The most hotly debated question in American archaeology for the past two decades concerns the fundamental questions: Who were the First Americans? From where did they come? How did they get here? When did they get here? What were they doing here?
These are the basic questions the authors to Strangers in a New Land address. Authors James Adovasio and David Pedler are colleagues in the anthropology department at Mercyhurst University, and Adovasio has spent the last four decades excavating the Meadowcroft Rockshelter in southwestern Pennsylvania, a site that has produced some of the earliest human deposits in the New World. For much of this time Adovasio has been on the front lines of the very heated debate, once denounced as being misguided, then praised as being a visionary.
Until the 1970s almost every American archaeologist believed that humans arrived in the Americas from Asia via a land bridge since inundated by the Bering Sea, thence along a corridor between the great North American ice sheets onto the Great Plains. The people were called Clovis, after a town in eastern New Mexico where their distinctive fluted points were first identified. Similar sites were discovered through the continent, and they were carbon-14 dated to 12,800-13,300 years ago. Adovasio and others challenged that truism, and over the last thirty years, the Clovis First hypothesis has imploded to the point that it now a distinctly minority view.
This volume examines in depth thirty-five sites in the Americas that have produced evidence of pre-Clovis and Clovis material. Some of the pre-Clovis sites are disputed and others are controversial, but archaeologists now have several convincing pre-Clovis dates of 16,000 years ago and earlier, even as early as 38,000 years ago. These pre-date the ice-free corridor thorough Canada, making a coastal migration by boat the preferred theory.
This large format book is lavishly illustrated and written for the general reader, and the in-depth description of the thirty-five key early sites is the first of its kind. It is a must book for all of us, archaeologists and lay people alike, who are interested in the story of how the Americas were colonized. —Mark Michel
