Arrowhead battles
Did the earliest Americans arrive by surf or turf?

By Diane Muir

Does your heart swell with pride every time you think of those sturdy first immigrants, ancestors of today's Amerindians,
who walked over the land bridge from Siberia hunting wooly mammoths with stone-tipped spears as they came? Would it
deal a serious blow to your sense of self-worth to discover that those first comers took a boat and dug clams, instead?

Brace yourself: A corps of archaeologists armed with spades and obsidian spear-points is preparing to overturn the
received wisdom regarding the peopling of the Americas. And they're facing stiff opposition.

In "Lost World," journalist Tom Koppel gives us not merely good reporting on field archaeology in action, but a blow-by-
blow account of a major scholarly battle in full spate. When it comes to landing knockout punches, Mike Tyson has
nothing on Koppel's account of archaeologists dealing near-fatal blows over dating methods.

The archaeological record in the Americas begins with a scattering of stone spear tips known as Clovis points. These
distinctive artifacts have been found from the Atlantic to the Pacific in such numbers that you can easily see one in a
nearby museum. Even a brief inspection separates the distinctively fluted Clovis points from the arrowheads in the
display case. Indeed, their distinctiveness establishes that all Clovis points were made by a single, big-game-hunting
culture.

The charcoal and bones found with them prove that Clovis culture was spread rapidly across North America from 12,800
to 13,200 years ago by hunters who used stone-tipped spears to kill animals like the giant buffalo and mastodon.

The great question is: Did the Clovis walk over the land bridge, or did they evolve from an earlier Amerindian culture,
possibly a population that moved along the Pacific coast in canoes?

Koppel, a strong partisan of the canoes-along-the-coast theory, lays into the "stubborn, hidebound" academic
proponents of the walked-over-the-land-bridge hypothesis with the vigor of a hungry Paleo-Indian attacking a woolly
mammoth.

The advantage of the coastal migration theory is that it makes sense. Life along the littoral is easy. Oysters, after all, just
lie there waiting for someone to eat them, and even an animal as large as a sea lion makes easy prey when it hauls itself
onto a beach. When the coasts of Alaska and British Columbia got overpopulated, it would have been the easiest thing in
the world to climb into a canoe and move on to an empty beach along Puget Sound, or San Francisco Bay, and so on
right down to the tip of South America.

Well and good. But the question that troubles those "stubborn, hidebound" academics is that despite the compelling logic
of the coastal migration theory, its proponents have turned up very little in the way of evidence.

To argue that the first Americans followed the coastal route is to assume that people lived at the shore for some period
of time before developing the Clovis hunting technology and moving inland. Yet no human bones older than Clovis have
ever been found in the Americas. And there are only two archaeological sites believed to pre-date Clovis: Monte Verde in
Chile and Meadowcroft in Pennsylvania. What's more, most archaeologists have serious doubts about Meadowcroft.

This raises critical questions since sites this old are not rare in the rest of the world. Australia alone has 200 well-dated
sites older than Clovis.

In recent years, archaeologists intrigued by the coastal theory have headed for the rain-swept northwest coast to
reconstruct prehistory, piece by soggy piece.

Koppel follows archaeologist Tim Heaton deep into a narrow cave on an island off the coast of British Columbia. We see
Heaton reaching under a rocky ledge, "digging in soupy sediments, working mainly by feel. Suddenly, nudged by his
trowel, a long, narrow piece of bone flipped into view" - the oldest human bone yet found on the Pacific coast.

It turns out to be not quite old enough. Yet I finished "Lost World" excited by the prospect that this summer or next, an
archaeologist on an island off Vancouver will reach into a layer of damp sediment to pull out the definitive piece of
evidence. Koppel's book will prepare you for that round.

• Diana Muir is the author of 'Reflections in Bullough's Pond: Economy and Ecosystem in New England' (University Press
of New England).

This article appeared in the June 26, 2003 edition of the Christian Science Monitor.

Lost World: Rewriting Prehistory, How New Science is Tracing America's Ice Age Mariners
By Tom Koppel
Atria Books 288 pp., $26