Journal of Field Archaeology

ISSN: 0093-4690 (Print) 2042-4582 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yjfa20

Editorial: Palaeolithic America

Curtis Runnels

To cite this article: Curtis Runnels (2012) Editorial: Palaeolithic America, Journal of Field
Archaeology, 37:2, 83-85, DOI: 10.1179/0093469012Z.0000000008

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/0093469012Z.0000000008

Published online: 12 Nov 2013.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 184

View related articles

Citing articles: 1 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=yjfa20

Download by: [178.128.44.224] Date: 21 October 2017, At: 11:59

 Editorial: Palaeolithic America
In their new book Across Atlantic Ice: The Origin of
America’s Clovis Culture (reviewed in this issue),
Dennis Stanford and Bruce Bradley argue that the
Clovis culture in North America had its origins in the
Upper Palaeolithic Solutrean of Europe. They make
a plausible case for the presence of Palaeolithic Solu-
treans from northern Spain in North America during
the last glacial maximum, ca. 24,000–16,500 B.P. If
this hypothesis is supported by future research, it will
require North American prehistorians to come to
grips with the concept of an American Palaeolithic.
The discussion of this hypothesis provides an oppor-
Downloaded by [178.128.44.224] at 11:59 21 October 2017
tunity for the archaeological community to take a
collective deep breath and consider the implications
of Upper Palaeolithic contact between the Old World
and the New World.
Ever since the pioneering work of Knut Fladmark,
who suggested that humans were navigating the
northern Pacific from northeast Asia to reach Alaska
and the western coast of the continental United
States, prehistorians have been chipping away at the
Clovis First hypothesis and the Ice Free Corridor
land route, opening up the possibility of perhaps
multiple contacts between Asia and the Americas.
Now, the picture of Upper Palaeolithic Solutreans
crossing the Atlantic from southwestern Europe to
North America suggests that we must also take
seriously the possibility—even the probability—that
sea lanes and sea ice margins were not barriers to the
dispersal of early humans, but open highways for
early human movements that have no known, or for
that matter even a theoretical, lower temporal limit.
The most novel part of the Stanford-Bradley hypo-
thesis of a Solutrean origin for the Clovis culture is
the suggested seafaring skills of Upper Palaeolithic
Solutreans from Europe. Ten years ago it was hard to
accept the thought that early Palaeolithic peoples had
the technical capabilities or cognitive abilities to
construct and navigate seaworthy boats, but this is no
longer the case. There is a growing body of evidence
for seafaring skills amongst even older Palaeolithic
peoples, for example Middle Pleistocene hominins in
southeast Asia (Bednarik 2006) and the Mediterranean
(Strasser et al. 2010; Strasser et al. 2011). It is in-
creasingly plausible that Palaeolithic hominins were
capable of transpelagic voyaging in the Middle Pleisto-
cene, and if hominins such as Homo erectus or Homo
ß Trustees of Boston University 2012
DOI 10.1179/0093469012Z.0000000008
heidelbergensis were able to use boats, it is hardly
surprising to discover that anatomically modern hu-
mans like the Solutreans were seafarers.
If the Solutrean-Clovis hypothesis is unrefuted, it will
add to the growing evidence (from e.g., Meadowcroft,
Cactus Hill, and Buttermilk Creek) for a Pre-Clovis
North American archaeological culture or cultures,
and further bury the Clovis First model. Also, if we
acknowledge the possibility of Pleistocene seafaring,
there will be additional reasons to abandon the Ice
Free Corridor and give more attention to Fladmark’s
northern Pacific route of entry. Finally, as a con-
sequence, we can now expect a flood of fresh evidence
and hypotheses for the Pleistocene peopling of the
New World. It is clear to us that the Solutrean-Clovis
hypothesis will require that all previous assumptions
about the timing of early migrations to the New World
be discarded, and that many possible routes for
entering the New World, including transpelagic cross-
ings of both oceans at an early period, be considered.
We must remain open minded even about the human
species involved. In short, we believe the time has come
to consider the presence of Palaeolithic peoples in the
New World.
At this juncture, remarks from a previously un-
published letter from Loren Eiseley are worth quot-
ing in full (in litt., to CR, 25 January 1973):
[A] rather hefty hand ax undoubtedly worked lies
here on my desk. I picked it up many years ago in
the Nebraska badlands but in a situation which
made age determination impossible. It is not without
interest, however, that on at least two occasions
visiting African specialists picked it up from my
desk and assumed that I had found it in Africa. This
does not mean that it is necessarily of Pleistocene
antiquity but it does suggest that one must keep
constantly in mind the mistakes originally made
about the Folsom horizon. The world, even the
Americas, has not been so thoroughly explored or
excavated that surprises may not still await us—
particularly as human antiquity is extended back-
ward in the Old World. I have always been willing to
maintain an open mind on this subject [emphasis in
the original].
Evidence of Eiseley’s open mind on the subject of
early humans in the New World is easily found (e.g.,
Eiseley 1971: 182–183), and in The Night Country, for
instance, he says, ‘‘I touch with fondness a miner-
alized skull vault whose age I can never prove but
Journal of Field Archaeology 2012 VOL . 37 NO . 2 83
 Editorial: Palaeolithic America
that rolled, I well know, for ages in the glacial gravels
of the Platte’’ (1971: 104). We should all be so open
minded today.
The thought that there might be an earlier
Palaeolithic presence in the New World is of course
nothing new. Charles Abbott in the 19th century
thought that he had discovered Lower Palaeolithic
handaxes in the Pleistocene terraces of the Trenton
River in New Jersey (Abbott 1876). Unfortunately,
Abbott’s poor field methods and shoddy record
keeping, despite the early support of George Putnam
from the Peabody Museum at Harvard, raised doubts
among a younger generation of professional archae-
ologists, and William Henry Holmes’ failure to con-
firm the in situ nature of the finds led to the rejection
of the ‘‘American Palaeolithic’’ (Holmes 1893). Some
were not convinced by Holmes’ arguments, and we
note that the geologist G. Frederick Wright continued
to support the presence of artifacts in Pleistocene
Downloaded by [178.128.44.224] at 11:59 21 October 2017
North American contexts (Wright 1897: 242–262).
This rearguard action, however, did little to convince
skeptical archaeologists about the presence of humans
in the Pleistocene New World, and it would be another
generation before the discovery of the Folsom and the
Clovis cultures in New Mexico demonstrated that
there were indeed humans on American soil at the very
end of the Pleistocene, a finding which led to the
eventual articulation of the Clovis First hypothesis.
And today, we too have in our JFA offices lithic
artifacts that in technological and typological terms
resemble Acheuelan bifaces, and are undoubtedly
worked, which were found recently in early, but as
yet undated, geologic contexts by an amateur archae-
ologist (Kenneth Carl Stanton) near Phoenix, Arizona.
When these were brought to our attention, we were
prompted to examine the reports of similar artifacts
that have been considered at one time or the other to
belong to one or more ‘‘Palaeolithic’’ cultures. Some
are close at hand, like those original ‘‘coup de poings’’
found by Dr. Abbott in the Trenton gravels, and which
we have examined in the Peabody Museum at Harvard.
We noted a few specimens among them that do indeed
resemble handaxes and differ in raw material, technol-
ogy, and form from the later, historical materials
in the same collection that are more obviously pre-
forms for small bifaces. Farther west than Cambridge,
Massachusetts, in the Great Basin region, there are
similar finds in the Black’s Fork Basin of southwestern
Wyoming (Renaud 1940). Renaud, a French-trained
Palaeolithic archaeologist, found what he believed to
be handaxes as part of the Black’s Fork culture, which
he compared with Acheulean bifaces in France, plac-
ing them side by side with the Old World materials
(Renaud 1940: 76–91). Convinced that they were Lower
or Middle Palaeolithic in age, Renaud searched for an
in situ occurrence of the artifacts with a datable context,
84 Journal of Field Archaeology 2012 VOL . 37 NO .
but admitted that he was unable to find one, a failure
he attributed to his limited resources in time and
manpower. Although the Black’s Fork culture has all
but disappeared from the literature, we think that it
should be reinvestigated because Luna Leopold and
Claudio Vita-Finzi have recently tested new dating
techniques on artifacts from Pinedale, also in south-
western Wyoming, and in similar contexts, that
suggest that some of these artifacts are of Pleistocene
age (Leopold and Vita-Finzi 2005).
Still other North American assemblages are asso-
ciated with bifaces resembling handaxes or other
artifacts that have been claimed on typological or
geologic grounds to be earlier than Clovis. The so-
called Lake Manix culture in California is known
from Calico Hills, one of the most controversial Pre-
Clovis sites, which was investigated for six seasons by
a team supported by Louis Leakey (Schuiling 1979),
only coming to an inconclusive end when funding
dried up after Leakey’s death. Yet another suppo-
sedly Pre-Clovis site worth further investigation is
George Carter’s Texas Street site near San Diego
(Carter 1957: 304–346, 1980: 173–198). Reading Carter’s
books for the first time recently, we wondered why
his work had not been followed up. The geological
descriptions for the Texas Street site describe a context
similar to Palaeolithic sites in the Mediterranean with
which we are familiar, and at least some of the posited
artifacts from Texas Street would not be out of place
in early glacial or earlier Palaeolithic assemblages.
Unfortunately, Texas Street, like Calico Hills, appears
never to have been fully published, and a detailed
assessment is not possible without further research. At
the moment, it seems as if professional opinion has
coalesced around one of two conclusions concerning
the early Pre-Clovis sites like Calico and Texas Street:
either the ‘‘artifacts’’ are not artifacts at all, but
only natural geofacts; or, if they are artifacts, their
association with Pleistocene geologic deposits is pro-
bably fortuitous. We do not believe that the existing
evidence is sufficient to allow either of those conclu-
sions to be accepted prima facie, but we also believe
that it is pointless to rehash the arguments about the
presently known Pre-Clovis ‘‘sites’’ because there is
too little that is known for certain about their contexts
and dating. Nothing more can be said about them until
there have been new excavations followed by the full
publication of large assemblages of definite artifacts
associated with secure geologic contexts and dated
chronometrically.
In any case, all claims for early Pre-Clovis cultures
must be subjected to strong skeptical scrutiny be-
fore scholars can or will accept them as convincing
evidence of a New World Palaeolithic. We are not
arguing that ‘‘early looking’’ American artifacts are
in fact Palaeolithic. The only thing to be said for
2

certain is that we do not yet know what they are. With
Fladmark’s, and Stanford and Bradley’s, transpelagic
crossings in mind, however, it seems to us that earlier
contacts between the Old and New Worlds must at
least be considered. Here we call for a fresh start on the
question of Palaeolithic America. And to begin again
we must first discard all that we think we know. We
can no longer assume that we know the timing of early
human migrations to the New World, any more than
their frequency, their points of origin, or their modes
of traversing land and sea. We believe that the time has
come for new research designs using palaeoenviron-
mental modeling to predict likely habitats in the New
World for archaic and early modern humans in the
Middle and Upper Pleistocene, and these habitats
should be searched for in situ assemblages that can be
excavated and dated. We must look now at the
archaeological record without prejudice.
In this spirit, we invite the submission of manuscripts
Downloaded by [178.128.44.224] at 11:59 21 October 2017
on Pre-Clovis topics, which, if they pass rigorous peer
review, we will be pleased to publish in these pages.
Curtis Runnels
Norman Hammond
Editorial: Palaeolithic America
References
Abbott, C. C. 1876. ‘‘The Stone Age in New Jersey,’’ Annual Report of
the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, 246–380.
Bednarik, R. G. 2006. ‘‘Seafaring in the Pleistocene,’’ Cambridge
Archaeological Journal 13: 41–66.
Carter, G. F. 1957. Pleistocene Man at San Diego. Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins Press.
Carter, G. F. 1980. Earlier Than You Think: A Personal View of Man
in America. College Station: Texas A&M University Press.
Eiseley, L. 1971. The Night Country. New York: Scribner’s.
Holmes, W. H. 1893. ‘‘Are There Traces of Glacial Man in the
Trenton Gravels?’’ Journal of Geology 1: 15–37.
Leopold, L. B., and C. Vita-Finzi. 2005. ‘‘Archaeological Trash: Geo-
morphology and Early Human Occupation in Wyoming,’’ Catena
62: 1–13.
Renaud, E. B. 1940. The Archaeological Survey of the
High Western Plains: Twelfth Report: Further Research Work in
the Black’s Fork Basin, Southwest Wyoming 1938–1939. Denver,
CO: University of Denver, Department of Anthropology.
Schuiling, W. G., ed. 1979. Pleistocene Man at Calico. Quarterly
of San Bernardino County Museum Association 26. San
Bernardino, CA: San Bernardino County Museum.
Strasser, T. F., C. Runnels, K. Wegmann, E. Panagopoulou,
F. McCoy, C. DiGregorio, P. Karkanas, and N. Thompson.
2011. ‘‘Dating Palaeolithic Sites in Southwestern Crete,
Greece,’’ Journal of Quaternary Science 26: 553–560.
Strasser, T. F., E. Panagopoulou, C. N. Runnels, P. M. Murray,
N. Thompson, P. Karkanas, F. W. McCoy, and K. W. Wegmann.
2010. ‘‘Stone Age Seafaring in the Mediterranean: Evidence
from the Plakias Region for Lower Palaeolithic and Mesolithic
Habitation of Crete,’’ Hesperia 79: 145–190.
Wright, G. F. 1897. Man and the Glacial Period. New York:
Appleton and Company.
Journal of Field Archaeology 2012 VOL . 37 NO . 2 85