In the summer of 1973, University of Pittsburgh archaeologist James Adovasio began to excavate a nearby rock shelter. By the next summer, he had dug a hole 10 feet deep exposing at least 20 separate layers of human occupation that included identifiable artifacts. He later encountered layers with decidedly human artifacts that were unknown to scholars. At that very time, the radiocarbon dates from the first summer’s work arrived from the Smithsonian Institution’s laboratory. Two of the dates were about 13,000 years old (RC years?), 1,500 years before the earliest accepted date for the peopling of the Americas. Eventually, Adavasio would get even older dates—16,000 years ago—from the Meadowcroft Rockshelter.
The First Americans tells the story of one of the most exciting and controversial research projects in the history of American archaeology. When Adavasio got his early dates in 1974, almost every American archaeologist was convinced that the first Americans were the Clovis people, who arrived in the New World from Siberia via the Bering land bridge some 11,500 years ago. Adavasio’s claims were the subject of intense scrutiny and criticism, even ridicule. The Meadowcroft controversy was one of the most personal and bitter in the history of the profession.
But this is more than a book about Meadowcroft. Adavasio attacks most of the conventional wisdoms about the peopling of America, including some of the most recent. The first Americans came long before the last Ice Age ended, probably by boat. Early hunters could not have played a significant role in the extinction of the wooly mammoth and other mega-fauna, in fact Clovis people rarely had the ability to attack and kill elephants. Kennewick man was not a Caucasian. He and all the early Americans were Asians. The role of women in early societies is grossly understated by archaeologists.
Adavasio is a pioneer in the study of the early human occupation of the Americas. In the past few years his ideas have become generally accepted as more and more early sites have been dated to pre-Clovis times. As the story of the peopling of the New World is being rewritten, Adavasio and Page provide us with a highly readable account of the controversies that swirl around one of archaeology’s most enduring mysteries.
