2011. szeptember 29., csütörtök

Survey of California and Other Indian Languages


Link

http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~survey/

"The Survey of California and Other Indian Languages is a research center in the Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley, supporting the documentation, study, and revitalization of the indigenous languages of California and the Americas. We maintain a major archive of field notes and other documentary materials, accessible in 1311 Dwinelle Hall and indexed in our online catalog; some material is digitized and available online. We also curate the collection of linguistic field recordings in the Berkeley Language Center, many of which can be listened to on their website.

We provide financial and logistical support for students and scholars to conduct field work on American languages, including work space, field equipment, and computing facilities. We publish an occasional series of monographs, Survey Reports. We also sponsor a variety of events, including regular gatherings of the Group in American Indian Languages, the biennial Breath of Life Workshop for California Indian Languages, and occasional workshops on language documentation and revitalization for California Indian communities. Please let us know how we can help you!..."

Director
Andrew Garrett

Director Emerita
Leanne Hinton

Consulting Archivist
Lisa Conathan

Survey of California and
Other Indian Languages
Department of Linguistics
University of California, Berkeley
1203 Dwinelle Hall
Berkeley, CA 94720-2650

Phone: (510) 642-8891

Email: scoil-ling@berkeley.edu

Hours: Friday 1:00-3:00 p.m.
or by appointment

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2011. szeptember 28., szerda

The Bering Strait and The Land Bridge

http://www.cabrillo.edu/~crsmith/bering.html

The Bering Strait links the Arctic Ocean with the Bering Sea and separates the continents of Asia and North America at their closest point. The strait averages 98 to 164 ft (30 to 50 m) in depth and at its narrowest is about 53 mi (85 km) wide. There are numerous islands in the strait, including the two Diomede Islands (about 6 sq mi [16 sq km]), and to the south of the strait lies St. Lawrence Island (about 1,000 sq mi). The U.S.-Russian boundary extends through the strait.

Some of the Bering Sea water passes through the strait into the Arctic Ocean, but most of it returns to the Pacific. In winter the region is subject to severe storms and the sea is covered by ice fields averaging 4 to 5 ft thick. In mid-summer drift ice remains in the Bering Strait. The strait is named after Vitus Bering, a Danish captain, who sailed into the strait in 1728.

Some 20,000 to 25,000 years ago, towards the end of the Pleistocene (Ice Ages), monumental continental glaciers forming in the earth's northern hemisphere (especially in Canada and Greenland) locked up so much water that the world's ocean levels were more than 300 feet lower than today. In the region of the Bering Strait, this drop in sea levels exposed a massive unglaciated tract known the Bering Land Bridge. This bridge joined northeast Asia to modern Alaska and formed part of a much larger province called Beringa. When fully exposed Beringia was over 1000 miles wide. Many scientists presume that it supported a tundra vegetation where Arctic fauna, particularly the caribou, flourished.

For most of the 20th century, archaeologists and anthropologists assumed that the forbears of the Native Americans moved across this land bridge following the game animals. However, towards the end of the 20th century, additional routes by which human beings first reached the Americas were being proposed: following the southern coastline of Beringia and Alaska, then southward along the Pacific coast all the way to the southernmost tip of South America, exploiting the rich marine fauna (shellfish, fish, sea mammals, seaweed) along the way. This coastal route could have been by foot along the beach, or by boat, drifting eastward then southward with the Japanese current. It's also possible that the first humans into the Americas exploited both coastal and interior resources.

Below is an article by Don Alan Hall which appeared in the MAMMOTH TRUMPET VOL 12, NO. 2 (1997) which discusses new findings concerning when the Bering Land Bridge was open, what the environmental conditions on the Bridge were like, and what that meant in terms of suitability for human subsistence and use.


Bering Land Bridge Was Open Until After 11,000 Years Ago - Scrub Tundra Grew in Lowland Beringia, Not 'Mammoth Steppe'

Just a few decades ago, Beringia, the land linking North America and Asia during glacial times, was a hypothetical concept. But as evidence mounted of biological connections between Siberia and Alaska, and knowledge of changing sea levels came to light, the notion of a land bridge allowing free passage of animals and humans became universally accepted. Until recently, the connection was thought to have been severed by rising sea levels about 14,000 years ago.

Now, thanks to research by Scott A. Elias and his colleagues, we know the link remained in place until sometime after 11,000 years ago, probably being flooded about 10,500 years B.P. The event cut the Americas off from Eurasia for the first time in many thousands of years. When the level of the Pacific Ocean rose to within about 40 meters of its present level, it spilled across into the Arctic Ocean.

Dr. Elias, of the University of Colorado's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, is able to tell us much about the lowland that once constituted the land bridge because of careful research employing cores previously collected by the U.S. Geological Survey from the floor of the Chukchi and Bering seas. Not only did the work reveal that the land bridge was open to passage long after scientists thought it had been closed, the research provided new insights into the environment before the continents were separated. Elias found that land bridge lowland had been covered with shrub tundra that would not have provided much food for grazing animals; he found no evidence of the steppe tundra that some believe must have been plentiful to nourish the great Pleistocene bison and mammoth herds with its grasses.

However, it is clear that people and animals could have freely crossed the land bridge until after 11,000 years B.P. Elias can describe the paleoenvironment of the land bridge because of research he and his colleagues have done on pollen and the remains of insects and plants. These environmental markers became preserved in shallow pools in the Beringian lowland, and when melting glaciers raised sea levels, the fossils were protected from the flood.

The research had its origins more than a decade ago when the U.S. Geological Survey sailed the U.S. research ship Discovery in the Bering and Chukchi seas to gather geologic and geophysical information. The project included the taking of dozens cores from the sea floor. These cores, about 10 cm in diameter, ranged up to nine meters in length. After the voyage, the USGS stored the cores, sealed in plastic tubes, under refrigeration at Palo Alto and Redwood City, Calif.

Elias began his research by looking through the core logs from USGS cruises in the Bering and Chukchi seas. The goal, of course, was to find cores that would yield information about the most-recent terrestrial deposits-- layers that could be expected to contain plant and insect remains.

"We picked cores that had organic lenses near their tops," Elias said. "We knew that these organic layers would represent the land bridge." The topmost core material represented Holocene marine sand, deposited after the Pacific Ocean had flooded northward. Below that were sediments from the land bridge. Below the land-bridge sediments the cores revealed an as-yet-unexplained gap in the geologic record--the next sediments are Cretaceous in age.

Elias and his colleagues then went to the USGS storage rooms to look up their chosen cores. It wasn't quite like looking up a reference in the library, because about half of the cores were stored in a refrigerated trailer near the bay at Redwood City. During the Loma Prieta earthquake a few years previously, all the cores in the trailer had fallen from their shelves and they remained in a jumble on the floor. "We had to unload literally the entire contents of the trailer--hundreds of cores--out into the parking lot in order to find the ones we were interested in."

They dug the organic lenses out of the cores and took them back to Boulder to extract the fossils. "The organic deposits were easy to differentiate because they are nearly black, whereas the rest of the sediments are nearly sterile marine sands and clays, tan to gray in color."

Accurately dating the deposits was a high priority of the research team. Previous land-bridge closure dates had been obtained from radiocarbon analysis of bulk samples, and there was a suspicion of contamination by coal. Elias and his colleagues wet-screened the samples to remove any such material, and chose individual macrofossils for radiocarbon dating by accelerator mass spectrometry. Elias found that samples of cores taken in the Chukchi Sea could provide the most accurate dating of the submergence of the land bridge.

AMS dates from screened peat from cores taken north of Alaska's Cape Lisburne were 11,330 +/- 70 years B.P. (Beta 43952) and 11,000 +/- 60 (Beta 43953). Analysis of the cores, then, indicated that the sea covered the land bridge after 11,000 B.P.; probably by 10,500 B.P.

Elias' insect analysis is done the same way archaeologists do faunal analysis of larger animals. "I compare my fossils with modern specimens in museum collections." There are two principal differences between analyzing remains of beetles and remains of mammals--evolution and scale.

"As far as we can tell, there has been no evolution of species and no extinction of species during most, if not all, of the Quaternary," he says. "So 999 out of 1,000 insect fossil specimens have living counterparts in their own species with which to compare ecological requirements and modern distribution patterns."

Elias finds insects' small size an advantage. "Insects are far easier to work with than mammals. I have more than 10,000 fossil specimens and 5,000 modern specimens in cabinets in my office, whereas a fossil- and modern-mammal collection of this number of specimens might take a gymnasium to house. I use a low-power stereo-binocular microscope to identify my specimens, but for picture taking, I prefer to use the scanning electron microscope because the images of three-dimensional specimens are sharper."

The research went back in time far beyond the final submergence of the land bridge. Elias says that fossil samples fell into three age classes--more than 40,000 years old, 20,000-14,000 years old, and 14,000-11,000 years old. Generally, the oldest period represented an environment of birch-heath-grass tundra with a few shrubs, while the middle period was tundra with fewer heaths. The latest period again was dominated by birch-heath-grass tundra--moderately moist--and there were small ponds choked with aquatic plants. By 12,000 years B.P. summer temperatures were as warm as they are now and by 11,000 B.P. summers were warmer than Alaska's north slope now experiences.

Elias and paleobotanist Susan K. Short (INSTARR) and Hilary H. Birks (University of Bergen Norway) found no evidence for steppe-tundra vegetation at any period. R. Dale Guthrie of the University of Alaska's Institute of Arctic Biology has hypothesized that Beringia was a vast steppe covered with grasses and sagebrush. Dr. Guthrie, an authority on large Pleistocene mammals, argues that Alaska's plentiful fossil record means that Beringia must have offered highly productive grazing to have allowed bison, mammoths, and other grazers to reach such giant size. Elias and his colleagues, however, have not found evidence of extensive expanses of that steppe habitat, nor had earlier work by palynologists. Is Guthrie wrong?

"I think that we could easily both be right," said Elias. "The land bridge may have been a narrow waist of mesic tundra surrounded by steppe-tundra landscapes on either side." He notes that the land bridge probably could not have sustained many big grass eaters. "I don't think that there was much for megafaunal mammals to graze on out there on the land bridge, but they may have migrated across the narrowest part of the Bering Strait region in just a few days."

"Based on our evidence, grazing animals and their human hunters probably spent little time on the land bridge. Shrub tundra offers too few food resources for the animals."

As far as the timing of human migration across the continental link, Elias doesn't believe evidence that the land bridge was usable until after 11,000 years B.P. has anything to say about when the first people reached North America. "Certainly the new dates mean that the land bridge was available to people until Clovis time, but the land bridge had been open for many thousands of years before then, as well. Furthermore, you can still walk from Siberia to Alaska across the Bering Strait in winter." Because the water is so shallow, he says, it often freezes completely; Inuit people do travel between Alaska and Siberia to visit friends and relatives.

Elias would like to broaden his research by examining deposits from other areas. "First I'd like to get cores from the southern part of the Bering shelf--the south sector of the land bridge." Deposits from cores taken in waters south of the Bering Strait yielded older dates, possibly because the stormier sea caused erosion of the most recent terrestrial deposits. "Second, I'd like to get my hands on cores from the Russian side of the Bering and Chukchi seas."

He says Russian scientists took cores there about the same time the USGS was coring on the Alaskan side. "I have recently sent out an e-mail to Russian colleagues in Moscow, trying to find out where these cores are being kept and whether I could get permission to go sample from them. I hope that the cores haven't been lost or thrown out, but with the near-collapse of the Russian science infrastructure, I am worried about the fate of these cores."

-- Don Alan Hall

Copyright © 1997 Mammoth Trumpet


Return to First Americans

The First Americans

http://www.cabrillo.edu/~crsmith/firstamer.html

New digs and old bones reveal an ancient land that was a mosaic of peoples, including Asians and Europeans. Now a debate rages: who got here first?
By Sharon Begley and Andrew Murr


Putting Flesh on the Ancient Bones. Measuring distances between scores of points on the skull produces a "cranial profile" that lets scientists identify a skull as likely belonging to a particular ethnic group. Placing skin and muscles on the bone shows what the ancient man looked like in life.  
Facial reconstruction of the 'Spirit Cave Man,' based on bones found in Spirit Cave, Churchill County, Nevada (David Barry--Courtesy Nevada State Museum; facial reconstruction by Sharon Long)
 Reconstruction of 'Spirit Cave Man'




As he sat down to his last meal amid the cattails and sedges on the shore of the ancient lake, the frail man grimaced in agony. A fracture at his left temple was still healing; deep abscesses in his gums shot bolts of pain into his skull. Still, he was a survivor, at fortysomething long-lived for his people. But soon after he finished the boiled chub that he had netted from a stream in what is now western Nevada, he felt his strength ebbing like a tide. He lay down. Within hours he was dead, felled by septicemia brought on by the dental abscess. When his people found him, they gently wrapped his body in a rabbit-fur robe and secured his bulrush-lined leather moccasins, his prize possessions; he had patched them twice with antelope hide on the right heel and toe. Surely he would want them where he was going. His people dug a shallow grave in a rock shelter, lined it with reed mats and laid him within. Some 9,400 years later, anthropologists would discover him. They would name him Spirit Caveman.

He wasn't supposed to be there. Spirit Caveman is the wrong guy, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. According to the standard anthropology script, anyone living in America 9,000 years ago should resemble either today's Native Americans or, at the very least, the Asians who were their ancestors and thus, supposedly, the original Americans. But Spirit Caveman does not follow that script - and neither do more than a dozen other skeletons of Stone Age Americans. Together, the misfits have sparked a spirited debate: who were the First Americans?

The emerging answer suggests that they were not Asians of Mongoloid stock who crossed a land bridge into Alaska 11,500 years ago, as the textbooks say, but different ethnic groups, from places very different from what scientists thought even a few years ago. What's more, stone tools, hearths and remains of dwellings unearthed from Peru to South Carolina suggest that Stone Age America was a pretty crowded place for a land that was supposed to be empty until those Asians followed herds of big game from Siberia into Alaska. A far different chronicle of the First Americans is therefore emerging from the clash of theories and discoveries that one anthropologist calls "skull wars." According to the evidence of stones and bones, long before Ellis Island opened its doors America was a veritable Rainbow Coalition of ethnic types, peopled by southern Asians, East Asians; and even, perhaps, Ice Age Europeans, who may have hugged the ice sheets in their animal-skin kayaks to reach America millenniums before it was even a gleam in Leif Ericson's eye. "It's very clear to me," says anthropologist Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institution, "that we are looking at multiple migrations through a very long time period - migrations of many different peoples of many different ethnic origins."

The standard story of the peopling of the Americas holds that wanderers from Northeast Asia fanned out across the Great Plains, into the Southwest and eventually the East to become the founding populations of today's Native Americans. Stone spear points found in Clovis, N.M., in the 1930s were dated at 11,000 years ago and hailed as evidence of the oldest human settlement in the New World. The story was so tidy that any skeletons that seemed to challenge this "Clovis model" were shoved back into the closet by the mandarins of American anthropology; any stone tools that seemed older than Clovis were dismissed as misdated. Clovis had American archeology in a stranglehold; James Adovasio of Mercyhurst College in Pennsylvania calls its defenders the "Clovis mafia."

The small band of hunter-gatherers made its summer camp on the riverbank, at the northern end of the region through which they followed the seasonal game. The location, 45 miles southeast of what is now Richmond, Va., was ideal: winds from the north kept the flying insects down. Some of the band would spend their days striking long, slender quartz flakes from stone cores; others made triangular and pentagonal spear points for the hunt. It was 15,050 years ago; the erstwhile "First Americans" would not make the trek across the Bering Strait for 3,500 more years.

Now there are too many skeletons in the closet to ignore. Pushed by a 1990 federal law that requires museums to return Native American remains to their tribes, scientists - called in to figure out who belongs to whom - have amassed a database of "craniometric profiles." Each of the 2,000 or so profiles consists of some 90 skull measurements, such as distance between the eyes, that indicate ancestry. For most skeletons, it has been pretty straightforward to tell a Hopi from a Crow. But some skulls stand out like pale-skinned, redheaded cousins at a family reunion of olive-skinned brunettes. The oldest American found so far, an 11,500-year-old skeleton from central Brazil, resembles southern Asians and Australians, anthropologist Walter Neves of the University of So Paulo reported last year. One skull from Lime Creek, Neb., and two from Minnesota - all 7,840 to 8,900 years old - resemble South Asians or Europeans. Some of the other misfits: Buhl Woman, found in 1989, died 10,600 years ago at the age of 19 or so. "She doesn't fit into any modern group," says anthropologist Richard Jantz of the University of Tennessee, "but is most similar to today's Polynesians."

Spirit Caveman bears less resemblance to American Indians than he does to any other ethnic group except African Bushmen. His face is not flattened or wide, his nose is not narrow - all traits of Amerindians. He "does not show affinity to any Amerindian sample [we used]," conclude Jantz and Douglas Owsley of the Smithsonian. Instead, with his long head, wide nose, forward face and strong chin, he resembles the Aboriginal Ainu of Japan or other East Asians.

Kennewick Man, found on July 28, 1996, by two college students watching a hydroplane race on the Columbia River in Washington, looks almost nothing like a Native American. His face is narrow, with a prominent nose, an upper jaw that juts out slightly and a long, narrow braincase. Although early reports described him as Caucasoid or even European (which led the Asatru Folk Assembly, followers of an ancient Nordic religion, to claim him), in fact the 8,000-year-old man most resembles a cross between the Ainu and the Polynesians.

America, it seems, was a mosaic of peoples and cultures even 11,000 years ago. Based on their study of 11 ancient skulls, conclude Owsley and Jantz in a paper to be published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, America was home to "at least three distinct groups ... None of the fossils [except for one] shows any particular affinity to modern Native Americans ... [Skull measurements] depart from contemporary American Indians, often in the direction of Europeans or South Asians."

One explanation for the lack of a family resemblance between the oldest Americans and today's Amerindians is that the original Americans might simply have changed in appearance over the generations. "You'd expect them to look different," says anthropologist David Hurst Thomas of the American Museum of Natural History. "They're separated by 9,000 years of evolution." A more radical explanation is that the First Americans - perhaps from Polynesia, perhaps from Europe [related Reuters story] - left no descendants. Whoever got here first, in other words, were not the ancestors of today's Pequot, Shoshone and other tribes. Instead, they were obliterated by later arrivals who made war or made love: killing them or mating with them. Kennewick Man, for instance, had a stone spear point in his hip. Its shape suggests it came from what scientists call the Cascade culture, people who were just moving into the area. "It may be a sign of ethnic conflict," says anthropologist James Chatters, who first inspected K Man.

The possibility that today's Native Americans are not the descendants of the original Americans is not going down easily. "If you tell the Native Americans that they weren't first," says Thomas, "you're asking for trouble." That conclusion, even if proved, has no direct legal ramifications for Native Americans' hard-won gains, such as the right to fish ancestral waters and the right to establish casinos. "But it may be just a step before legislation starts being rolled back," Thomas warns. Some Americans resent the newfound wealth of some tribes, and "if the discoveries make today's Native Americans just another Ellis Island group, it makes it hard for them to preserve their sovereignty."

Already, Native Americans are protesting this line of research. The Shoshone-Bannock demanded custody of Buhl Woman and reburied her. The Northern Paiute are asking that Spirit Caveman be reburied, and the Umatilla of Washington want Kennewick Man. "We know that our people have been part of this land since the beginning of time," said Armand Minthorn, a Umatilla religious leader, in a statement. "Scientists believe that because [Kennewick Man's] head measurement does not match ours, he is not Native American. Our elders have told us that Indian people did not always look the way we do today."

The determined band passed up the quartz in the nearby deposits, trekking beyond the Green River in what is now Wyoming and Utah, all the way to the northern Bighorn, 600 miles away. There they found the obsidian and quartz crystal they would fashion into stone points and flakes - and never use. Instead, they would bury their caches on a layer of compacted red ocher. Their neighbors had equally strong preferences, but for them the quest was not for exotic materials but for sources imbued with spiritual significance. Rejecting the local quartz, they climbed the peaks to chip out red jasper found at 9,000 feet and flake it into stone tools that they, too, would cache, unused. Stones that lay nearer their gods would make a fitting offering.

For years, no authority would accept any deviation from the party line that the First Americans were the Clovis people of 11,000 years ago. But in 1977, archeologist Tom Dillehay of the University of Kentucky began excavating a site deep in the Chilean hills called Monte Verde. There, some 30 hunter-gatherers lived beside a creek 35 miles inland of the Pacific until a rising peat bog pushed them out - and preserved the site like volcanic ash over Pompeii. The band lived in low, tentlike structures lashed together with cord and covered with bark and mastodon hide to keep out the rain, says Dillehay. Outside were work areas, and fire pits lined with clay. A hut set apart from the others may have served as either a paleohospital or a Stone Age Studio 54: inside, Dillehay found five chewed quid made of boldo leaves, which contain both an analgesic and a mild hallucinogen. Boldo was clearly prized: the nearest supply lay more than 100 miles north, so either someone made a long trek or arranged trades with distant inlanders. Belying the image of the original Americans as full-time big-game hunters, the Monte Verdeans ate a varied diet: freshwater mussels and crawfish, wild potato, fruits and nuts, small game like birds that they brought down with stones and the occasional mastodon that they felled with fire-hardened lances. But the paradigm killer was this: Monte Verde was inhabited 12,500 years ago - 1,000 years before the original Americans supposedly flocked across the Bering Strait.

For years archeologists dismissed Dillehay's claim. At scientific conferences, he recalls, "others would be introduced as doctor this and doctor that. I was always 'the guy who is excavating Monte Verde.' Some people wouldn't even shake my hand." Even worse, the Clovis model had such a stranglehold that scientists "would dig until they hit the Clovis level and just stop." Few looked for older bones and tools. Four or five possible pre-Clovis sites in South America were never reported because the scientists feared that doing so would wreck their reputations.

That changed two years ago, when archeology's pooh-bahs finally accepted that Monte Verde was indeed 12,500 years old. The floodgates opened. Sites once dismissed as misdated are being re-examined. At Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Avella, Pa., for instance, where for 26 years Adovasio has been excavating under an overhang that juts out from a rock face 43 feet above the ground, scientists are now reconsidering his claim that the charcoal, stone tools and woven material buried there are at least 14,000 and possibly 17,000 years old. At Saltville, in western Virginia, archeologists are studying what may be a Stone Age mastodon feast. Stone and bone tools (including an ivory-polisher), mastodon bones and fire-cracked rock along an ancient riverbank have been unearthed from a layer that may be 14,000 years old. Saltville has a distinguished pedigree: a friend sent Thomas Jefferson a mastodon tooth from the site in 1782.

Jefferson was curious enough about the prehistory of America that when he dispatched Lewis and Clark to survey the West, he asked them to look for signs of ancient settlements. He might have turned his curiosity closer to home. Archeologists led by Michael Johnson had stopped digging at Cactus Hill in Virginia when they found Clovis material, dated at 10,920 years old, three feet down. But with the theory of the First Americans shifting beneath their feet, they dug deeper - and came upon stone blades and cores (the rock chunks from which flakes are struck) in a layer 15,050 years old. "This looks like a good candidate for a Clovis precursor to me," says the Smithsonian's Stanford. Like Johnson, archeologist Albert Goodyear of the University of South Carolina had never felt much need to dig below the Clovis layer in his Topper site on the Savannah River. But last spring he and colleagues found, beneath the Clovis layer, stone blades and flakes by the score in layers three feet down - a depth that, he estimates, corresponds to more than 12,000 years. "This is pretty substantial evidence," says Goodyear, "that people were here long before we thought."

And they may have come from somewhere no scientists in their right mind would have considered only a few years ago: a French Connection. There are striking similarities between the stone tools attributed to the Clovis culture, in the Americas, and the stone tools attributed to the so-called Solutrean culture of France and the Iberian Peninsula. Both made beveled, crosshatched bone rods, notes archeologist Bruce Bradley. Both made idiosyncratic spear points of mammoth ivory. Both made triangular stone scrapers. Yes, two separate peoples might have invented the same thing, as David Meltzer of Southern Methodist University points out: "These similarities may represent finding the same answer to the same problem" of killing and butchering game. But there's a twist. "The oldest of these tools in America," says Bradley, "are in the East and Southeast, not the Southwest" - where they should be if the Clovis people trickled in from Siberia and then fanned out across the continent. And since glaciers did not retreat from America's midsection until 11,500 years ago, anyone inhabiting the Eastern Seaboard before then must have come from the East rather than the Bering Strait.

How? Crossing the open Atlantic would have posed a perhaps insurmountable challenge, even though people traveled in boats from southern Asia to Australia at least 40,000 years ago. "We don't give early people enough credit," says Stanford. "Yeah, they lived in caves - but they were pretty smart, too." Smart enough, perhaps, to have navigated along the ice sheet and seasonal pack ice that spanned the ocean from England to Nova Scotia. "They could have made it if they worked the glacier for seals and water birds," says Johnson. "They would have seen migratory birds flying west; they would have known there was land in that direction." Similarly, the Asians who reached America from the West may have been seafarers, too.

Deep in the craggy uplands 450 feet above the Amazon, the people of Caverna da Pedra Pintada look nothing like the stereotype of the First Americans as bison-fur-wearing big-game hunters. This band drew sustenance from the river and the forest, dining on turtles, frogs, snakes, fish and fresh-water mussels, as well as Brazil nuts and palm nuts. And they did more. The cave floor is splattered with gobs of red and yellow iron-based paint, dripped 11,000 years ago. The Stone Age artists created exuberant scenes of snakes and other animals and even handprints - designs? signatures? - including children's.

"We are rewriting the textbooks on the First Americans," says Stanford. The new edition will show that "the peopling of the Americas was never as simple as simple-minded paradigms said." Instead, it will tell of an America that beckoned to far-flung people long before the Mayflower or the Santa Maria or the Viking ships, of an unknown continent so alluring that men and women endowed with a technology no more sophisticated than sharp rocks braved Siberian tundra and Atlantic ice packs to get here. It is still the New World. But it is thousands of years older than we thought - home to settlers so diverse that it was, even millenniums ago, the world's melting pot.

Copyright © Newsweek, April 26, 1999


 

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History: Before the Europeans

Native American History - Pre-European Period

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http://www.cabrillo.edu/~crsmith/anth7_hist1.html

Native American History

Pre-European Period


 

 

Native American History

Pre-European Period

 


Everything was water except a very small piece of ground. On this were the eagle and the coyote. Then the turtle swam to them. They sent it to dive for the earth at the bottom of the water. The turtle barely succeeded in reaching the bottom and touching it with its foot. When it came up again, all the earth seemed washed out. Coyote looked closely at its nails. At last he found a grain of earth. Then he and the eagle took this and laid it down. From it they made the earth as large as it is. From the earth they also made six men and six women. They sent these out in pairs in different directions and the people separated. After a time the eagle sent the coyote to see what the people were doing. Coyote came back and said: "They are doing something bad. They are eating the earth. One side is already gone." The eagle said: " That is bad. Let us make something for them to eat. Let us send the dove to find something." The dove went out. It found a single grain of meal. The eagle and coyote put this down on the ground. Then the earth became covered with seeds and fruit. Now they told the people to eat these. When the seeds were dry and ripe the people gathered them. Then the people increased and spread all over. But the water is still under the world.


All humans are interested in their origins and try to account for their existence through creation stories, like the one quoted above which is told by the Yaudanchi (a Yokut-speaking Nation living in the south-central San Joaquin Valley of California). Every native North American society has such stories recounting the actions and deeds of "power" in the past. They commonly explain how people came to live where they do, how they acquired tools and customs, and why one should act, or not act, in certain ways. Most commonly they contain fundamental conceptions of nature, society, and how people ought to relate to the world and to one another.

Like North America's Native People, anthropologists and archaeologists also have creation stories which explain how America's native peoples came to be, though their stories differ markedly from those of most of the Native People. It's not a better story, just a different one. The short, and until a few years ago the standard textbook, version goes like this (for a longer version, click here):

Humans first evolved in Africa some 4 - 5 million years ago. Over the next 4 million years, through the interplay of evolution and adaptation, survival and extinction, many species of humans evolved. By about 100,000 - 120,000 years ago, people physically like modern humans had evolved in Africa and sometime around 100,000 years ago some of them migrated out into the rest of the world, reaching central and eastern Asia by at least 40,000 to 50,000 years ago. And it was from these "out-of-Africa" populations that the first immigrants into the Americans came, reaching North America about 12,000 years ago by means of a "land bridge" between Asia and North America.

The "land bridge" existed because at various times during the Pleistocene (Ice Ages), vast continental glaciers (in places up to two miles thick) formed over much of the northern half of North America. Each time the glacial masses reached their maximum extent (drawing massive amounts of water out of the ocean and causing a consequent lowering of sea levels worldwide), Alaska and northeastern Siberia were joined by a broad "land bridge" which formed part of a province geologists call Beringia. This land bridge appeared (and disappeared) several times during the Pleistocene (Ice Ages): from about 75,000 to 45,000 years ago, and again from about 25,000 to around 14,000 years ago, when the land bridge was exposed for the last time. And it was during this last emergence that high latitude living nomadic big-game hunters in Northeast Asia crossed into the Americas by way of the "land bridge." These pioneers lived in small bands, hunting large and medium sized game animals such as mammoth, musk ox, and bison which provided them with food, their hides a source of shelter and clothing, and their dung perhaps used in place of firewood.

Animated picture showing the retreat of the continental glaciers in North America from about 18,000 years ago to their disappearance at about 6,000 years agoThis map is a looping GIF animation depicting the retreat of glaciers in North America - beginning about 18,000 years ago. If your browser supports animated images, you will see the glacial extent changing on the map. If your browser doesn't support animation, you can view the animation by clicking here.

NOTE: This looping GIF animation was created by the Illinois State Museum and can be found on their website

However, once in Alaska, these big game hunters were blocked from going south or east by the presence of the glaciers, in some places up to two miles thick and stretching from the Atlantic coast to the mountain ranges of Alaska and British Columbia (but not quite all the way to the Pacific coast), and from the southern shores of the Great Lakes to the north polar regions. Then around 12,000 years ago the glaciers began to disappear and an "ice- free" corridor appeared between the receding glaciers of Alaska and British Columbia and those lying eastward in Canada, and opening the door to the Americas for the very first time (so the story went) in human history. And it was by means of this corridor that the hardy Siberian-cum-American pioneers made their way to the south, reaching the Great Plains of North America some 11,400 years ago.

Once the pioneers had traversed the "ice-free" corridor, they fanned out in many directions: some groups moved into the Eastern U.S.; others contined southward into northern Mexcio; while still other groups moved into the Great Basin and Southwestern regions of the U.S. In so doing they became the First Americans, or as the archaeologists call them, the Paleo-Indians, and have been regarded as THE ancestral populations to all of today's Native Americans.

The earliest, and best-known, of these "founders" are called the Clovis people, named after a site in New Mexico where, in the 1930s, large, bifacially flaked stone spear points were found in direct association with mammoth bones (in some instances actually embedded in the rib bones on the mammoths). Clovis hunters left their stone points and butchered animal bones at kill sites scattered across much of North America. When radiocarbon dating was introduced in the 1950s, Clovis sites were shown to range in age from about 11,000 to 11,400 years old - several thousands of years older than any other sites in the Americas (at least that was the thought then), just shortly after the corridor had opened up.

Everything seemed to fit quite nicely: no people in the Americas before 12,000 years ago (because of the ice sheets), the opening of an ice-free corridor beginning around 12,000 years ago, and the "sudden" appearance of Clovis at about 11,400 years ago, and their seemingly rapid spread over much of North America. Thus Clovis were the First Americans.

A simple, persuasive, once might even say seductive, story - several small bands of nomadic big-game hunters from Siberia colonizing a virgin land and over thousands of years their descendants would spread to every corner of the Americas and give rise to most of the native people in the Americas today. This was (and for many archaeologists it still IS) the gospel of American archaeology.

BUT .... it now seems that this scenario is much too simple. All across the Americas, archaeologists and anthropologists, along with geneticists, linguists, geologists, and some of America's native peoples, are assembling new data, reassessing older data, and generating new models that call into question both the single genetic and cultural origin model as well as the Clovis First model. And the answers now emerging to the questions of who were the First Americans, from where did they come, how did they get to the Americas, when did they arrive in the Americas, and what were their lifeways during initial colonization are very different from those of just a few years ago and suggest a picture very different from the standard textbook story of Who the First Americans were.

  • WHO were the FIRST Americans?
    The accumulating skeletal and genetic evidence suggests that the earliest populations to move into the Americas were not Asians whose primary genetic background was that of residents of northeastern Asia and eastern Mongolia (the old view). At the end of 1999 scientists meet in California and New Mexico to mull over the implications of recently discovered or restudied ancient American skeletons, most of which date between 8,600 and 11,000 years ago. And what they discovered has shaken the foundations of the anthropological communities. Instead of resembling the historically known American Indians, the wide range of skull shapes which have come to light so far display affinities with populations as diverse as the Ainu of Japan, peoples of central Asia, Australasia, India, southwest Asia, even the Neandertals of Europe (see Ancestors of the New World Had Multiple Origins for more information about the possible Neandertal connection). Genetic evidence also supports the idea of multiple migrations of people coming from distinctly different genetic poplations: perhaps as many as four or five different genetic populations. For an idea of what some of these earliest Americans may have looked like, go here.
  • HOW did they GET TO the Americas?
    While some populations, perhaps the genetic and cultural forbears of the Clovis people, walked across the "land bridge" and down the ice-free corridor in western Canada, some theorists are beginning to consider the possibility that people migrated to the Americas by walking or boating along the now submerged Beringia and the continental shelves of North, Central, and South America. While older ideas stressed that the late Ice-Age glaciers extended down and into the Pacific ocean, newer studies have shown that this was not the case. Indeed, even our ideas about the environment of the entire "land bridge" have changed markedly in the last several decades. Perhaps the "ice-free" corridor was along the Pacific coast of the Americas, which would help explain why some of the oldest sites in the Americas are in South, not North America. Other scientists have proposed a migration of boat people from Europe, basing their hypothesis on what they perceive as shared technologies and tool types between Clovis and Solutrean people who lived in France around 18,000 years ago. Presumably, European boat people would have used much the same route that the Norse (Vikings) did thousands or years later (around 1,100 years ago), when they settled in Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland, and the northeastern U.S.
  • WHEN did they ARRIVE?
    Archaeological evidence suggests that people were already living in the Americas well before the initial appearance of Clovis. For example, people were living at a site called Monte Verde (in Chile) at least 12,500 years ago (and perhaps as much as 30,000-plus years ago). AT some point after the inhabitants left the site, rising creek waters covered the site, laying down a deposit of peat which preserved a wide range of items: animal bones, wood planks, stakes, and animals used to cover rectangular shaped living structures, fireplace ash, a human footprint, and the remains of over 70 kinds of edible plants. At Meadowcroft Rock Shelter, in western Pennsylvannia, there is evidence of nearly continuous human occupation from the Iroquoian Seneca of the early centuries of English and American occupation all the way back to Clovis and beyond. The site's excavator, Dr. James Adovasio, claims he has human-made fire pits dating to more than 14,000 years ago, with indications of some being as old as 17,000 years.A battery of radiocarbon dates puts people at this creekside campsite in south-central Chile around 12,500 years ago.
  • WHAT were their LIFEWAYS.
    Varied and diverse subsistence practices (and by extension, varied and diverse technologies and tools). If the Clovis people (and their immediate genetic and cultural ancestors) came through an "ice-free corridor" and emerged onto the great plains of North America, their subsistence in all probability centered on the taking of mega-fauna, supplimented by familiar plant foods. For those folks who entered the Americas along the Pacific coast, either on foot or by coastal boating, food resources would have run the gamut from shellfish to fish to birds and birds' eggs to sea mammals, plus those plant species which were widely distributed along the coast and with which the pioneering people were well familiar.

Subdivisions of Native American History - the Pre-European Period

Archaeologists divide North America's past into a number of time periods, both to emphasize features share by cultures at one time as well as highlight their differences from cultures of other times. Unfortunately, there's little agreement on how best to divide the past that is useful and/or consistent across native North America. The one used here divides the period before the coming of the Europeans and Ameropeans (American born descendants of European settlers) into three major time periods: Paleo-Indian, Archaic, and the Formative.

The Paleo-Indian period covers that span of time during which people first came into the Americas. Since there is great controversy surrounding exactly when the first people came to the Americas, no fixed starting point for the Paleo-Indian periods be can be given. Some scientists say humans came into the Americas no earlier than 13,000 years ago, while other scientists believe that people were living in the Americas long before 13,000 years ago. Also, the origin tales of many of the Native American societies state that they were created in essentially those geographical locations where they were when first encountered by Europeans; thus, the Indians have always been in the Americas. The Paleo-Indian period ends with the major climatic changes (and accompaning flora and faunal changes) brought about by the end of the Pleistocene (Ice Ages), some 10,000 years ago.

The Archaic period is an outgrowth of the Paleo-Indian period and spans the time from the end of the Pleistocene until about 4,000 to 5,000 years ago. It was during this time that the Paleo-Indians spread out across the Americas, moving into every habitable portion of the continents, adjusting and adapting to regional extremes of temperature and climate, to the mountains and valleys, lush woodlands and dry deserts, verdant prairies and arid tundra, coastal marshlands and inland lakes. Over time, increasingly varied Indian cultures evolved so that by the end of the Archaic, North America was a veritable patchwork of differing cultures, languages, and societies.

The end of the Archaic is difficult to fix. As early as 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, societies in many places in North America began to do things differently: moving away from mainly egalitarian social systems to extremely complex, often highly stratified, soci-political systems; shifting from nomadic to sedendtary settlement patterns and living in large, permanent villages and towns; experimenting with a variety of indigenous North American plants, some of which would be domesticated in the following period; engaging in a wide range of environmental management practices, including the use of fire; manufacturing pottery; engaging in long distance trade. On the other hand, many archaic period societies maintained an archaic way of life until less than 100 years ago.

The Formative period, beginning at various times between 3,000 - 5,000 years ago, witnessed a flowering of native societies. Archaic period trends became dominant themes during the formative. In some geographical regions, people engaged in full-time agriculture, lived in cities of 10,000+ people, and elevated their leaders both architecturally and socially. For example, at the ancient city of Cahokia, leaders, who may have been considered as living embodiments of gods and goddesses, lived on top of giant earthen mounds which soared several hundreds of feet into the air. In what is now the southwestern U.S., societies who are glossed under the term Anasazi, erected multi-room, mulit-storied apartment complexes, built roads to connect their towns and cities with each other, and engaged in long-distance trading with the might empires of Mesoamerica.

The Formative period ends with, or perhaps slightly before, the European colonization of North America. I say "perhaps slightly before" as there are indications that prior to European settlement of North America, European fishers were regularly visiting the rich fishing grounds off of present-day Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Maine. In the process, these fishers often came ashore to acquire water, food, timber, and fuel, and it's possible that they may also have infected the local Indian populations with diseases. Given the near lack of genetic immunity to these diseases, coupled with the dense population in northeastern North America, it's possible that disease were beginning to decimate many of the Formative period societies before actual European settlement.

Additional information on these three periods can be found by selecting from the following topics:

  Paleo-Indian

 Archaic

 Formative