First Americans? Once Again a Mystery

A leading theory on when and how humans first arrived in North America has pretty much been discarded. The so-called “Clovis” theory was deemed credible until the last five years, when more indications have surfaced that humans were here earlier than Clovis postulated.

According to the New York Times:

For many decades, archaeologists have agreed on an explanation known as the Clovis model. The theory holds that about 13,500 years ago, bands of big-game hunters in Asia followed their prey across an exposed ribbon of land linking Siberia and Alaska and found themselves on a vast, unexplored continent. The route back was later blocked by rising sea levels that swamped the land bridge. Those pioneers were the first Americans. 

The theory is based largely on the discovery in 1929 of distinctive stone tools, including sophisticated spear points, near Clovis, N.M. The same kinds of spear points were later identified at sites across North America. After radiocarbon dating was developed in 1949, scholars found that the age of these “Clovis sites” coincided with the appearance at the end of the last ice age of an ice-free corridor of tundra leading down from what is now Alberta and British Columbia to the American Midwest.

 Disproving a long-standing theory does not automatically replace it with another, which is the current situation, as summed up in this article by Andrew Curry, a contributing editor for Archaeology magazine.

 Click here for the article.

Painting by Charles Valsechi

Evidence Points to Cahokian Human Sacrifice

Portion of mounds still remaining at the Cahokia site.

An Illinois anthropologist contends the Midwest’s ancient Cahokian culture practiced mass human sacrifice, in contrast to the pastoral, nearly idyllic way the culture usually is depicted. Timothy R. Pauketat, a University of Illinois archaeologist and professor of anthropology, has described his findings in his new book, Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi.

According to an article in Sunday’s Belleville (Illinois) News-Democrat:

Ancient Cahokia, which reached its peak about 1150 A.D. with a population of 20,000, was a religious center of farmers and hunters that probably influenced much of what archaeologists call the Southeast Ceremonial Complex, a string of similar but smaller sites found from Illinois to northern Florida.

It was abandoned about 100 to 200 years later and its descendants are believed to be the various tribes from historic times. At the time of its zenith, Cahokia rivaled London in population and was America's most-populous city until Philadelphia eclipsed it in the 18th century.

. . . In this society, often referred to as the Mississippian Culture, women played much more of a role than convenient sacrificial victims, Pauketat said. And even in this death ritual, women were respected, unlike some of the men whose remains were found with heads lopped off. "The women never show injury,” he said. “There is no trauma. So that means either they drank poison or they were strangled. But, that's speculation. They were very carefully placed into these pits."

Pauketat said that at Cahokia, religion drew people from small farming villages across the region.

"People recognized in Cahokia a supernatural power on a scale and of a kind that was probably unknown in North America north of Mexico," he said.

Click here for the News-Democrat article.

Click here for a sensationalized review of the book in Salon.com.

Old Vinland Map Deemed Authentic

The earliest map to show part of America before Columbus landed here is genuine, according to a Danish expert.

The 15th century Vinland Map has been controversial since it came to light in the 1950s. Some scholars figured it was a hoax meant to prove that Vikings were the first Europeans to land in North America ~ a claim later confirmed by a 1960 archaeological find. But doubts about the map lingered even after carbon dating established the age of an object.

"All the tests that we have done over the past five years ~ on the materials and other aspects ~ do not show any signs of forgery," Rene Larsen, rector of the School of Conservation under the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, told Reuters this past Friday.

The map shows both Greenland and a western Atlantic island "Vinilanda Insula," the Vinland of the Icelandic sagas, now linked by scholars to Newfoundland where Norsemen under Leif Eriksson settled around 1000 AD.

Larsen said his team carried out studies of the ink, writing, wormholes and parchment of the map, which is housed at Yale University in the United States.

Wormholes, caused by wood beetles, were consistent with wormholes in the books with which the map was bound.

Larsen said claims the ink was too recent because it contained a substance called anatase titanium dioxide could be rejected because medieval maps have been found with the same substance, which probably came from sand used to dry wet ink.

American scholars have carbon dated the map to about 1440, about 50 years before Columbus "discovered" the New World in 1492. Scholars believe it was produced for a 1440 church council at Basel, Switzerland.

The Vinland Map is not a "Viking map" and does not alter the historical understanding of who first sailed to North America. But if it is genuine, it shows that the New World was known not only to Norsemen but also to other Europeans at least half a century before Columbus's voyage.

Click here for the complete Reuters article.

Iowa Dig Produces 100,000 Artifacts

Archaeologist David Benn at the dig site.

Eight weeks of archaeological digging in southeastern Iowa has yielded 100,000 artifacts and is increasing knowledge about little-known hunter-gatherers who lived in the area about 1,700 years ago.

The area's ancient inhabitants are believed to be part of the Weaver culture located not far from the confluence of the Iowa and Cedar rivers near Oakville in Louisa County, where fish and game were plentiful, said Dave Benn, a research archaeologist.

The Native Americans lived in a doughnut-shaped village around a communal area and occupied 20 to 25 tree branch and bark wigwams capable of housing up to 10 people each.



“They ate a huge number of fish, and we also found turtle and deer bones,” Benn said of the diet of the people about whom little is known. “They lived well, they ate well, and there was a lot of food here. There were villages up and down the banks of rivers all through the area. This one is a particularly good find, probably the best I’ve seen in a decade.”



Many of the recovered artifacts are unrecognizable bone fragments and pottery shards, but there are also stone arrowheads and spear points, stone axe heads and pits laden with ancient trash that give a glimpse of how the village lived. “As archaeologists, we are very interested in trash,” Benn said. “We’re all about trash.”

Click here for the complete Quad-City Times article.

Dancing Figure Dates to Mississippian Period

The drawing on the roof of the concealed rock shelter is about a foot long.

A drawing of a dancing stick figure recently discovered in a rock shelter in Tennessee's remote Cumberland Plateau dates likely from 1000 to 1600 AD.

“I knew that Native American rock art had been found in the area, but I didn't realize this was so significant," said Corey Holliday, a cave specialist who found the drawing. "My first impression was that someone had drawn it with charcoal."



In fact, the artist most likely lived during the Mississippian Period between A.D. 1000 and 1600 and used a paint based on a prehistoric recipe whose main ingredient was pulverized clay, according to Jan Simek, a University of Tennessee anthropology professor who specializes in cave archaeology.

Simek determined that the reason the pictograph looks so fresh is because it has been protected by a veneer of calcium carbonate leaching out of the sandstone.

"It is a remarkable figure," Simek said. "In my mind, there is no chance it is a recent fake."



Click here for the complete article.

Did Welsh Explore America 300 Years Before Columbus Sailed?

A portion of the 855-foot stone wall at Fort Mountain, perhaps built by early Welsh explorers.

One of the stone wall's circular 'pits' formed likely for defensive purposes.


More evidence is pointing to the potential validity of expeditions by Welsh explorers in the southern portion of North America some 300 years before Columbus set sail. As the legend goes, the group arrived at Mobile Bay around 1170, made their way up the Alabama and Coosa rivers and built stone fortifications at several spots near present-day Chattanooga, Tenn.

Dana Olson, an author who has spent decades trying to prove the legend, said circumstantial evidence on both sides of the Atlantic is too compelling to ignore.

"I've traveled all over the country finding these forts. Some of them are pretty well known, but I'm still uncovering some of them," Olson, author of The Legend of Prince Madoc and the White Indians, told the Associated Press.

Indians or Welshmen?

The stone structures have long been a topic of debate. Many scientists have come to believe that the walls at Fort Mountain in Georgia and other Southeast sites were built by native Americans between 200 B.C. and A.D. 600.

"We're not exactly sure what purposes these enclosures served," said Wood, the UGA archaeologist. "But they were likely well-known gathering places for social events. Seasonal meetings of friends and kin, trading of goods, astronomical observance, and religious or ceremonial activities may have occurred there."

Yet supporters of the Madoc legend say the wall's tear-shaped designs are similar to ruins found in Wales or elsewhere in Great Britain.

They cite an 1810 letter from John Sevier, the first governor of Tennessee, who said that in 1782 he was told by an Indian chief that the walls were built by white people called the Welsh who lived in the region before the Cherokee.

Never to Return

They were driven out with the promise that they would never return to Cherokee lands, Sevier said in the letter, and they supposedly traveled to the Ohio valley or downstream to the Mississippi. There is also evidence of a major battle between 1450 and 1660 at the Falls of the Ohio, which Olson said was the scene of the "big battle began between the red Indians and the white Indians" ~ the Welsh.

Click here for the complete Associated Press article.
Click here for Robert Sewell's informative site with links.