Meadowcroft dig team reunites after 43 years
Dr. James Adovasio, left, and Dr. Joel Gunn reflect on their work from 1973-1978 at the original site that started an alternate theory to human origins in America, the Meadowcroft Rockshelter.
A panoramic view of the rockshelter
Meadowcroft director David Scofield, left, assists lead dig archaeologist Dr. James Adovasio in a presentation that utilizes overhead lights to highlight portions of the rockshelter.
“Good grief,” exclaimed the 72-year-old archaeologist to the surprise party’s laughter.
Dr. James Adovasio walked into the Meadowcroft Rockshelter visitors’ center expecting to give a lecture, but was instead greeted by more than a dozen of the original team that excavated the rockshelter starting in 1973. After the initial surprise, he rolled right into his talk about how that team’s work would upend traditional historical analysis of Paleolithic origins of man.
And how Meadowcroft would be the first to lead an alternate theory to the single-origin migration of indigenous peoples in America.
Adovasio’s presentation focused on how male-dominated historical perspective and a pop-culture fixation on early humans primarily as hunters has muddied public understanding of how human ancestors lived. His colleagues – then graduate and college students – corroborated what was the most frustrating and ultimately gainful insight: there weren’t a lot of artifacts to be found in the 1973-1978 digs.
“There was no immediate smoking gun we were looking for. We didn’t think this was all that important of a site,” said Dr. Joel Gunn, 73, a Pitt graduate and professor at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, “but then we were seeing frequency of fire pits and other densities of organic remnants. And when Smithsonian carbon dating came back and we found out it was near 16,000 years old – this was an important time capsule of human history.”
Adovasio and other academics have pushed back against the “Clovis First” hypothesis popularized in the 20th century, or that emigrating peoples came to America all at once via ice bridges from Europe to Alaska. The theory is based, ironically, on a lack of evidence of any other proto-human settlers before the Siberian migration. Well, Adovasio said, if one is finding almost nothing but easily preserved weapons and tools, then archaeologists’ worldview is going be a prism through that evidence.
“Nearly 90 percent of artifacts found are hunting tools. They’re durable; they hold up. And they conveniently support this Blitzkrieg colonization theory that’s really implausible to think they covered so much land and did a mass hunt and species extinction on their own in bands of 30 or so across America,” Adovasio said, “so we’ve belabored under the image that the success of ice age ancestors were because of hunters, mostly male, do-or-die by sticking a sharp object into flesh and following those creatures wherever they roam, partly because illustrators didn’t think women and children chasing carrots was that compelling.”
The archaeologist’s expertise in organic and perishable artifacts has helped him investigate beyond the obvious flint and bone tools and look to what other elements could explain human ancestors’ culture, behavior and origin.
“When you look to the peoples’ terraforming in (caves like the rockshelter), you see fire pits; food and fuel residue; storage and roasting pits and garbage incinerating areas – and baskets and nets.”
Nets are a novel tool in the context of terrestrial hunting. They’re typically thought of for fishing – not a nearly half-milelong contraption wielded by an entire group to capture hares, boars or other small game.
“They weren’t just hunter-gatherers. They planted, they collected – and yes, they did hunt, but with spears going after little rabbits? Probably not. And stretching out this huge net as part of the socialized community hunt goes against the thought of manly men going out and hunting, but that wasn’t popular nor supported by evidences until recently,” Adovasio said, “and they don’t show women or children making those tools in popular depictions. But that’s what was happening.”
Getting to all these sensitive organics preserved in clay, the 1973 team had to be extremely careful, using razor blades to whittle away at just 9 inches of rock over an entire summer.
“These demented souls who had to endure this tedium would patronize many of the dozen or so saloons in Avella at the time to vent their frustrations,” Adovasio said, “and then they would come back the next day nursing a hangover and going through another day of that tiring, but ultimately rewarding, work.”