J.M. Adovasio -- An archaeologist who still digs his work
In 2002 I interviewed the professor whose findings at the Meadowcroft Rockshelter southwest of Pittsburgh played a major part in the big debate about when and where the first humans lived in America.
Now — 2022 AD:
On Saturday Nov. 5 from 10 am to 1 pm, Dr. Adovasio — who is still active and still digging around the world for clues about early human settlements — will lead an “Insider Tour of Meadowcroft Rockshelter” for $30 in conjunction with the John Heinz History Center.
Here are the details.
Q&A from 2002, AD
Archaeologist's findings help overturn theory on 'First Americans'
Pittsburgh Tribune-review
Sept. 2, 2002
J.M. Adovasio didn't set out to rock the archeological world in 1973 when he and his University of Pittsburgh students started digging under a large sandstone overhang in Washington County.
But when his team found evidence that humans had been visiting the rock shelter for almost 16,000 years, it smashed the archeology establishment's long-cherished theory about when and where humans first inhabited the Americas.
The archeological dig — 30 miles southwest of Pittsburgh near Avella — is now known around the globe as the Meadowcroft Rockshelter and is considered one of the most important sites in the Northern Hemisphere.
But as Adovasio explains in his new book, "The First Americans: In Pursuit of Archaeology's Greatest Mystery," Meadowcroft set off a fiery debate that is only now ending.
Before Meadowcroft, reigning archeological dogma held that humans who had crossed over from Asia at the Bering Strait first settled near Clovis, N.M., about 12,000 years ago.
Although Adovasio's findings at Meadowcroft — 20,000 human artifacts and nearly 2 million animal and plant remains — were backed by carbon dating, they were doubted and often discredited by the scientists whom Adovasio calls the "Clovis-first lobby."
Recent findings at sites in Chile and Virginia have corroborated Adovasio's older dates, so the debate over Clovis is essentially over, but there's still much to be learned about who the First Americans were and where they came from.
Question: What, in a 30-second sound bite, is your book about?
Answer: It's an exploration of the history of the problem and various answers to the fundamental series of questions Columbus asked when he first arrived and met Native Americans: "Who are these people?" "Where did they come from?" and "When did they get here?"
Q: For years, we all grew up thinking the first Americans were Siberian Americans who crossed over the Bering Strait from Asia about 10,000 B.C. Where did that idea come from?
A: Actually, it goes back quite a ways. As early as the 1590s, there was a Jesuit priest who had observed that it was clear to him, at least, that the physical resemblance of some Native American groups to groups from northeastern Asia was such that that's where their ancestors must have come from.
Later on, we began to appreciate better what the nature of glacial activity was around the world, and realized that when there was a lot of ice tied up on land, sea levels dropped. Then it became apparent that there was a land connection between Siberia and North America and this land connection was a sort of bridge across which both humans and animals could freely travel in either direction.
Q: Where did the 10,000 B.C. date come in?
A: Before radiocarbon dating was invented, people had geological estimates of when Ice Age animals became extinct. So when you found particular Ice Age animals — in this case bison at Clovis, N.M., that were roughly 10,000 years old, or 8,000 B.C. — they then assumed that the first Americans were there from at least 10,000 years ago.
Then, a little later on, between 1932 and 1935, they found older materials elsewhere in New Mexico that were about 11,500 years old — by estimate. Then, after World War II, when radiocarbon testing was invented, it proved that those estimates were pretty accurate, and those became the dates that would herald the arrival of the first people in the New World.
Q: What does what you found at the Meadowcroft Rockshelter do to that theory?
A: In essence — and it's not Meadowcroft by itself, but it is one of the pivotal places — it shows that people were here several thousands of years earlier and that the infiltration of people into the New World was not a single unitary process by rapidly moving hunters who basically sprinted from the extreme north of this hemisphere to the tip of South America in few hundred years.
Instead, it suggests that people filtered over here in waves and some of them came down through the interior of North America, between the ice sheets. Some of them went down the coast. Some of them had one kind of technology. Some of them had another kind of technology.
In effect, Meadowcroft and places like Monte Verde in Chile and Cactus Hill in Virginia and other locations have richened the picture of the past that we have. They've painted a much more complicated image of the ways things used to be during the Ice Age that we ever thought was the case.
Q: What specifically did you find at the Meadowcroft dig that was so significant?
A: In layers beneath layers that should have been the oldest, we continued to recover material beyond the Clovis time span. Some of these items went back 16,000 years and included tools of various kinds.
These tools didn't look like Clovis tools. In fact, they were a fairly unique constellation of artifacts that have their closest resemblances in north China and other parts of northeastern Asia. They show rather conclusively that the Clovis folk were not the first Americans.
Q: Has what you found proved to be accurate beyond any doubt?
A: Now that there are many other sites that fall under this time horizon, it sort of puts the final nail in the Clovis-first coffin. For a long time, people questioned whether those deep dates were somehow contaminated or artificially old.
Now it's clear that they aren't and that, in fact, except for some literal diehard fanatics of the old religion, which is about what Clovis-first has become, there's pretty much a consensus that the first Americans came here much earlier.
Q: You found your 16,000-year-old stuff in the 1970s. So what is the big argument in the archeological world about it now?
A: See, one of the things about the book is the fact that it tries to explain to the interested reader that science just doesn't change overnight. Ideas don't just get altered. Ideally, we're presented with new information, we digest the new information, and then we change our minds.
But that's really never the way it works in any part of science. People invest whole careers in a particular point of view, and they tenaciously defend that point of view. That is what has been the case for the last 2 1 / 2 decades.
You've had people investing in this Clovis-first idea to the point that it's no longer science, it's an article of faith. For the erosion of that article of faith to occur, it has taken a very long time and a whole bunch of sites to finally wear down the resistance.
Similar things have happened before in the history of science. The idea that continental drift had occurred and that continents weren't always in the places that they are now was resisted vigorously at the turn of the century.
It's now so clear that you think, how could we ever not have believed that they moved⢠That's the whole issue. Unfortunately, science is done by scientists who are human beings, who have personalities and who have ideas about their rightness and wrongness that are very, very hard to change.
Q: Have other sites been found that push the time for the first humans in America back even further?
A: The dates in Cactus Hill in Virginia are roughly the same as the Meadowcroft dates. There are dates at sites in South America that may be a shade older.
Q: What is something that you know about the people who used Meadowcroft and the way they lived that might shock or surprise people today?
A: It's not that it's so shocking, it's that they are much different from what we think they should be. We have these images of early humans that have been beaten into our heads since you or I were in grade school that always portray men in furs hunting large animals with spears and doing essentially manly things as a sort of byline of the Ice Age.
In fact, the evidence from Meadowcroft indicates that these early groups were doing anything but this mono-focused kind of hunting of big game animals.
They're collecting mussels and shellfish from the stream. They're eating small seeds. They're hunting passenger pigeons, hunting elk, hunting white-tailed deer. They have an extremely varied diet.
They don't fit all of our preconceptions.
All of our images of the Ice Age tend to exclude women and their activities. They tend to exclude kids. They tend to exclude old coots and geezers of either sex.
What Meadowcroft and sites like it are beginning to show us is a much more rounded view of the past, a view that encompasses all those groups in a way which may not be as dramatic anymore.
Sure, it's a really cool thing to think about standing in front of a 16-foot-tall bear and poking a spear into it, but you can be damn certain if you do it, it's the last thing you're ever going to do.
Stretching a net across an area, like a tennis net, and catching a bunch of rabbits is a much more likely explanation of how, at least in some places, food resources were accumulated.
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An up-to-date biography of Dr. Adovasio:
In 2002 he lived near Erie and was the head of Mercyhurst College's anthropology/archeology department and founder and director of the Mercyhurst Archeological Institute.
Here is the most current bio information I could find, which says that in 2020 he was the current Director of Archaeology at Senator John Heinz History Center, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania:
James M Adovasio, PhD, DSc, achieved world acclaim as an archaeologist in the 1970s with his excavation of Pennsylvania’s Meadowcroft Rockshelter. Meadowcroft is widely recognized as one of the earliest well-dated archaeological sites in North America, with evidence of human habitation dating to ca. 16,000 years ago. Perhaps, more importantly, Meadowcroft is considered to be one of the most meticulous excavations ever conducted, anywhere. During his career, he has specialized in the analysis of perishable materials (basketry, textiles, cordage, etc.) and the application of high-tech methods in archaeological research. In recent years, his research has confronted another of archaeology’s mysteries by delving underwater to seek submerged evidence of early Americans off the coast of Florida in the Gulf of Mexico. Recently, he was the principal investigator of the re-excavation at the Old Vero Man Site in Florida. This Late Ice Age locality has figured prominently in the history of American Anthropology and promises to yield new insights into the behavior of the First Floridians. He is the author of more than 500 books, book chapters, monographs, articles, and papers which include The Invisible Sex: Uncovering the True Roles of Women in Prehistory, The First Americans: In Pursuit of Archaeology’s Greatest Mystery, and Basketry Technology, and most recently “Strangers in a New Land.” Adovasio received his undergraduate degree in anthropology from the University of Arizona and doctorate in anthropology from the University of Utah. He is formerly the Director of Archaeology at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, Florida Atlantic University.