Word: meadowcroft
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...this speculation is spurring a new burst of scholarship about locations all over the Americas. The Topper site in South Carolina, Cactus Hill in Virginia, Pennsylvania's Meadowcroft, the Taima-Taima waterhole in Venezuela and several rock shelters in Brazil all seem to be pre-Clovis. Dillehay has found several sites in Peru that date to between 10,000 and 11,000 years B.P. but have no apparent links to the Clovis culture. "They show a great deal of diversity," he says, "suggesting different early sources of cultural development in the highlands and along the coast...
...settlement in the hemisphere--and many archaeologists have been loath to give up this "Clovis first" model. But since the 1970s, it has been challenged by the discovery of still older sites on both sides of the continent, most notably a 17,000-year-old rock shelter in Meadowcroft...
Radiocarbon dating and other techniques indicate the campsite was occupied as long as 5,000 years before the Clovis culture appeared. Calling the results "unequivocal," McAvoy says they should "terminate the debate over whether Clovis was first or not." The Meadowcroft rock shelter's chief investigator, archaeologist James Adovasio of Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pa., agrees. "This is another indication that people were running around North America earlier than 13,000 years ago," he says...
Although the age of the earliest objects from Meadowcroft remains controversial, this rock shelter 30 miles southwest of Pittsburgh has long been considered one of North America's most promising pre-Clovis sites. Among the findings: charcoal, pieces of bone and antler (some scored with knife marks) and charred fragments of basketry that are estimated to be between 12,000 and 15,000 years old. There is also an assortment of non-Clovis blades and points. Says Mercyhurst's Adovasio, who has studied Meadowcroft for nearly 20 years: "It may well be the oldest archaeological site in North America...
Despite all the doubts and unanswered questions, the case for pre-Clovis Americans is gaining ground. Even if the discoveries at Pedra Furada fail to satisfy the critics, sites such as Monte Verde and Meadowcroft are powerful testimony that early migrations did take place. However the first immigrants got to the New World, and whatever the reason why they left behind so little physical evidence, it has become difficult to deny their existence -- and increasingly likely that earliest American history will have to be rewritten...