Monte Verde Fallout	"Monte Verde Under Fire" October 18, 1999
Compiled by Mark Rose

The debate about Monte Verde raises several important questions. First, what does it say about how archaeologists prove, or disprove, particular claims for sites? Second, where does it leave us in terms of when and how the Americas were colonized?

THE BURDEN OF PROOF

The ongoing debate about Monte Verde raises questions about how sites are interpreted. After all, it would seem to be a simple thing to show that a site was or was not occupied before the ~11,500 B.P. Clovis barrier. Two sorts of trials have been used: sets of criteria that must be met and examination of the site by outside experts.

Criteria

From the time of the Folsom discoveries of fluted points with the bones of extinct bison (Bison antiquus) in 1926 and 1927 to today, various criteria have been proposed to demonstrate first the great antiquity of people in the New World and later to demonstrate a pre-Clovis occupation. C. Vance Haynes (1969: 714) summarized the criteria as follows: "For establishing man's presence, the minimum requirements met for the Folsom site still apply for future excavations. The primary requirement is a human skeleton, or an assemblage of artifacts that are clearly the work of man. Next, this evidence must lie in situ within undisturbed geological deposits in order to clearly demonstrate the primary association of artifacts with stratigraphy. Lastly, the minimum age of the site must be demonstrated by primary association with fossils of known age or with material suitable for reliable isotopic age dating." E. James Dixon (1999: 48), based on Haynes and on Stanford (1983: 65), suggests the following questions must be answered:

1. Are the artifacts clearly the product of human manufacture?

2. Is the recovered material within clear stratigraphic context?

3. Are there reliable, concordant, and stratigraphically consistent radiocarbon dates from the deposit?

4. Are paleoenvironmental studies consistent with ages assigned to the site?

5. Are there human remains that are reliably dated older than 11,500 B.P.?

If there are no human skeletal remains or indirect evidence of humans such as preserved footprints, the first four questions must all be answered positively if a site is to be considered pre-11,500 B.P.

David Meltzer of Southern Methodist University has observed (1993: 62-63) that these criteria are not too different from those used in Africa "to identify the earliest (and often the most ambiguous) traces of human behavior found with pre-modern humans--traces which seem uncommonly uncontroversial. Yet...the criteria have proven extraordinarily difficult to meet. So difficult, in fact, that proponents cry foul. The criteria, they charge, are excessively rigid, and were they generally applied to sites of all ages we would be left wondering whether, for example, anyone ever occupied Eastern North America after 11,500 B.P. These are serious charges: Are the criteria so perversely narrow that they blind archaeologists from seeing legitimate evidence? A closer look is in order."

Meltzer then notes some of the difficulties facing those trying to demonstrate a valid pre-Clovis occupation according to such criteria: many artifacts would have been made of perishable materials and did not survive, less modified tools (like a river cobble used to smash open bones for marrow) might be difficult to recognize as tools or to distinguish from naturally made counterparts (like a cobble flaked while tumbling in a stream). Context, he says, can make a difference: a river cobble by a hearth at a campsite not near stream might be more convincing as an artifact than one found in a riverbed.

At the same time, Meltzer(1993: 55-56) admits that in the late 1800s and the first decades of the twentieth century, "Skepticism about a genuine Pleistocene human presence was not arbitrary, but forged in the face of repeated cases which failed to withstand scrutiny--cases often based, as proponents themselves admitted, upon unverified finds made under appalling field conditions by untrained farmers or collectors." I think the same standards of proof, or higher since we have better excavation and analytical techniques available to us, must be applied today as those 100 years ago. Is it difficult to meet them? Yes. Should it be? Yes. Lowering the bar will not get us closer to understanding the peopling of the Americas.

Site Visits

Over the past 150 years the examination of archaeological sites by outside experts has been seen as an important tool in establishing their validity (Meltzer 1993: 44-48). Site visits played an important part in the first acceptance of humanity's great antiquity when British geologist Sir Charles Lyell traveled to Abbéville, France, in 1859 to examine firsthand the findings of Jacques Boucher de Perthes who for decades had collected stone tools and fossils from sites in the Somme River Valley. In the Americas, site visits were critical in the debunking of the supposed Palaeolithic tools found beginning early in the 1870s by physician Charles Conrad Abbott near Trenton New Jersey.

Meltzer asks (1993: 55-56), "Could it possibly be that easy nowadays? Is the price of resolving the ongoing human antiquity dispute in America no more than the cost of the plane tickets to fly half a dozen skeptics to a corner of South America or the outskirts of Pittsburgh for an on-site evaluation?" His own experience should convince him, and others, that the answer is no. Meltzer was part of the panel that validated Monte Verde in 1997 and was one of three Paleoindian specialists who conducted a similar visit to Pedra Furada, a Brazilian another pre-Clovis hopeful, in 1993. (The others were James Adovasio of Mercyhurst College, excavator of Meadowcroft Rockshelter, and Tom Dillehay of the University of Kentucky, excavator of Monte Verde). Meltzer et al. (1994) critiqued the evidence from Pedra Furada in the journal Antiquity, concluding that "Obviously, we are sceptical of the claims for a Pleistocene human presence at Pedra Furada, and in our view the concerns raised here must be resolved before this potentially important site is accepted (at least by us)." Given the authors' stature in American Paleoindian scholarship, this conclusion was damning and Pedra Furada has been virtually written off. The French excavators of the site countered in a subsequent issue of Antiquity, claiming that the critique was based on "partial data and false information." Their response, not in my mind convincing, was pointless anyway because most had already accepted Meltzer, Adovasio, and Dillehay's verdict. Today, with Meadowcroft not free of all doubt as pre-Clovis and Monte Verde under fire, one might excuse the excavators of Pedra Furada if they looked askance at all of this.

What can a site visit accomplish? Today much of the archaeologist's work is done not in the field but in the laboratory, and not in one place by a single scholar but in many places by dozens of specialists. One can look at the site during excavation to check the quality of the fieldwork and to examine firsthand the stratigraphy, but beyond that the critical body of evidence has to be the final site publication in which the excavation is set forth in sufficient detail so that anybody can review the data and interpretation of it. In that respect one can note that Tom Dillehay has done just that for Monte Verde, made a review possible through his publication. And on his part, Stuart Fiedel has undertaken just such a review.

Beyond Clovis

Review of E. James Dixon's Bones, Boats, and Bison

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