preserved in peat along with wooden
planks, knotted grass and the remains of
meals of meat, seaweed, nuts and seeds,
became a key piece of evidence in one of
the great debates about the early history
of the world.
The campsite, today called Monte
Verde, was 10km inland from a bay
on southern Chile’s Pacific Coast. It
had been investigated for two decades
by Tom Dillehay, an American
anthropologist. At the time, it was
believed people first crossed the Bering
Strait from Asia around 11,000 years
ago. Following a passage between two
ice sheets that extended beyond the
Canadian border, they moved rapidly
into the United States. Here they hunted
big game with spears whose stone tips
archaeologists call Clovis, after finds
made in New Mexico in the 1930s.
The idea that Clovis people were the
first Americans was so strong that few
archaeologists accepted Dillehay’s claims
for Monte Verde. But in 1997 a team
of archaeologists travelled to the site,
examined the finds and proclaimed them
genuine. Critics were (mostly) silenced.
Yet acceptance that people lived so far
south so long ago brought new problems.
Who really discovered the Americas, and
when? There remains no simple answer.
The problem is those ice sheets. For
people to have reached Monte Verde
when they did, we have to imagine at
least one migration across what is now
Alaska some centuries before, to allow
time for communities to spread across
two continents. But to avoid a wall of
ice in the north, such a migration would
need to have occurred before 20,000
years ago, something few archaeologists
can accept – not least because no signs of
people that far back have been found.
One alternative is that early hunters
paddled their way down the Pacific
coast, exploiting the sea and shores and
barely moving inland. It’s a plausible
idea, but again the evidence is sparse.
As research continues, we can expect
further controversial discoveries.Archaeologists previously agreed that
such things as architecture, religious
symbolism and settled communities first
appeared among developed agricultural
societies: civilisation, the story went,
was built on farming. Yet there were
no farmers dwelling at Göbekli Tepe.
Living off wild foods before the
occurrence of domestic crops and
animals, pottery or metal, the people of
Göbekli were hunters. But if, as Schmidt
says, they invented gods, where did their
ideas come from? What inspired their
art and architecture? What came before
Göbekli Tepe?When were the Americas
first settled?
Some 14,000 years ago, a child stood by
a campsite hearth and left a footprint.
In the late 20th Century the print,Mike Pitts is an archaeologist, author and the
editor of British Archaeology. His next book is
about the dig to find King Richard III.