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Virginia is for Lovers…14,500 Years Ago?

by
Scope Correspondent

Just how old is the Old Dominion?

The Clovis people, who arrived in the Americas about 11,500 years ago, shared a distinctive tool-making method, scattering troves of similarly shaped spear points across the Americas. After years of finding Clovis point after Clovis point—and not much else from earlier—a consensus emerged among anthropologists: that these Clovis tips marked the first arrival of humans in the Americas. “The whole pattern paradigmatically was to verify Clovis,” says Tom Dillehay, a Vanderbilt University anthropologist, up until the 1970s, when a spate of new sites—led by Monte Verde, a 14,800-year-old site in Chile excavated by Dillehay—upsetting the anthropological apple cart. The Clovis points represented a massive wave of human migration into the Americas, to be sure, but others, a diffuse set of groups dubbed the “pre-Clovis” peoples, had beaten them to the punch.

A  spear tip in the Clovis style, typical of the humans migrating into the Americas some 11,500 years ago. (Locutus Borg, Wikimedia Commons)

A spear tip in the Clovis style, typical of the humans migrating into the Americas some 11,500 years ago. (Locutus Borg, Wikimedia Commons)

But identifying a site as pre-Clovis is tricky stuff, leading archaeologists and anthropologists to point to only a handful of them in the eastern United States: Meadowcroft Rockshelter, an impeccable, 13,000-year-old-site outside of Pittsburgh; Cactus Hill, a 17,000-year-old site about an hour’s drive south of Richmond; Topper, a 15,000-year-old site in South Carolina’s southernmost tip; and Saltville, dated to about 14,500 years ago.

Tucked away into a corner of southwest Virginia, the town of Saltville, Virginia—home to 2,000—has been the home away from home for Smithsonian and Virginia Museum of Natural History archaeologist Jerry McDonald, who drove the work in Saltville and supervised digs throughout the 1990s at a site called SV-2—digs that may help paint a picture of the earliest inhabitants of North America.

“I’m convinced that…the evidence is there, that materials were accumulated…or manipulated by human agency,” says McDonald, who has since retired from active archaeology work to devote time to his academic publishing company.

Even from the beginning work in Saltville back in 1992, McDonald says, “there were a bunch of little suggestions that human agency was there.” He and his crewmembers would find flakes of rock—perhaps tantalizing evidence of prehistoric humans making stone tools—below the Clovis material now and again, but it wasn’t until opening up SV-2 that McDonald found truly striking accumulations of material, including a level “platform” adjacent to what would have been an active stream channel, replete with uniformly spaced boulders and stacks of bone fragments. At the time, the only question he could muster was, “What the heck is this about?”

McDonald and his team kept finding intriguing patterns of rocks laid down in the silt and mud—this time, a circle of stones whose arrangement “posed challenges to alluvial processes,” or the running of the river, and a couple of pieces of bone and ivory that almost looked like they were altered by human hand. Most intriguing of all: a fragment of bone about 8 or 9 inches long that looked shaped by human hands into some sort of scraper for helping process animal meat.

The tibia fragment identified as a scraper by McDonald. The scraping end is purportedly to the right (Jerry McDonald, adapted from Goodyear 2005)

The tibia fragment identified as a scraper by McDonald. The scraping end is purportedly to the right (Jerry McDonald, adapted from Goodyear 2005)

“Looking at the wear pattern [on the scraper], clearly it was very selective. It wasn’t like what I would expect to see in coarse gravel or coarse sand, fine sand…in a [river] setting,” says McDonald, who published his results in a flurry of papers in late 1990s, culminating with a comprehensive 2000 study produced by the Virginia Museum of Natural History.

As positive as McDonald and others are about the site, however, it’s not universally considered a slam-dunk pre-Clovis site, cautions Dillehay. “There are some things there that are very interesting, and [it] could qualify as a possible or probable human site,” says Dillehay. “But it’s one of those sites that’s ambivalent,” though “not [through] the fault of the investigator,” he affirms, making it clear that he respects McDonald and his work. What are the possible sticking points, then?

There are three major criteria for determining if a site is pre-Clovis or not, says Dillehay. First, there must be unequivocal artifacts or settings clearly altered by human agency. Second, the site must be in a highly stable geological setting—with material trapped “like a sandwich” between undisturbed sediments—in order to rule out contamination from more recent human activity. Finally, researchers must accurately date the site’s age, using the carbon found in charcoal or bone buried alongside the human artifacts. If the site is from earlier than about 11,500 years ago, he says, then the site can be considered pre-Clovis.

The challenge with Saltville, Dillehay says, is the geological messiness that the Saltville site imposes. For tens of thousands of years, a river flowed through the valley, eventually stopping up about 13,500 years ago to become a lake. Chunks of bone could have tumbled along the bottom of the river, leaving paleontologists with a hodge-podge of differently aged bones when excavating the ancient riverbed. As it stands, says Dillehay, the site’s dating is so-so as a consequence.

Also, the river didn’t just carry materials around for tens of thousands of years; it also bludgeoned them, bumping and scraping rocks and bones against each other in ways that could have resulted in objects superficially resembling human-made tools. The challenge here, says Dillehay, lies in finding artifacts that bear distinctively human wear patterns, like “fresh” bone breaks or parallel cut marks in the bones’ surfaces. After all, he says, “people…dismember animals with a particular physical grammar.”

Finally, transformation of the Saltville River into Lake Totten—and the rapid changes in coastlines as a result—makes it difficult to ensure that the materials McDonald excavated were all originally deposited there.

All told, though, Dillehay maintains a heavily guarded optimism about the prospects for Saltville as a pre-Clovis site. “It’d be nice if Jerry and his colleagues went back and published it all in detail,” Dillehay says, noting that much of McDonald’s work was published years ago in regional academic journals with little wide fanfare. “Saltville doesn’t come up much in the conversation,” he says. “One kind of has to go out there and keep it afloat.”

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