had intimate knowledge of that forest in that setting. And that indicates that they were there for a long time before Monte Verde to learn where these resources were and how to use them.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
And the fact that a lot of these resources come from the Indian mountains to the east and down toward the coast and out in a broad radius probably suggests there were other peoples around, obviously, and they were exchanging products with them.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
That's a very good point. And that is where we're moving toward today. There are other archaeologists beginning to examine and cut banks, peat lenses, and looking for other sites. There is one possible site north of Monte Verde, about 110 kilometers away, called Pilauco, that has... preserved animal bones embedded in a peat lens as well. So your point is well taken.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
There are probably other sites similar to it. The problem is, is that in the Americas, unlike where you're at and in other parts of Europe, We're accustomed to what's called wet sites preserved by peat bogs, late sites, early sites, and so forth. Here in the Americas, there's only three known wet sites that have ever been excavated, two in North America and now Monte Verde.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
So there's not a tradition of looking for these kinds of sites in the field, although the same kind of terrain is there, to search for them.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
No, there have not been. First of all, if these people were there 10, 12 months, what's the likelihood of somebody dying and being buried there? So a lot of these sites are short-term occupation sites. But we did find three human footprints in the site. Somebody, probably a sub-adult, they're about 11 centimeters long, walked across a patch of clay in the site.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
And with one of them, it's very clear. You can see the arc impression, the heel and the five toe prints, and the other two are there. So it's right foot, left foot, right foot across a patch of clay. But what you have brought up is a very interesting point.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
In the Americas, there's probably no more than three legitimate, well-dated human skeleton remains, and not the complete skeleton either, in the entire Western Hemisphere that date before 10,000 years ago. So the problem is this. What's the mortuary pattern of these first Americans? Were they dumping them in bodies of water or things like swamps and bogs?
The Ancients
The First South Americans
Were they cremating the remains and placing them somewhere else? Were they committing some form of cannibalism, then getting rid of the remains? We do not understand the mortuary patterns of the first Americans. And that creates a problem for the genetic studies. Because the genetic analyses are going to come from mainly those human skeletons.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
And it's completely different from the old world where you are, Africa, Australia, Asia, Europe. They have found numerous human skeletons of different time periods, as you well know, not in the Americas.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
The one thing that always comes to mind with these early sites, stone tools. So we've got lancelet points, projectile points, spear points, as you might want to call them. We've got stone scrapers, cutting tools, grinding stones for crushing plants, and a wide array of adzes and perforators with stones. And then in the wood area, we have what appear to be digging sticks.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
We found remains of wild potatoes at Monte Verde. So what people use today are cow ribs or wooden sticks to dig the potatoes out. We found starch grains of potatoes on the edges of some of these wooden sticks. There's also, we found the remains of two wooden lances that had been broken and placed on top of fire pits. Seems to be some kind of decommissioning of the site or ritual. I don't know.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
The points of them were sharpened and burned to harden them. So there's a wide array of wooden tools and a few bone tools as well. Some probably used as digging sticks, quote, unquote. And others kind of looked like adzes. They were breaking off the bones themselves. of the tusk of the mastodons and using those as well.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
And then a couple of the molars, large molars of the mastodons seem to have been used as choppers for chopping material too. They've been crushed in a very different way than we would expect. So there's a wide array of organic and inorganic tools at the site, including the wood that was used to construct these two structures I was talking about, the tents. and also the wooden stakes as well.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
No, you don't. That's why Monteverdi, for a long time, beyond the radiocarbon dates of being 1,500 years older than Clovis, was controversial. How can you have these kinds of things? We haven't found this before. And it was somewhat shocking to the discipline.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
A very good question, and you're right at the truth. As they went through different ecological zones, adapting to different places at different times with this environment over thousands of years, constantly changing, then they had to adapt their life ways, and that included... consumption of different resources and different technologies.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
But we do see in the scrapers and the adzes and cutting stone tools and the projectile points some degree of similarity. And also, what we find a lot of in South America, and I haven't mentioned this, are what's called bola stones. These are spheroids. that have grooves around them. And they're still used today by some of the indigenous groups in Patagonia.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
They're used as sling stones or as kind of bolas that you throw and it wraps around the legs of a bird or a small animal or stuns them by hitting them and you capture them. These were found at Monte Verde and they're found at a number of early sites in Patagonia. And they're also found at early sites along the Rio Grande in cave sites in Texas and New Mexico.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
Well, the site, going back to its geological setting, is on a high portion, the upper end of this creek, that's on a high ridge that runs from east to west. So it would be kind of a footpath from the ocean to the Andes. But Monte Verde II, as I've mentioned before, may be occupied for a year.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
But if Monte Verde I, with these different depths of minute portions of evidence suggesting a human presence off and on for another 10, 12, 15,000 years, there exists the possibility of people there long before Monte Verde II at 14,500 years ago. It's just unproven as yet. And the problem is once you excavate Monte Verde II, it's like going from riches to rags.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
Because there we have this pausity of information, you know, in the deeper levels. There are some sites in Brazil and elsewhere in South America that might date 16,000 to 20,000, 22,000 years ago. But they're controversial as well, as is Monte Verde 1. And they still need to be proven. So there's hints out across the continent of people being there earlier, as there are in North America as well.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
At Monte Verde, no. We have no evidence that after 14,500 years ago that people were coming back. So let me quickly insert one thing here. What we found at the site was a very thin layer of ash covering the site.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
The two continents are connected because in South America, specialists see the peopling of the continent coming from North America, obviously, down through Central America, across Panama, into the continent.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
about half a millimeter thickness to a millimeter in thickness in ash probably eruptions from the volcanoes to the east and i suspect and i haven't published on this because it's too much speculation but i'll say it now that perhaps they abandoned the site as a result of volcanic eruptions as people do today when there are volcanic eruptions and they did not come back to the site
The Ancients
The First South Americans
But there probably are other sites in the area where they were visiting other places, as we talked about before.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
Well, there is. In fact, I'm going down, I'll be excavating there at Monte Verde one in March, and there likely are more sites. It just takes more time, more resources. And also, one thing I haven't mentioned is that the team working at Monte Verde because of the preservation of so many organic remains is composed of almost 70 specialists.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
We've got insect specialists, geneticists, we've got wood specialists, seaweed specialists, so on and so forth. So to do this kind of work, it requires a big team and a lot of resources.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
What's really exciting is not only new discoveries going on up and down the Western Hemisphere, and particularly in recent years in South America and also in the Amazon and along the coastline as well, but also genetics, as my colleague David Meltzer probably talked about, has added a very new and exciting dimension to the discipline related to connections between different kinds of sites and geographic vectors of movement and so forth.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
There's several sites that date around 12, 13,000 years ago, up and down the continent that provide solid evidence, and other sites are rejected or questioned. But one site is on the Pampa, Argentina, grasslands of Argentina, called Arroyo Seco. It dates about 14,000 years ago, excavated by Gustavo Politis, Argentinian archeologist. Couple of sites in Eastern Brazil,
The Ancients
The First South Americans
hovering around maybe 13,000, 13,500 years ago. There's some sites up north in Colombia and Peru, Ecuador, maybe 13,800 years ago. And on the coast of northern Peru, in the desert, Guacapieta, where I excavated with a colleague of mine, Duccio Bonavia, Peruvian-Italian. And that dated around 14,500 years ago, maybe a little older.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
And what it is, is a remnant terrace of the late Pleistocene, nearly 100,000 years ago, that looks like a pitch of two soccer fields that are elevated up some five to six meters and sitting right on the ocean today back then they would have been about 15 kilometers from the ocean because the sea lanes were down but we found there Shark bones, big sharks, three meters long.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
I don't know how they killed them or captured them, with large stone flakes that were seven, eight to 15 centimeters across, used for cutting. Preservation's not as good as Monte Verde. We found some seaweed there as well, in addition to collecting marine resources. Shellfish, they're fishing as well. And the environment at that time would have been a grassland, not a desert. Today, it's a desert.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
But between that site and the ocean, there were a number of estuaries and edlets of brackish water. And probably fish and sharks with high tide were coming in. And we think there is how they're capturing the fish and maybe killing the sharks as well. Even today... In certain areas along the north coast of Peru, there's still people who use that technique. They wait until high tide.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
Here comes the high tide washing with the fish. They get caught in small sharks too in low areas. So the people go out and club them today with baseball bats and club them to death, take them off and eat them.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
In a desert environment. Back then it would have been a kind of a dry grassland environment, but those people were mainly exploiting the ocean, not the terrestrial resources.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
Yeah, well, we found later, not at 14,500, but around 10,800 years ago at Huacapieta in the later levels, still foragers, maritime foragers, terrestrial foragers. We found evidence of avocado, squash, and chili pepper, all three dating about 10,500 years ago. And probably all three are non-domesticated, wild, okay? So this is indicating, again, same case with monthly burying.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
We're not just talking about people hunting big game. In this sense, it'd be sharks. We actually found one whale bone too. Well, it was probably washed up on shore, as happens today. People butchered it and consumed it. Now, that was in the levels of 14,000 years ago. But these people are exploiting a wide range of resources. It's like they have a supermarket out there.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
They go into it and they're eating anything they can get their hands on.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
Yeah, you can throw in a number of sites from Colombia, Brazil, again, Argentina and other places. What is this indicating very early on is that these people exploited a very wide variety of not only edible plants and, of course, animals, large and small, but also fishing, shellfish collecting and collecting medicinal plants. I mean, let's face it, they're humans with health problems.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
out there learning what is in that environment and exploiting it probably effectively and efficiently and adapting, as we talked about before, their technology to these different and differing situations. They're a lot more acute and astute than we think they are. They're just not simple mobile hunters and gatherers on the move.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
But also what's been found in recent years in South America is exciting because we have a number of South Americanists themselves from different countries who have been getting their degrees in the U.S. and South American universities, North America, going back and doing a lot more research on this topic. So everything's coming together and coalescing in a new, exciting movement.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
But in working these sites, you gain a real appreciation for the intelligence and intuition of these people.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
Oh, absolutely. That's why I say they have intimate knowledge of that environment. And as you say, probably a lot of it was trial and error as well. We found an interesting plant at Monte Verde called Drosetera sp. It's just a scientific name. And it comes from the steppes of Argentina, the other side of the Andes. And it's very toxic and poisonous.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
And today, the indigenous people have to masticate it and spit it out, let it dry in the sun, and it can become potentially a medicinal element. But that indicated to me, and it always stuck in my mind, okay, they brought that plant back to Monte Berri. Did they learn how to use it from groups in Argentina? Did they try to use it? Was somebody sick from it? Did they abandon that plant?
The Ancients
The First South Americans
And it gets to the very point of trial and error with anything out there in the environment. And one point I'll make here is I work with the local Mapuche indigenous people. And I talk with the shamans down there who are healers and ritual people and so forth. And the shamans, I asked them the same question. How did you learn about the plants, the edibles and the medicinals?
The Ancients
The First South Americans
They said, we learned it from the animals. We watch what they eat and then we tried it out.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
Good question. I've always thought that there were multiple avenues into South America. First, you have to think about the Panamanian Isthmus. It's very narrow. As you come out of southern Panama, the Dovian Forest into Colombia, that's the bridge into South America. And they could have come along the Pacific coast.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
They could have come along the Atlantic coast or just over land or a mixture of those. You know, the peopling of South America, there's two theories. One, they came along the waterway, the Pacific. But you have to throw in the Atlantic as well, that side, and by land. So I'm a believer in multiple pathways. You know, it could be any or all of those.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
It's been difficult, not only for me in some ways, but colleagues. South American colleagues, for their data to be evaluated and eventually accepted, much of it has to be published in English. There's a certain degree of
The Ancients
The First South Americans
what I call academic imperialism that still operates in the world, where there seems to be this notion of, well, first of all, not a lot of North Americans read Portuguese or Spanish, so they're going to have to read things in English. But I think that It's a discipline that's growing very quickly. It's one of the hot topics in anthropology.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
And getting this information out, archaeology, as I've hinted at, and as you well know, is a discipline that requires a lot of interdisciplinary research and a lot of resources. But these sites are not easy to find either. Monty Berthie found me. I didn't find Monty Berthie. It came to me vis-a-vis this student. And a lot of sites are like that. Farmers and fishermen find sites and so forth.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
But I think there needs to be, and I say that, more systematic archaeological survey and reconnaissance by archaeologists out across well-defined paleo landscapes. Because when we look out there at that landscape, as you alluded to earlier, that is very different in the past 12, 14, 15,000 years or more ago than it is today. And we need to learn that landscape and learn how to research it.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
But, you know, times are exciting. There's more interdisciplinary data coming into view. Genetics is exciting. New techniques with LIDAR technology.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
Yeah, exactly. And you get a better reading of what the landscape was like in addition to the archaeology. So I encourage young people to go into any discipline that relates to this theme or archaeology in general.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
It's not as rich as North America. The reason being is because there are fewer investigators over the past, let's say, 50 or 60 years working the continent. But the record has increased significantly, and mainly along the Pacific coast and the desert areas of northern Chile and Peru, but also in the high Andes as well.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
But there's always been a great deal of work for some curious reasons of people looking at the peopling of South America from the viewpoint of southern Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. But also in recent years, largely due to Brazilian and French archaeologists, a lot more work's been going on in Brazil.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
Absolutely. Here we have to talk about what we call archaeological visibility. When you get into the Amazon jungle, you've got a dense forest and preservation of the record is difficult. Organics are not well preserved. Soils have acid that eat the organic material. You've got the dense forest. But when you're working in the open deserts west of the Andean mountains, as you mentioned,
The Ancients
The First South Americans
archaeological visibility is a lot easier. You can see things. On the other hand, the sites are often eroded by water and wind too. So there's some issues there, but A lot of people in archaeology prefer to work along that Pacific coastline. But these gaps across the continent are beginning to be picked up by South Americanists working in their own countries.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
No, they're probably similar in some ways. First of all, the world's driest deserts, the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. And that desert extends all the way up to what we call the Altiplano, the high lands in Bolivia that reach up to 14,000 feet in elevation. That is still desert.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
But you have the desert also along the entire coast of Peru until you get into the forested and grasslands of the Andes. But also, you have kind of a semi-desert once you get into the Patagonian area. It's kind of like a dry steppe grassland where the visibility archaeologically is easier than it would be in the Amazon Basin.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
I would say the deserts I was just talking about probably would have been grasslands. And since then, things have become drier and less moist. One thing that distinguishes North and South America is that you have these massive glacial ice sheets in the north. that kind of prevented movement from, let's say, Yukon, Alaska, down into the lower US 48.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
But the only place that you had any glaciers that might have prohibited human movement in South America was in the high Andes, central Andes, and down toward Patagonia. So movement was a lot easier across north, south, east, west, diagonally, and so forth. But getting back to your question, The Amazon, probably 12, 14, 15,000 years ago, is not the dense green shag carpet we think of today.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
It was savannas, parklands, open forest here and there. And since the late Pleistocene period, it began to fill in with this dense high canopy forest we think of today. And then the deserts would have been, as I said, grasslands. So no, ecologically, it would have been very different in a lot of different places.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
Well, Monteverde is located in northern Patagonia in what would be the cool temperate rainforest of southern Chile, what they call the Lake District. And the ecological zone that's kind of equivalent perhaps to northern Europe in some ways, bogs. and swampy terrain.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
But Monte Verde came to me, I was teaching at the time at the Southern University of Chile in Valdivia, about 400 kilometers farther north. And one day, a student came to the university with a very large, quote unquote, cow's tooth. It was brought to my attention. And that cow's tooth turned out to be a mastodon gumped with their tooth. And at the time, I didn't have too much interest in it.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
I said, look, if I ever get down that way, further south, I'll take a look at it. And I did. About a year later, I got down there and we found some large ribs and other teeth eroding out of an embankment of a small creek called Chinchihuapi Creek that the local forest people use for bringing out cut timber in the local forest on ox carts, basically.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
So I began in 1977 excavating at the site, 77 through about 87 in the last century. And fortunately, the site was overlaid by a peat bog, something that certainly in Europe and in England, you guys know about.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
And it preserved the organic material underneath, where we found pieces of hide, pieces of meat, edible and medicinal plants, worked wood, the bones of different mastodons that had been killed, stone tools, and the remains of what looks like a large tent-like structure that had fallen down. over the years, obviously, and collapsed.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
So it was just full of all kinds of things that you normally don't get in late Ice Age Pleistocene sites anywhere in the world. What you normally get is maybe bones preserved, stone tools, occasionally a fire pit.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
Exactly. There turned out to be remains of seven different mastodons, or what we call gonfithears today. The kill site was probably located outside of what I'm describing, which was the campsite of the people.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
Well, what I'm talking about with the preserved organic materials at the site, which kind of shocked the archaeological discipline in the Americas and beyond, dated 14,500 years ago. And that was 1,500 years ahead of the most accepted paradigm or theory of the peopling of the Americas, the Clovis theory, but I'm talking about Monte Verde II.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
There's a Monte Verde I located nearby that has very small fire pits, a few convincing stone tools, a few bone remains, but it's not over covered by peatlands that preserved the site. And that dates at 16 and 18 and 24 and 33,000 years ago. So it's just scattered little ephemeral pieces of evidence in another part of the site at different depths. And that one, I admit, is unproven.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
We need to do more archeological and geological work on what I just described as Monteverde I. But Monteverde II, overlaid by that peat layer, is solid evidence.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
Yeah, if you look at the whole peopling of the Americas, it kind of follows the same pattern in Europe. Back in the late 1800s, a question came up, were humans ever associated with extinct, what we call megafauna? Here in the Americas, it would have been the American horse, giant bison, ground sloth, woolly mammoth, so forth. So the first solid evidence came out in the 30s at the Clovis site.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
Here in New Mexico, I'm three hours away from that site, where they found several woolly mammoths killed associated with these magnificent lancelet points with a flute in the base of it. And that was the first evidence. And that was Clovis' first theory that the first Americans are
The Ancients
The First South Americans
these big game hunters who came over from Siberia or Northeast Asia and rapidly moved throughout the Americas down into South America. And in the early 1940s, the late Junius Byrd of the American Museum of Natural History in New York was working in southern Patagonia near Tierra del Fuego. And he excavated a cave called Fell's Cave.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
That cave yielded what's called fishtail points, projectile points. And in the base of it, allegedly kind of a flute-like removal of a flake, something similar to Clovis. And at that time in South America, the evidence was incredibly clear. scarce. So the connection was made between the peopling of the north, peopling of the south.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
Clovis had moved very rapidly all the way from the north down to South America in Patagonia at Fell's Cave. And that was the theory that was set for the next 70 years or so. There's always been sites, other sites in North and South America, a few in Mexico as well, that have threatened the Clovis first paradigm or theory.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
But people debunk them because the proponents of Clovis are strong headed group of people. It was the first theory and we're going to hold on to it. So a lot of these sites were legitimately rejected. The radiocarbon data was questionable. The geological stratigraphy, questionable. Human artifacts, questionable. That goes on to today.
The Ancients
The First South Americans
And in the late 70s through the 80s, excavating Monte Verde was probably the first archaeological site in the Americas, along with Metacroft Shelter in Pennsylvania, that really threatened the Clovis paradigm. In around 2010 or 11, After some 30 years of excavating, Monte Verde was finally accepted as the site that broke the Clovis barrier, so to speak.