Peopling of the Americas Presentations

David Meltzer—Introduction to the Issues • Get researchers from very different disciplines together to update each other on current research • But we should also try to integrate our results • Monte Verde fundamentally altered our views on the origins, antiquity of Native Americans; early, non-Clovis, and far from Beringia—raised lots of questions, now have many answers and we need to determine which ones (from different disciplines) are congruent, and which ones have the best support • coastal route ca. 13,500; inland ca. 12,000, but earlier also possible depending on technology (esp. boats)colonization may have been “a dribbling over from Asia” and not a clear migration or even series of migrations • But linguistics (depending on whom one believes) and genetics seem to suggest only a few (maybe one) migrating population is this incompatible with “dribbling” or multiple migrations? • Lineage / language loss early on? Genetic even after European contact via selection by disease • Should there be convergence in answer to how many/when people came to the Americas? Meltzer is pessimistic this can happentoo much disagreement within disciplines to arrive at agreement between disciplines • Skeptical that modern distributions of languages and genes reflect ancient distributions • “remnant, isolated data points” • How do we integrate? Identify where and how points of common knowledge can occurgenetics and archaeology: archaeology provides minimum age for peopling of the Americas; genetics a maximum age=allows a bracket. Use evidence from different disciplines to test one another’s conclusions. “Under what circumstances do genes, language, and culture evolve together, and under what circumstances do they evolve independently?”

Questions: SZ, when we try to put data together we need to be careful about what dates we use: calendar vs. radiocarbon; DM yes, calibrated dates have significant error ranges and change, we should not use them; RS is it possible to estimate the size of when a population becomes “visible” in the archaeological record; DM no, very low probably; MGM what about order of magnitude; DM yes, only 2 sites older than 12,500 so by order of magnitude, very low; MGM what about Meadowcroft, Cactus Hill; DM waiting for final reports, Gault site also