The Settlement of the Americas: A New Prehistory - Hardcover

9780465076680: The Settlement of the Americas: A New Prehistory
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Who were the first Americans? Where did they come from, when did they get here, and how did they settle the Americas? Until three years ago, the Clovis people were credited as the pioneers, arriving across the Bering land bridge at the end of the last Ice Age, no earlier than 12,000 B.C. Now that standard scientific account has been demolished.As the principal investigator since 1977 at Monte Verde, Chile, the most important site in overturning the old theories, Thomas Dillehay spent many years being dismissed for his insistence on the presence of impossibly ancient human artifacts dating back 20,000 years. In the past few years he has been soundly vindicated, and in this book he presents a highly readable account of who the earliest settlers are likely to have been, where they may have landed, and how they dispersed across two continents.

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Review:
Archaeology is radically rewriting American prehistory. Since 1932, when exquisite stone points were first discovered at Clovis in New Mexico, accepted theory has asserted that humans did not begin to populate the New World until the retreat of glaciers that were blocking entry from Asia about 12,000 years ago. Then, in 1997, a group of archaeologists confirmed that objects found preserved in a peat bog in the far south of Chile--stone tools, bones, even chunks of mastodon meat--could securely be dated to at least 12,500 years ago. In The Settlement of the Americas, Thomas D. Dillehay--the archaeologist who excavated this material--gives his reasons for believing that people reached the Americas before the ice sheets moved south more than 20,000 years ago. It is a fascinating detective story based on tantalizingly meager data, one in which logic and a powerful imagination are required to fill vast blank areas in the geography and prehistory of two continents. The author sets the scene at a time when so much water was locked up in glaciers that coastlines were several hundred feet lower than they are now. Scientific studies such as stone-tool technology, linguistics, and genetics are used to build an overwhelming argument. Academic battles can be as bitter as any others, and the author is ruthless in his demolition of rival theories. Every scientist has his own bias, and this study is heavily weighted toward South American evidence, but Dillehay's interpretations appear to be objective and well-argued. The Settlement of the Americas answers basic questions, such as who were the first Americans and how did they colonize an empty land, in an exciting and readable way. --John Stevenson
About the Author:
Thomas D. Dillehay is Professor and Chairman of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. He has been Principal Investigator at the Monte Verde site in Chile and is the author of the two-volume work Monte Verde: A Late Pleistocene Settlement.

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  • PublisherBasic Books
  • Publication date2000
  • ISBN 10 0465076688
  • ISBN 13 9780465076680
  • BindingHardcover
  • Edition number1
  • Number of pages384
  • Rating

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