14

THE FIRST OF THE FIRST

The University of Alaska Fairbanks, with its broad range of graduate programs, is the state’s principal academic institution and a center for Beringian scholarship. Scores of professors and researchers study land bridge geology, paleontology, palynology, archeology, anthropology, and other areas. Nevertheless, one of the most significant land bridge discoveries credited to the university emerged not from its laboratories or libraries, but from the ground on which the buildings stood.

On a fall day in 1933, a student named James Jacobsen was digging a posthole for the freshman bonfire at the Alaska Agricultural College and School of Mines as it was called then. The school sits on a bluff, and Jacobsen was digging at the crest of it, a scant hundred yards from the administration building. It was always a good spot from which to look out over the Chena and Tanana River valleys. Proof of that turned up in Jacobsen’s shovel in the form of a flint projectile point.

The following summer, two students decided to dig a forty-foot test cut at the site and located “a surprising concentration of worked stone material.” They packed about four hundred of the artifacts into a gallon can and sent it to Nels Nelson, an archeologist at the American Museum of Natural History. Nelson had been on an expedition to Mongolia and recognized the small flint cores and flakes as “identical in several respects with thousands of specimens found in the Gobi desert.” Dating the Campus site artifacts to seven thousand to ten thousand years old, Nelson declared, “The specimens furnish the first clear archaeological evidence we have of early migration to the American continent.” A later investigator, Charles Mobley, recognized the artifacts as similar to those unearthed in Siberia, northern China, and Japan. The Campus site was, he said, “the first evidence in support of the Bering Land Bridge hypothesis for human entrance into North America from Asia.”

Today, most archeologists, including Mobley, consider the site to be only three thousand to four thousand years old. In any event, it furnished Alaska’s first recognized microblades and Alaska’s largest collection of cores. Although some of the artifacts are no doubt still intact at the site, today people drive cars over it. In 1966, the university president, William R. Wood, announced the selection of the Campus site as the location for a new visitor’s lookout—complete with a large totem pole—to be adjacent to a new road, sidewalks, and a parking lot. Though archeologists from several states and countries strongly objected, Wood insisted on the development. Eventually, the university removed the totem pole, a relic of maritime societies and a cultural square peg in interior Alaska. The asphalt, however, remains.

The Campus site stood virtually alone as an archeological link between Alaska and Siberia until Hopkins explored the Trail Creek Caves, leading to Helge Larsen’s excavation there in 1949 and 1950. Larsen found more of the tiny flakes of stone the archeologists were calling microblades, as well as the cores from which they were struck. In the lowest levels of one cave, he also found bone projectile points. Slots in the points corresponded exactly to the dimensions of the microblades, which apparently were intended as insets to provide razor-sharp cutting edges along the sides of the point. This was the first, and remains one of the only, discoveries in eastern Beringia of slotted bone points together with microblades. The fashioning of microblades was an ingenious way to utilize what was perhaps the world’s first precious stone, says archeologist E. James Dixon. A pound of stone rendered into microblades, he says, could yield over five hundred linear inches of cutting edge, versus about eight linear inches of edge if a conventional point were fabricated from the same pound. And this efficiency was especially important in the far North, where snow covered the ground for about eight months of the year, making it difficult to locate suitable rock.

Additional microblades and cores turned up in the 1960s when Frederick West excavated a number of sites in and around the Alaska Range. He grouped these with Trail Creek into a single tradition he called the Denali complex, after the Athabascan name for Mt. McKinley, the highest peak in North America. Searching for prototype traditions in Siberia, West found that Russian workers at the Dyuktai site in the Lake Baikal region had unearthed similar tools. Denali’s relationship to Dyuktai is clearly, writes West, “that of direct derivative.”

In the Nenana River Valley in interior Alaska, a cluster of deeply stratified sites has produced Clovislike tools dated to eleven thousand three hundred years before present. And similar implements have been found in Siberia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. The earliest well dated evidence of human occupation in Alaska came from a handful of sites in the Tanana River valley, upriver from Fairbanks. The oldest of them is the Broken Mammoth site, situated on a bluff overlooking both the Tanana River and Shaw Creek Flats, where microblades, scrapers, stone and ivory points, eyed needles, and other artifacts date to eleven thousand eight hundred years ago. Along with the tools, archeologists found the bones of bison, elk, caribou, and sheep, as well as those of swans, geese, ducks, ptarmigan, and other birds, ground squirrel, red squirrel, porcupine, marmot, snow-shoe hare, and fish. This wealth of small animal remains suggests a rich late glacial environment and proves that these late Pleistocene hunters practiced a diversified economy and made their living from more than big game alone. Similar arrays of eleven-thousand-year-old animal bones show up on Siberia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. And toolmaking patterns there replicate some of those found in the Nenana Valley.

 

Among archeologists, it’s the rare scholar who is without a trowel to grind, and one who can sift through the information and provide a synthesis in plain English. One of them is David Meltzer, a writer, professor, and field archeologist who studied the paleoecology of Beringia under Hopkins. Twenty thousand years ago, Meltzer believes, Native Americans were part of a single ancestral stock in northeast Asia, as their teeth and genetic markers reveal. All possessed the Sinodont dental morphology. But they had begun to diverge genetically into distinct groups before moving east onto the land bridge, and they continued to differentiate in the New World. Linguistic and dental evidence conflicts as to whether the Na-Dene or the Eskimo-Aleut were the second to arrive, but they strongly suggest that the first Asians to enter the Western Hemisphere were the Amerinds. Their ancestors chipped stone tools in Eastern Siberia later than twenty thousand years ago, perhaps as recently as fourteen thousand years ago. And similar tools appear in Alaska at least by eleven thousand five hundred years ago, as the land bridge submerged at the end of the Ice Age. Amerinds may have aggregated in unglaciated central Alaska for a few millennia, until a way through the glaciers to the south opened up. With the Laurentide and Cordilleran Ice Sheets shrinking toward their centers, an ice-free corridor must have opened up between them. While it may not have looked like a frozen version of the Red Sea parting for the fleeing Israelites, some kind of passageway would have appeared, and it may have accommodated Amerind people expanding southward into latitudes that are more temperate.

Or all that could be wrong. As Meltzer points out, some of the oldest dated sites in the New World turn up in South America.

Chilean workmen clearing brush in 1976 for a road across Chinchihuapi Creek unearthed bones that, once examined at the Universidad Austral de Chile, proved to be from mastodon. Tom Dillehay, an American archeologist then teaching there, concluded that the bones showed signs of butchering by humans. When Dillehay visited the site, called Monte Verde, he found wooden implements and even mastodon meat and skin preserved in the boggy soil. As the dig continued along thirteen hundred feet of stream bank, workers unearthed twelve dwellings, three human footprints, hearths lined with clay and thirty-eight hunks of meat. They discovered a great variety of plants, including four kinds of seaweed, carried to the site from the Pacific coast, thirty river miles away, and plants from distant grasslands, even the Andean highlands. There were eleven varieties of wild potato, twenty-three kinds of medicinal plants, seeds, fruit, and leaves that had been chewed. Of tools, they found lances, digging sticks, and a few stone implements. One bifacial point was made of quartzite from a range of mountains thirty-seven miles away. But, most amazing of all, Dillehay radiocarbon dated the occupation surface to about twelve thousand five hundred years ago, a thousand years older than the oldest Clovis site in North America.

If the theory is correct that Beringian hunters migrated south through a deglaciated corridor eleven thousand five hundred years ago to people the Americas, how is it that Monte Verde—ten thousand miles farther south—was inhabited a thousand years earlier? A number of scholars think they have an answer. One of them is E. James Dixon, who was a young graduate student when Hopkins invited him along to the Khabarovsk conference in Siberia and who remembered the Russians chanting, “Hop-kins, Hop-kins.” Dixon has been digging in caves on Prince of Wales Island in the Tongass Forest of Southeast Alaska. In one, he found human bones that, when radiocarbon dated, turned out to be the oldest reliably dated early man bones ever found in Alaska or Canada: ninety-two hundred years before present. The cave, whose name is being kept secret in deference to the wishes of the local Native people, also contained a ten-thousand-three-hundred-year-old bone implement, as well as stone tools. The limestone basement of the many islands of the Tongass Forest contains hundreds of caves. Dixon anticipates more discoveries: “It’s my belief that some of the oldest archaeological remains preserved in North America may be found in the caves of Southeast Alaska.” The coastal areas are rich, he says, “The table’s set twice a day—at low tide, and again at low tide.” All of this suggests to Dixon that the first Americans followed a route through Beringia, all right, but along the coast, in boats.

Textbooks usually depict the entire northwest coast of North America as completely covered by ice during the Ice Age. The ice sheet drops from the adjacent mountains of Alaska and Canada right into the sea, perhaps out to the edge of the continental shelf. But Dixon believes there were strips of unglaciated land along the coastal plain. These areas would have been warmer because of the low elevation and the heat-retaining properties of the sea. During the late Ice Age, possibly as early as fourteen thousand years ago, these refugia would have permitted a seagoing people equipped with boats to fish, hunt sea mammals, and forage the tidal flats. These people, Dixon believes, were the first to colonize the New World, spreading south along the west coast of both Americas. And with the vast Pacific on their right, glaciers on their left, and already populated areas to the north, there may have been good reason to hasten south.

Dixon wasn’t the first to come up with this idea. That distinction belongs to the Canadian researcher, Knut Fladmark, who established the geological possibility of a coastal route into the Americas, though he never claimed to have proven that it happened. In fact, many archeologists consider the “maritime entry” model problematic. For one thing, solid evidence of late Pleistocene sea mammal hunting (as distinct from seaworthy boats) is minimal. For another, northeast Asian maritime cultures developed significantly later than northwest North American maritime cultures. Alaskan archeologist William Workman, who has dug for years along the coast, is one of the skeptics. “If Pleistocene maritime colonists came from northeast Asia, their skills were forgotten, to be painfully reinvented in the middle Holocene,” he says. “Possible, I suppose, but it seems unlikely to me.” Of the coastal route theory, Workman says, “Fladmark demonstrated this was possible, but in recent years a possibility has been promoted first to a probability, then to a near certainty, without excessive input of convincing data.”

Humans did somehow cross open ocean to reach Australia more than forty thousand years ago. But that was probably done in rafts. And transoceanic raft travel in the South Pacific is an altogether different proposition from crossing the glacier-fringed waters of the Gulf of Alaska in the North Pacific. Still, if the people reaching coastal Siberia twenty thousand years ago had developed watercraft such as skin boats, their expansion around the Pacific Rim—from Kamchatka to South America—could have taken place with lightning speed and before appreciable expansion inland. And that could account, proponents believe, for older artifacts turning up in the southern reaches of the New World, even before the barrier glaciers had melted.

But for every theory, there is a countertheory, and the intensity of the debate is marked. Sorting out all the archeological, geological, paleontological, palynological, paleoenvironmental, linguistic, genetic, and dental clues of the great migration, says E. James Dixon, permits us to understand deep issues having to do with “the nature of humans as colonizers, their impact on pristine environments, and the influence of different environments on cultural development.” And, as Dixon’s former mentor Hopkins would add, it’s also a lot of fun. The coastwise migration theory that Dixon endorses does not contradict the classical idea of Siberians walking dry-shod across the land bridge from Asia into North America, he says. Rather, he sees coastal Beringia as the fastest route into the New World, the one taken by the first of the first Americans. Beringia is still the northern filter through which all New World migrants passed. And Hopkins, he says, is still “the leading international expert on the history of the Bering Land Bridge,” the one scholar who held all the strands of Beringia studies in his hand, who, metaphorically, raised Beringia up out of the depths until we could almost see it.