WHO, WHEN, FROM WHERE, HOW AND HOW OFTEN? PLEISTOCENE PEOPLING OF THE AMERICAS

In the decades since INQUA last convened in the United States, our knowledge of the peopling of North America has expanded dramatically. Yet, some of the questions unanswered then remain unanswered now, despite an increase in the number of sites, and a battery of new and sophisticated methodological tools and analytical techniques brought to bear on the problem. Nonetheless, much has been learned, and though the peopling process is better understood, it is also proving to have been more complicated than once thought.

Most notably, we now have evidence that the initial colonization took place earlier than previously supposed. The evidence comes from the Monte Verde site in Chile, radiocarbon dated to ~12,500 B.P. By virtue of how old and where Monte Verde is relative to the presumed Beringian entryway, the site raises a flurry of questions about who the ancestors of this group were and where they came from; when they crossed Beringia; and the route (coastal or interior) by which they traveled south from Alaska. It further begs the question of how this group relates to the better known, North American-wide Clovis occupation, which appears at 11,500 radiocarbon years ago (and was for decades thought to represent the initial colonizing pulse).

Evidence of a pre-Clovis occupation in the Americas has thrown Clovis itself into new light, and has prompted a re-evaluation of traditionally accepted notions about that archaeological phenomenon. Much attention nowadays is focused on an exploration of its roots, whether in Siberia or within North America itself; on the means by which Clovis so suddenly appeared across North America at about 11,500 B.P. (a rapid spread, or merely diffusion of a new and highly distinctive technology - fluted points - across an extant population?); and on just what this wide-ranging and apparently fast-moving people & technology reflects in terms of human adaptation.