Posted on 10/28/2005 11:53:56 AM PDT by blam
Posted on Thu, Oct. 27, 2005
Clovis speakers discuss man's origins in the United States
MEG KINNARD
Associated Press
COLUMBIA, S.C. - A University of Texas archaeologist opened the highly anticipated "Clovis in the Southeast" conference at the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center Thursday by rejecting the premise on which many experts once based their theories on man's North American origins.
At the meeting, sponsored in part by the University of South Carolina, Michael Collins called the idea that the first inhabitants traveled by way of a land bridge from Asia "primal racism." Instead, Collins said, they arrived by water, because "the rich marine environments" along the northern Atlantic and Pacific coasts are "very attractive regions for human exploitation."
Conference staffer Thomas McDonald said that roughly 400 people had pre-registered for the four-day conference on Clovis - the culture traditionally thought to have been the first in North America.
In recent years, many experts have begun to consider other explanations, such as migration from Europe, and not Asia. That idea was advanced by Dennis Stanford, head of the archaeology division of the department of anthropology at the Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of Natural History.
Other speakers talked about the wide array of paleo-Indian artifacts throughout the southeastern region. University of South Carolina archaeologist Al Goodyear discussed his research at the Topper site in Allendale County, calling the spot "the Goldilocks location to be doing archaeology." In 1998, Goodyear announced that he had discovered artifacts thousands of years older than Clovis materials at Topper.
University of Tennessee professor David Anderson also encouraged private collectors to consider sharing their artifacts with the public. Be "thinking about where you're going to be 100 years from now," he said. "We're all part of the archaeological record."
Afternoon speakers discussed the discoveries of Clovis tools from sites throughout the Tennessee River Valley. Showing slides of the dozens of samples recovered from a Tennessee location, John Broster of the Tennessee Department of Conservation said, "It sorta gets boring in a way, after a while, I guess, but it's still really exciting."
On Friday, Jim Welch will moderate a discussion that Goodyear said "might get a little hot and heavy." Goodyear said he hoped artifact collectors would attend and help to heal some of the "antipathy" between professionals and collectors in the field.
Scheduled events culminate in a Saturday visit to the Topper site.
Nah. I have more respect for Fell than to lump him in with von Daniken.
Maybe with Gloria Farley
We are indeed living in interesting times!
Clovis is the root language for Basque. :)
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Not so much "primal racism" as "pathological isolationism". Also a strong bias against navigation by a bunch of landlubbers. :')
Michael Collins
(and believe me, the temptation for a Jethro Tull reference is huge right now):
http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/books/colclo.html
Dennis Stanford (looks like a good topic in its own right):
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/first/claimstan.html
New radiocarbon dates: Evidence puts man in North America 50,000 years ago
http://www.sc.edu/usctimes/articles/2004-11/topper_discovery.html
David G. Anderson:
http://web.utk.edu/~anthrop/faculty/anderson.html
[rimshot!]
;')
Good example. I do hope that the studies of sea bottoms at places of known large ancient battles eventually turn up some that have been in anoxia conditions.
Terrible headline....leads one to believe that Clovis language had been reconstructed.....
I wish someone had alerted me to this conference in advance. I would have attended.
That part about private collectors sharing their artifacts with archaeologists is in order. Some of my old homies in Central Kentucky have Paleoindian collections that exceed (in both quantity and quality) those of most universities and museums.
Remember, 12,000 years ago, sea level was 300+ feet lower than it is today. The "Grand Banks" off Newfoundland, where cod-fishing existed until recently, was above water then. The coastline from Cape Hatteras to central Florida was 45-70 miles east of the present shoreline. The Chesapeake Bay was a forested river valley. Any boats...and I'm sure there were many....would have been ditched along the coastline, which is now under 300+ feet of ocean. If any still exist (remember, marine worms eat wood), they would be pretty hard to locate.
"....North Atlantic shores are not at all hospitable for human life....."
AU CONTRAIRE. See if you can dig up an old NOVA episode about the "Lost Red Paint People". There was a thriving pan-Atlantic culture that rimmed the Northern Atlantic all the way from the Mediterranean, up the West coast of Europe, right around to Newfoundland and Labrador, in upper Paleothic to Neolithic times. The people hunted whales and other marine mammals, went to sea in huge canoes, traded around the North Atlantic, and buried their dead in ochre.
It's difficult to locate any info on the Red Paint people. The last I remember reading about them was a article connecting artifacts found in the NE US with those in Norway.
as Renfield noted, living on the northern Atlantic coasts is going on now, and has been for a long while. During the Medieval Warming the Arctic Ocean was regularly navigable, and some of the previous warm phases were warmer than that.
here's the video, plus links to a couple of books:
The Mystery of the Lost Red Paint People
http://www.bullfrogfilms.com/catalog/paint.html
Red Paint People: A Lost American Culture
by Bruce Bourque
(to be published 2006)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1593730381/sunkencivilizati
The lost Red paint people of Maine:
A few things we think we know about them and more that we know we don't
by Walter Brown Smith
(out of print)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00088UDB0/sunkencivilizati
"To arrive by water one would need a serious craft - either large rafts ("Kon-Tiki" type) or primitive ships. Such craft being sizable, the remnants of at least a few would be likely to survive either physically [like viking longboats], or at least in the lore. What is the age of the oldest boat/raft remnant ever found around the Americas?"
Eskimo kayak and larger skinned craft are seaworthy but not very preservable. Coastal craft wouldn't have to be large at all, especially when the ice sheet was larger.
(Red Paint / Maritime Archaic)
Camden tool could be 5,000 years old
VillageSoup.com (Greater Portland Region, Maine) | Oct 12, 2005 | Lynda Clancy
Posted on 10/12/2005 9:18:35 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1501177/posts
Well, as His Excellency the Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld uses to say, the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. At least some boats would be expected to have been used on interior waterways [like the Vikings did], and anoxic bogs are good wood preservers - I'd think that at least a few boats or their remnants ended up there.
America was created when enough like minded people got together.Heh, im so simple!
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