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Topper Site

S.C. dig challenges theory of first Americans

Evidence suggests a diverse wave of migrants trekked here earlier than experts once believed . . .

By HENRY EICHEL Columbia Bureau [name of paper unknown -ed.]

MARTIN, S.C. -- From a pair of 6-foot-deep pits, a team of archaeologists and volunteers has spent the last month sifting hundreds of tiny stone flakes from the gray sand, trying to unravel one of the continent's oldest mysteries: Who got here first?

For decades, most scientists believed the first Americans were big-game hunters who crossed a now-disappeared land bridge across the Bering Strait from Siberia during the last ice age about 11,500 years ago. Supposedly, today's American Indians are all descended from these ancient people. But the discoveries at the Topper Site in rural Allendale County, about 85 miles southwest of Columbia, are part of a growing body of evidence that could overturn that theory.

Scientists are starting to believe that people may have arrived in the New World thousands to tens of thousands of years earlier, in many waves of migrations and from many different places. Stone Age America may have been a more crowded and racially diverse place than we thought.

At the heavily wooded dig site earlier this week, University of South Carolina professor Albert Goodyear opened a plastic bag and took out a pale yellow rock about the size of a person's little finger. Pointing to the stone's sharp, beveled edges, Goodyear said, "Nature can't make this; a human being has to do it very carefully. He would have had to take like a split beaver tooth, or a tiny hard bone with a sharp tip, and he'd have to pressure the flakes off. You've got to be good."

The person who worked this piece of rock camped at this spot between 12,000 and 18,000 years ago, and possibly even earlier, said Goodyear, director of the Topper excavations. That was a time when huge ice sheets covered what is now the northern United States, and South Carolina was a much colder place, with spruce and fir forests that resembled present-day Canada.

Mammoth and mastodon roamed the forests, as did now-extinct species of bison, camels and tiny horses. "They all would have been here," Goodyear said, "but whether these people used them or not, we don't know." Unlike some other prehistoric sites where archaeologists have found human skeletons, animal bones, charcoal from ancient campfires and even the remnants of huts, none of those things appear to have survived in the acidic soil at the Topper Site. All that has remained are hundreds of small stone blades and the rocks from which they were chipped.

"They're little razor blade-type things," Goodyear said. "People might have set several of them into a wooden or a bone handle and used it as a knife to cut something soft, like fish." They are identical to blades discovered in Siberia that have been proved to be 20,000 years old, he said. Little blades like that were also typically used to groove and splinter antlers, mastodon tusks and wood.

If one could ask these prehistoric people for their biggest artifact, Goodyear said, "they might produce a hardwood spear with a 4-inch long antler tip on it." But, he said, "We won't find any in these sands." This year's dig wraps up today, but Goodyear has his eye on a spot in the Savannah River swamp a half mile to the north, where geologists have dated a peat bog to 18,000 years. "If there are any antler or wood artifacts, they'll be preserved in peat," he said.

Some things can be safely assumed about the people who once camped here. They were hunter-gatherers, because at that time, that's what everyone in the world was. Agriculture didn't catch on in a big way until about 6,000 years ago. So, they wandered a lot, looking for food. They traveled light. They wouldn't have needed much in the way of shelter in the summer, although they may have made huts out of animal hides for the winter. Were they the ancestors of modern Indians?

"There's a good chance they weren't," said Goodyear. "Some of the skulls that are showing up (at other sites) are not the typical Mongoloid types. They could still be from Asia, but from an old archaic population that migrated into the Western Hemisphere and died off." Ted Tsolovlos, 52, of Columbia, one of the 15 volunteers at the site this week, said, "I think ice age man was probably closer to God, in a sense, and that there was something magical about that time. We're finding these certain little facts about this culture. How did they see the world?"

For the past two years, through USC's Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, Goodyear has recruited volunteers from the public to sign up for a week or more to help with the excavation. They each paid $366, which included camping, lunch and dinner, evening lectures and a T-shirt. "I never thought I would enjoy digging in the dirt. But it's so much fun; you never know what you're going to find next," said Wanda Stover, a 48-year-old Bank of America officer from Charlotte who returned to the site for her second year.

In her pre-teen years, she said, she read Nancy Drew mysteries and other books set around archaeological digs and began a lifetime fascination with the subject. Then last year, she found the Topper Site expedition's Internet page and signed up. Goodyear will start taking applications for next year in January, giving preference to people who have been before. This year's 75 slots filled up by March.

For the next three weeks, geologists from around the country will comb the entire site, which is on land owned by Clariant Corp., a maker of industrial dyes. "They're going to interpret the age of the place based on the geological layers," Goodyear said. "That's a very important study that needs to be done for this site to gain widespread acceptance within the profession." Goodyear has been exploring the site since 1981. It's named for David Topper, a local landowner who first guided Goodyear and fellow USC archaeologist Thomas Charles to it. What made the heavily wooded hillside attractive to archaeologists were the outcroppings of chert, an impure form of flint. "You find a chert quarry, you'll find early man, because they were dependent on these rocks," Goodyear said.

Excavations since 1981 showed the quarry was a magnet for humans, with each layer of soil revealing an earlier culture. Two feet down, Goodyear found several 10,000-year-old spear points, and beneath those, some "blanks'' - rojectile points in their preliminary stages that had been broken and thrown away. "But I had never dreamed there was anything earlier," Goodyear said, because there weren't supposed to have been any people in North America before 11,000 years ago. But in 1998, Goodyear read in an archaeological journal about discoveries at a site called Cactus Hills, 45 miles southeast of Richmond, Va.

There, tests on charcoal from prehistoric campfires, along with stone tools and other evidence, showed that the site was occupied by humans at least 15,000 years ago. Earlier, in southern Chile, archaeologists had discovered the remnants of a 12,500-year-old hunting camp. That encouraged Goodyear to dig some deeper test holes. "In just a few hours," he said, "I was finding things I'd never seen before."