The Search for the First Americans

Front matter

The Search for the First Americans

Science, Power, Politics

Robert V. Davis Jr.

Preface

Like many Americans, I have routinely followed popular press reports about early human remains found in the United States. As a young boy growing up in Oklahoma, I was fascinated by searching for arrowheads during camping trips and even enjoyed an occasional visit in Tulsa to the Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art, which houses one of the most extensive collections of American Indian artwork and artifacts in the world. I studied the symbolism in the Oklahoma state flag and the stories of the five “civilized” tribes. I uncritically accepted what I learned as the truth. However, as adults, even among people of goodwill, an agreed-upon truth can be elusive and may well be dependent on where and how we situate our conceptual lives. As Mark Twain reportedly warned, what gets us into trouble is not what we don't know, but rather what we think we know that just isn’t so. The simple fascinations of our youth can lead later to complex intellectual journeys that disabuse us of some things that we thought we knew for sure. For me, this book has been just such an undertaking. In many ways it isa manifestation of the contradictions in American society between accepting the practical usefulness of science when it is in conflict with important cultural values.

The scientific search for the First Americans is, at a conceptual level, simple. As James Adovasio asked, “who the hell are these people, where did they come from, and when did they get here?” Although much has been documented, science is no closer today to finding an answer than at any time since the arrival of Columbus. In short, it has been a failed endeavor. Archaeology and anthropology, which are the intellectual domains most central to the search for the First Americans have, unfortunately, been caught fiercely protecting conclusions that are now known to be erroneous. Science has many strengths and is a critical component of the material progress that humans have enjoyed. But, at times, it can treat an explanatory theory with the same concreteness that should be reserved only for a material fact.

American Indians were present in the Western Hemisphere thousands of years before Columbus, or the Vikings, or the Phoenicians, or the ancient Chinese, or whomever has occasionally been put forward as the first to colonize the x Preface

New World. These indigenous tribes each have a creation story as to how they came to be. They do not tell stories of having wandered aimlessly over the Bering Strait during the last ice age. The difficulty for science is, understandably, valuing these beliefs when they are inherently contradictory and also conflict with clearly documentable findings of genetics and physics. Moreover, modern American Indians believe they are the direct descendants of the very first Americans and seem unwilling to concede that their ancestors might be later arrivals. This is clearly in conflict with the modern US psyche, which believes it must surely have been the destiny of everyone who ever came to this land to want to become an American.

The conflicting positions taken by First American scientists and modern American Indians have created an interstitial ontological void that has resulted in the power of the US political system being used to determine primacy of intellectual place. This examination of the search for the First Americans is a case study in the complex relationships between the biological findings of science and the social importance of cultural beliefs; the often fractious relationships across the sciences; the power of the US political process to dictate constraints on how science is conducted as well as how ancient human remains are to be disposed; and the hegemonic and often racist assumptions that are frequently embedded in how science has been conducted.

I must acknowledge the contributions of several others. I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments; Skip Furhman, Peter Schmitthenner, Ann Laberge, and Matthew Goodrum for their guidance on an earlier version; and Alessandra Tamulevich and Ihsan Taylor for their guidance through the publishing process.

While it is difficult, if not impossible, to operate completely external to one’s system of values, it is my hope that I have fairly captured both the strengths and weaknesses represented in the positions taken by American Indians as well as First American scientists.

Introduction

UBSTANTIVE DISAGREEMENT OVER A Cultural past is a reflection of

unstabilized power relationships in the present. This is a case study of the

practice of science in this unstable environment as it has been employed in the search for the First Americans. It is not an attempt to determine the validity of any specific theory or material artifact; rather, it is an investigation into the practice of science as it relates to a search to explain a particular human existence. It is concerned with how personal, organizational, and cultural power has been manifested through scientific concepts, government policy, American Indian tribes, the public, and the scientists themselves in the search for the First Americans. It is an examination into how the issues have been constructed and, finally, the manner in which (as well as the degree to which) differences in cultural myths, scientific theories, research methodologies, and public policy remain unsettled in modern America. As this examination of the search for the First Americans shows, perceptions of the past can be as unstable as any projections of the future. Compounding the challenges faced by scientists, modern American Indians have used the US political system to gain a voice in defining the history of America’s indigenous peoples. As a direct result, in 1990 the US Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) requiring that American Indian folklore and oral traditions be granted equal epistemological status with science in regard to the disposition of American Indian funereal artifacts and human remains found on federal and American Indian lands.

There is an inverse, and perhaps even a perverse, symmetry in the relationships created in the search for the First Americans. As anthropologist Randall McGuire has termed it, “the descendants of the conquerors study the ancestors of the conquered.”! Moreover, the broader scientific community within which First American science must function is increasingly perceived as suspect. In President Obama’s 2008 inaugural address, he stated, “We’ll restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders.”* What is science’s rightful place in American society, and, specifically in the search for the First Americans, how was it dislodged from there? Can the federal government, on the one hand,

“restore” science to some privileged position, but also enforce the provisions of NAGPRA on the other? One of the more challenging aspects is tracing instances of not only where observations from different scientific domains have led to validation or invalidation ofa particular theory, but alternatively where observations in one domain have been shaped by the theories of a different domain.

The analytical tools associated with science studies especially lend themselves to deconstructing the practice of science in the search for the First Americans, the conflicts between science and the traditional beliefs of modern American Indians, and the power relationships internal to and among the sciences, American Indian groups, and public institutions such as federal and state governments, the press, universities, and museums. Although there are books on the search for the First Americans that focus on archaeology or are written for the popular press, there are no book-length treatments of this subject that address the dynamics across the scientific, cultural, and governmental realms; moreover, there are few offerings of even article length that approach the issues with the interdisciplinary tools of science studies. Among the few book-length analogues of the approach being taken are those of Naomi Oreskes in her examination of the twentieth-century geological community’s fifty-year rejection of tectonic plate theory and Mario Biagioli in his placing of Galileo in the social context of the turn of the seventeenth century.*

Much of the necessary materials are the written products not only of American archaeologists, bioanthropologists, linguists, and geneticists, but also of American Indian scholars and the policy statements issued by modern American Indian organizations, the US Congress, the Department of the Interior, various US courts, and the popular press. Research dealing with the quest for the First Americans must address the myths of centuries, several sciences, the policies of the federal government, the politics of American Indian organizations, and the popular press, all within the context of the substantive science studies literature.

Terminology

Given the intensity of the debate surrounding the issues, particular attention must be paid to the often unarticulated power relationships embedded in the terminology employed, and the extent, if any, to which there is a discernable influence on the practice of science. As philosopher Paul Feyerabend observed, subtle classification that is sensed rather than comprehended can affect perceptions.’ Several issues associated with nomenclature have moved well beyond being considered subtle to being openly contentious.

A fundamental issue arises immediately around simply what to call the first people to enter the New World. Until the early 1960s, the name commonly used in the scientific community was Early Man. Today, anyone addressing this subject inevitably must choose between either Paleoamerican or Paleoindian to describe the first inhabitants of the Americas. All parties agree that such people are indeed Paleoamerican—that is, ancient American. However, some—especially those sympathetic to modern American Indian interests—consider the use of Paleoamerican to be a de facto statement that modern American Indians are not the direct descendants of the First Americans. Modern American Indians consider the proper term to be Paleoindian—ancient Indian—a recognition that their habitation and culture should be considered as unbroken in the Americas since the first humans arrived. Conversely, the defenders of using Paleoamerican believe that there is as yet no conclusive scientific basis for that position; modern American Indians could well be the descendants ofa later, but still ancient, wave of migration from Asia and the very first American migrants may well have died out and left no modern descendants. Since many modern American Indian oral traditions hold that their cultural groups have been here continuously from the first peopling of the New World (whatever their version of “first” might be), prima facie acceptance of these oral traditions would lead one to conclude that Paleoindian and Paleoamerican capture identical concepts. However, some interpret usage of Paleoamerican as a political statement that modern American Indians are “old” Americans, but definitively not the oldest.

The issue became especially politically charged with the 1996 discovery of the remains of the Kennewick Man (as termed by scientists) or the Ancient One (according to American Indians) when they engaged in a legal confrontation over scientific access to the remains. Ironically, the terms Paleoindian and Paleoamerican, the distinctions between which are vitally important to American Indians, are both rooted in the very European-centric culture they disavow. Paleoamerican and Paleoindian are both designations by Western culture that create a chronological distinction between the people of an ancient past and ones of the modern present—a discontinuity that would appear to invalidate the very cultural continuity that American Indians espouse. Use of Paleoindian, the characterization preferred by American Indians, implies the existence of a more recent, and culturally distinct, Neoindian.’ The nomenclature of First American science would appear to have the power to make the cultural past discontinuous with the present. Recognizing that there is no consensus, I will employ the term First Americans to describe the first humans to set foot in the Western Hemisphere.

Such a designation is sufficiently broad to accommodate, without prejudice, any descendants these First Americans may, or may not, have begat. The designation First Americans also attempts to capture the modern American sense that it was, of course, the destiny of the first inhabitants to become Americans.

A similar issue arises in the terminology identifying the modern indigenous peoples living in the United States. Depending on the audience being addressed, the names include Native Americans, First Peoples, First Nations, American Indians, Original People, Indigenous People, Aboriginal People, Amerindians, and Amerinds. Such putatively racist terms as savage and redskin have been widely discredited, even among sports teams, and are not seen in recent academic literature. Looking to the US governmental process for a politically adjudicated name is not particularly helpful. The name of the most recent substantively relevant legislation is Native American Graves and Repatriation and Act. However, the title of the relevant Smithsonian Institution museum is the National Museum of the American Indian. Moreover, important political activists and academic figures who claim an indigenous heritage, such as the late Vine Deloria Jr.—a member of the Sioux tribe; a prolific author; an academic scholar with degrees in science, theology and law; and a continuing challenger to Euro-centric thinking in the search for the First Americans—refer to their culture as Indian. I will follow the example of the Smithsonian Institution and Vine Deloria Jr. and use the term American Indian to describe the indigenous culture extant at the time of European arrival.

Contention also appears in constructing the terminology for the cultural periods. Perhaps the best example is the so-called Clovis culture, the long-reigning archaeological type-site in New Mexico that First American scientists for many years believed, incorrectly as it turned out, represented the cultural tool kit of the First Americans. The authority of this Clovis-first typology made it the standard against which all other finds were to be compared and interpreted. Asa consequence, the Clovis-first paradigm produced accusations of anthropological imperialism on the part of US scholars. “Much of the discussion of the peopling of the New World uses North American terms (the label ‘pre-Clovis,’ generally applied, is irrelevant in South America where Clovis has never been found).”° Even the archaeological site of Monte Verde (ironically located in South America), which has now displaced Clovis as the earliest consensus First American archaeological site, is still referred to as a pre-Clovis site. For seventy years, the cultural authority granted to the Clovis-first paradigm so dominated the discussion that a sanctified chronological marker such as BC might well be borrowed and used by archaeologists to stand for Before Clovis. Nevertheless, although pre-Clovis has an inherent bias, the term is so prevalent that it will be used here.

One of the occasional difficulties in a research project is identifying a specific word that can express a key concept being brought to the foreground. A fundamental part of this project involves delineating the multifaceted relationships across myth, science, and other forms of cultural authority. While some may believe that myth has a taint about it of being a fable or a fairy tale—something important, perhaps, but also something not rooted in reality—here myth will be used to describe a statement concerning the natural world that is widely held within a culture and is generally accorded a status of being true, but at the same time is not necessarily (but might be) demonstrable according to the scientific methods of its time.

There is a continuing debate within the academic science studies community as to whether the range of methodologies that modern Western culture uses to investigate nature has such a commonality that it may be termed a single science, or whether it is sufficiently diverse that the proper term, therefore, is the plural sciences. In this distinction, the emphasis is on identifying a specific intellectual domain (e.g., physics, biology, chemistry) that is believed to characterize the natural world with a domain-specific set of methodologies. However, I am not examining the practice of science(s) through these domains, but rather through attempts by scientists, of whatever ilk, to solve one particular puzzle—the discovery and characterization of the First American. Any particular technique or finding may be claimed by physicists, archeologists, anthropologists, or biologists, and, in practice it can be, and frequently is, claimed by more than one discipline. To emphasize that the context of this examination of the practice of science is the puzzle of searching for the First Americans, and also to avoid being drawn into the conundrum of science versus the sciences, I will use the phrase First American science to capture the suite of methodologies employed. However, I will also examine the conflicts internal to First American science, which, at times, fracture along the traditional scientific disciplines espoused by individual scientists.

First American Theories, Myths, and Evidence

Between the Introduction and the Conclusions in this book, there are three major sections. The first, chapters 1 through 5, examines and contrasts the various First American scientific theories against the American Indian creation myths, and assesses the evidence for each.

For people who are a product of the scientifically based Western culture, it is difficult to find common referents between science and American Indian creation myths involving entities such as Tiny Little Duck or the Spider Grandmother. Successful employment of truth statements is a powerful social lever. If a culture is structured around a particular form of truth, some element of that culture typically is empowered to translate truth in ways that dominate cultural values and, therefore, social behavior. The truth statements for both the practice of First American science and for the traditions of modern American Indians fall into this category. Some scholars contend that there is no inherent conflict between the bodies of knowledge and methodologies of science compared with that of creation myths because they are concerned with different matters.’ As a practical matter, however, it is difficult to disentangle how these truths are translated into social power. As socially motive forces, the power-elite for both science and myth attempt to legitimize the basis of their truth statements by appealing to factors external to the statements themselves. For example, science appeals to the rigor of its methodology while cultural identity appeals to the sacred nature of its texts or oral traditions. Juxtaposing cultural authorities of such incongruent expressions of social power gives rise to contradiction and, therefore, epistemological conflict.

Central to this examination are archaeological sites at Clovis (Blackwater Draw), New Mexico; Monte Verde, Chile; and Meadowcroft Rockshelter, Pennsylvania, and how material evidence has been used, and, perhaps, abused by First American scientists to support conflicting theories. In addition, the status of Atlantis as a source for the First Americans is examined as both a scientific as well as a mythological statement. It is not that science is necessarily less speculative than myth, but rather, as Richard Feynman reportedly characterized it, science is imagination in a straitjacket. A review of the role of Atlantis will show that the methodological constraints imposed by the straight jacket change through time, with substantive implications.

The modern self-image of service to humanity that is embedded in some scientists was already evident in the nineteenth century. On October 21, 1898, aboard the steamer Germanic, Jeremiah Curtin dedicated a book titled Creation Myths of Primitive America to John Wesley Powell, who had lost an arm serving in the Union forces in the American Civil War and subsequently directed the US Geological Survey as well as the Bureau of Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution. In the dedication, Curtin wrote: “You lost your right hand in fighting to save American unity. ... The same kind of impulse that sent you to the field of battle to serve the country and world, sent you to the field of science to serve as a geologist and an explorer. . .. Through your labors, combined with those of the men whom you have associated with you, the world has learned more of the great primitive race of our country than it learned from the discovery of the continent till the day when the Bureau was founded.”§ Curtin’s dedication revealed two important points. First, he demonstrated a recognition of the influence of the scientific elite of the community through his sycophantic appeal to the good graces of Powell, certainly one of the dominant figures in American geology, archaeology, and ethnography of that period. The second was a declaration of the selfmindful role of then-modern science in providing the definitive statement on the “primitive race” in America; there is no mention of American Indian myth as an epistemological resource even though the book, which includes Curtin’s dedication, is about the creation myths of these very same people.

First American Science

Chapters 6 through 9 examine the unstabilized power relationships between the several sciences as they are employed in the search for the First Americans. Although the written reports of First American scientists reflect a widespread representation of scientific production, they are not the only sources to be explored. First American science, especially the field of archaeology, at its core is a science of materiality, of artifacts. Moreover, it is not only the artifacts themselves that are important in the scientific debate, but also their physical context—their in situ relationships. One manifestation of this physicality is the archaeological sites where not only the artifacts themselves are recovered, but also where the laboratory techniques of recovery and the positional relationships are available for inspection by the First American scientific community. A second manifestation of this physicality is the prominent display of First American-related artifacts at publicly accessible museums. As a representative sample of this physical aspect of First American science, I visited what is regarded as the Clovis-culture type-site at Blackwater Draw, New Mexico, and also what is now considered to be a significant pre-Clovis site at Meadowcroft Rockshelter, Pennsylvania. In addition, I visited the Hall of Human Origins at the Museum of Natural History and the National Museum of the American Indian, each a part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and I also visited the Blackwater Draw Museum in Blackwater Draw, New Mexico.

One of Michel Foucault’s contributions to the history of science is the concept of an epistemological grid in Western societies.” According to Foucault, there are unquestioned and powerful normative constructions that are so fundamental to a cultural fabric that a concerted effort is required to separate them from the societal background noise. Unless the underlying values are identified, historians have little prospect of differentiating meaningfully between the characteristics of modern science and the broader contextual mores of society at large. Although scholars have attempted to create a distinction between what is external and what is internal to science, this distinction has largely been discredited in science studies. This raises the issue as to whether the very concept of a first American is value neutral. Does the problem itself have a set of contextual assumptions that structures whether, and what kind of, science can answer it (or not), what constitutes an observation, and what might comprise an acceptable answer? In some quarters, it is inherently unacceptable, even racist, to conduct research examining whether the First Americans might have migrated from what is now considered to be Europe, or to conclude that the First Americans migrated into the New World from Asia across a Bering Strait land bridge.

Community

Chapters 10 through 12 examine the concept of community, which is of central importance to many aspects of First American science. It is an important social mechanism that not only shapes the boundaries of science and myth, but also validates who is considered to be a scientist or a member of a tribe. A community motivates and rewards, and it produces a value system that legitimizes or rejects theories, myths, observations, and methods. Any objectivity that First American science is accorded is a function of a group’s practice of science rather than of any single individual’s efforts.” A community has power-structures, institutions, elites, and normative constraints. Understanding community dynamics and their constituent elements is an important part of understanding science in the context of its search for the First Americans.

With a near consensus in the science studies literature that community values play some role in the practice of modern Western science, it is important to examine how these values are, if at all, modified from time to time and how fluid might be the modification process. In the United States, it is clear that the government—primarily, but not exclusively, at the federal level—is significantly involved not only in funding scientific projects and shaping their goals, but also in creating acceptance for scientific methodologies. Science may be considered as speaking truth to the power of the federal government, but that same political power has great influence over how First American science is practiced.

In the United States, federal law is the most intrusive form for externally dictating cognitive values to the scientific community. US law grants American Indian traditions and oral history equal epistemological status with the methods of First American science for determining the cultural affiliation of, and therefore access to, pre-European human remains and funerary objects found on federal or American Indian lands. There have, of course, been objections to governmental intervention from members of the scientific community, as captured by the comment of Douglas W. Owsley of the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution: “Positions taken by those persons or organizations opposing careful scientific study undermine attempts to learn about the pre-history and settlement of this hemisphere.” Taking a diametrically opposing position in Red Earth, White Lies, Deloria criticized the demeaning role of science and trumpeted the ontological value of American Indian traditions.” This, in turn, led James Adovasio, a First American scientist who is excavating the potentially pre-Clovis Meadowcroft Rockshelter, to conclude that Deloria was engaged in “an impassioned (and largely ill-informed) diatribe against the matter of human evolution, the existence of the Bering land bridge, and the continuing failure of the sciences to confirm the creation stories of Native American myth... .In response to such assaults, he denied the underpinning validity of any and all science, its findings, and its methods.”'? Obviously participating in the search for the First Americans is not for the socially sensitive.

There is an abundance of literature on the science, myths, and politics of the search for the First Americans. However, it tends to be scattered across the several scientific disciplines, American Indian organizations, and the federal government—and covers a five-hundred-year period. I have included an extensive bibliography that addresses the entire range, both chronological and disciplinary, of materials available.

PART I First American Theories, Myths, and Evidence

PN

CHAPTER I American Indian Creation Myths

ULTURES HOLD, AND EVEN REVERE, existential myths. It may be a

source of power for a dominant class or religion, provide a comforting

structure for social continuity, or reinforce a sense of cultural superiority. At the C. G. Jung Institute during the winter of 1961-62, Marie-Louise von Franz (1915-98), a noted Jungian psychologist and scholar, gave a series of lectures on creation myths that were published in 1972 as Creation Myths. According to von Franz, “creation myths are of a different class from other myths. . . . [T]here is always a certain solemnity that gives them a central importance. ... [A]s far as the feeling and emotional mood which accompany them are concerned, creation myths are the deepest and most important of all myths.”! Deloria, echoing the conclusions of von Franz, stated that “every human society maintains its sense of identity with a set of stories which explain, at least with satisfaction, how things came to be. Many societies begin at a creation and carry forward a tenuous link of events which they considered to be historical.”* Yet, in the United States there is a particular fascination surrounding the First Americans that is difficult to understand in these terms. This intense interest by a dominant European-centric culture is in identifying an exact source for the First Americans—the people of another culture.

At the times of the commonly acknowledged European arrivals, approximately 1000 CE by the Vikings and 1492 CE by Christopher Columbus, there was no European presence—linguistically, culturally, or phenotypically. For the conquering Western European culture, the roots of the Judeo-Christian imperative to dominate nature ran deep.* As Dana Villa explained, the European conquest of the Western Hemisphere objectified the earth itself.‘ It represented perhaps the last great barrier to human dominion over its physical circumstance. It may be difficult, however, for a culture to distinguish between its self perceived superiority and the grandeur of Homo sapiens at large. There is no civilization in which its creation myth recounts that the god(s) passed them by and chose, instead, to anoint a neighboring civilization. The cultural authority that sustains

14 CHAPTER I an existential myth does not provide for a people to have been an inconsequentially distant relation of the first people; there must be a direct lineal descent from the creative primogenitor. As a cultural act, the social construction of a society's creation myth is one of the few defining events in its history. However, when that myth is successfully challenged, then the creation myths of other societies are suspect as well. As pointed out by Deloria, “when secular science defeated Christian fundamentalism, in its victory it was able to promulgate the belief that all accounts of the creation or of spectacular catastrophic specific events were superstitions devised by ignorant peoples to explain the processes of the world around.”

The characteristics of creation myths, according to von Franz, are common across cultures. Typically, they fall into such categories as the awakening of consciousness; creation from above; creation from below; germs and eggs; or a mechanistic god, such as the Chinese P’an Ku, who is a master in all crafts, and the Egyptian God Ptah, who used a potter’s wheel to create the world and the other gods. American Indian creation myths generally conform to this model and can be categorized as describing an existential birth by: jumping, falling, or being pushed from the sky; arising from the earth or mud; appearing from the lake, ocean, or river; or being born in and climbing out of an underworld.’ Simultaneous with this creation, in many American Indian traditions they are also given an immediate awareness that they have been created.’ “Some have a creator, and some don’t and a few seem to have grafted a creator onto an older story that had none, perhaps under the influence of Christianity.”? There also appears to be no relationship between the geographical area or linguistic roots, on the one hand, and the particular category of creation myth indigenous to an American Indian tribe, on the other.'°