Word: dillehay
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Perhaps the most convincing candidate for a pre-Clovis site is Monte Verde, on the Chinchihuapi Creek in southern Chile. A team led by University of Kentucky archaeologist Tom Dillehay discovered indisputable traces there of a human settlement that was inhabited between 12,800 and 12,300 years ago. Usually all scientists can find from that far back are stones and bones. In this case, thanks to a peat layer that formed during the late Pleistocene era, organic matter was mummified and preserved as well...
...decade of digging, Dillehay's team found an unparalleled array of artifacts, including not only stone tools and animal bones but also chunks of mastodon meat, wild potatoes, and seaweed and other plants that must have been imported from the Pacific coast, some 40 miles away. The archaeologists discovered fire pits surrounded by burned wood chips, wooden lances with hardened tips, wooden basins containing seeds, grindstones -- and a human footprint. The foundation of a wishbone-shaped structure held the remains of more than 20 types of medicinal plants, some of which bore marks that may be the imprints of human...
...artifacts from Monte Verde have now been subjected to dozens of radiocarbon analyses -- a standard archaeological dating technique in which the amount of radioactive carbon in an organic specimen is used to calculate its age. Dillehay says he is "very confident" that he has found remnants of a culture that existed some 125 centuries...
...Dillehay has also uncovered traces of what may be an even older campsite nearby on a buried promontory. The evidence: 26 fractured stones, some of which were clearly worked by human hands, as well as three clay-lined pits containing charcoal that may be nearly 33,000 years old. Although radiocarbon dating supports this idea, Dillehay is reluctant to draw any conclusions. "The older level is a hell of a problem," he says, "and it simply will not go away. The more I look at the evidence, the more it looks like it represents human culture, but intellectually I still...