illustration of site
February 11, 1997
Excavation in
Chile Pushes Back Date of Human
Habitation of
Americas
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
After long, often bitter debate, archeologists have finally come to a consensus
that humans reached southern Chile 12,500 years ago. The date is more than
1,000 years before the previous benchmark for human habitation in the
Americas, 11,200-year-old stone spear points first discovered in the 1930s near
Clovis, N.M.
The Chilean site, known as Monte Verde, is on the sandy banks of a creek in wooded
hills near the Pacific Ocean. Even former skeptics have joined in agreeing that its
antiquity is now firmly established and that the bone and stone tools and other
materials found there definitely mark the presence of a hunting-and-gathering people.
The new consensus regarding Monte Verde, described in interviews last week and
formally announced Monday, thus represents the first major shift in more than 60
years in the confirmed chronology of human prehistory in what would much later be
called, from the European perspective, the New World.
For American archeologists it is a liberating experience not unlike aviation's breaking
of the sound barrier; they have broken the Clovis barrier. Even moving back the date
by as little as 1,300 years, archeologists said, would have profound implications on
theories about when people first reached America, presumably from northeastern Asia
by way of the Bering Strait, and how they migrated south more than 10,000 miles to
occupy the length and breadth of two continents. It could mean that early people,
ancestors of the Indians, first arrived in their new world at least 20,000 years before
Columbus.
Evidence for the pre-Clovis settlement at Monte Verde was amassed and carefully
analyzed over the last two decades by a team of American and Chilean archeologists,
led by Dr. Tom D. Dillehay of the University of Kentucky in Lexington. Remaining
doubts were erased by Dillehay's comprehensive research report, which has been
circulated among experts and is to be published next month by the Smithsonian
Institution. And last month, a group of archeologists, including some of Monte
Verde's staunchest critics, inspected the artifacts and visited the site, coming away
thoroughly convinced.
In his report of the site visit, Dr. Alex W. Barker, chief curator of the Dallas Museum
of Natural History, said: "While there were very strongly voiced disagreements about
different points, it rapidly became clear that everyone was in fundamental agreement
about the most important question of all. Monte Verde is real. It's old. And it's a
whole new ball game."
The archeologists made the site inspection under the auspices of the Dallas museum,
where their conclusions were reported Monday, and with additional support by the
National Geographic Society. The archeologists, all specialists in the early settlement
of America, included Dr. C. Vance Haynes of the University of Arizona, Dr. James
Adovasio of Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pa., Dr. David J. Meltzer of Southern
Methodist University in Dallas, Dr. Dena Dincauze of the University of Massachusetts
at Amherst, Dr. Donald K. Grayson of the University of Washington in Seattle and
Dr. Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.
Dincauze, who had expressed serious doubts about the site's antiquity, said that
Dillehay's report made "a convincing case" that the remains of huts, fireplaces and
tools showed human occupation by a pre-Clovis culture.
"I'm convinced it's 100 percent solid," Dr. Brian M. Fagan, an anthropologist at the
University of California at Santa Barbara, said of the new assessment of Monte
Verde. "It's an extraordinary piece of research."
Finally vindicated, Dillehay said, "Most archeologists had always thought there was a
pre-Clovis culture out there somewhere, and I knew that if they would only come to
the site and look at the setting and see the artifacts, they would agree that Monte Verde
was pre-Clovis."
Monte Verde, on the banks of Chinchihaupi Creek, is in the hills near the town of
Puerto Montt, 500 miles south of Santiago. Dillehay and Dr. Mario Pino of the
Southern University of Chile in Valdivia began excavations there in 1976. They found
the remains of the ancient camp, even wood and other perishables that archeologists
rarely find, remarkably well preserved by the water-saturated peat bog that covered the
site, isolating the material from oxygen and thus decay.
As Dillehay reconstructed the prehistoric scene in his mind, a group of 20 to 30 people
occupied Monte Verde for a year or so. They lived in shelters covered in animal hides.
They gathered berries in the spring, chestnuts in the fall and also ate potatoes,
mushrooms and marsh grasses. They hunted small game and also ancestors of the
llama and sometimes went down to the Pacific, 30 miles away, for shellfish. They
were hunters and gatherers living far from the presumed home of their remote
ancestors, in northeastern Asia.
The evidence to support this picture is extensive. Excavations turned up wooden
planks from some of the 12 huts that once stood in the camp, and logs with attached
pieces of hide that probably insulated these shelters. Pieces of wooden poles and
stakes were still tied with cords made of local grasses, a telling sign that ingenious
humans had been there. "That's something nature doesn't do," Barker said. "Tie
overhand knots."
Stone projectile points found there were carefully chipped on both sides, archeologists
said. The people of Monte Verde also made digging sticks, grinding slabs and tools of
bone and tusk. Some seeds and nuts were shifted out of the soil. A chunk of meat had
managed to survive in the bog, remains of the hunters' last kill; DNA analysis
indicates the meat was from a mastodon. The site also yielded several human
coprolites, ancient fecal material.
Nothing at Monte Verde was more evocative of its former inhabitants than a single
footprint beside a hearth. A child had stood there by the fire 12,500 years ago and left
a lasting impression in the soft clay.
Radiocarbon dating of bone and charcoal from the fireplaces established the time of
the encampment. The date of 12,500 years ago, said Meltzer, author of "Search for
the First Americans," published in 1993 by the Smithsonian Institution, "could
fundamentally change the way we understand the peopling of the Americas."
The research, in particular, shows people living as far south as Chile before it is clear
that there existed an ice-free corridor through the vast North American glaciers by
which people might have migrated south. In the depths of the most recent ice age, two
vast ice sheets converged about 20,000 years ago over what is now Canada and the
northern United States and apparently closed off human traffic there until sometime
after 13,000 years ago. Either people migrated through a corridor between the ice
sheets and spread remarkably fast to the southern end of America or they came by a
different route, perhaps along the western coast, by foot and sometimes on small
vessels. Otherwise they must have entered the Americas before 20,000 years ago.
Dr. Carol Mandryk, a Harvard University archeologist who has studied the American
paleoenvironment, said the concept of an ice-free corridor as the migration route
emerged in the 1930s, but her research shows that even after the ice sheets began to
open a path, there was not enough vegetation there to support the large animals
migrating people would have had to depend on for food.
"It's very clear people couldn't have used this corridor until after 13,000 years ago,"
Mandryk said. "They came down the coast. I don't understand why people see the
coast as an odd way. The early people didn't have to be interior big-game hunters,
they could have been maritime adapted people."
No archeologists seriously considers the possibility that the first Americans came by
sea and landed first in South America, a hypothesis made popular in the 1960s by the
Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl. There is no evidence of people's occupying
Polynesia that long ago. All linguistic, genetic and geological evidence points to the
Bering Strait as the point of entry, especially in the ice age, when lower sea levels
created a wide land bridge there between Siberia and Alaska.
Although several other potential pre-Clovis sites have been reported, none has yet to
satisfy all archeologists in the way Monte Verde has just done. But archeologists
expected the verification of Monte Verde would hasten the search for even older places
of early human occupation in the Americas.
Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company
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