8 Volume 33 I Numberl= TRUMPET

Part 1: The trailblazer, Ia grande dameHE CLOSING CEREMONY of the 2016 summer OlympicGames, hosted in Rio de Janeiro, paid tribute to the “art

" - of the people," alluding to the cave art of the first SouthAmericans. The sequence began with the figure of a womansearching through the dark, cavernous expanse of the arena; asshe explored its space, images of cave paintings flickered ontothe arena floor. The phantasmagoria of lights glowingbright red and orange summoned images of ~_the blazing sun striking the hills of Serra -da Capivara, which lies in the southeast ofPiaui State. F

In the drama presented on the Olympic ’stage, the heroine represented estimable >“’Niede Guidon, an extraordinary Brazilianpioneer who at 84 continues to work in thenorthern state of Piaui despite her unfortunaterun-in with the Zika virus. Her home propertylies in the Serra da Capivara National Park, anarea where she first discovered the Serra da Capivaracave paintings and where she has identified more than800 sites. Guidon dates human settlement in the regionto 32,000 years ago, perhaps more than 40,000 yearsago, tens of thousands of years older than conventionalarchaeological thinking would have it.

Beginning at PiauiSituated in the northeast region of Brazil, Piaui State 2

4.

has the shortest Atlantic coastline (66 km) of any of the it € wnon-landlocked Brazilian states. In its southeast corner .-..

national park boasts the highest concentration of rock art in theworld, a distinction Guidon championed throughout the courseof her archaeological career. And although Piaui is one of thepoorest and most underdeveloped states in Brazil, it containsone of the richest prehistoric archaeological assemblages in theworld. Pedra Furada, one of the most controversial sites in theAmericas, threatens to rewrite the history of the first humancolonization of the Americas. Not by coincidence, the site alsodivides archaeologists into two emotionally charged camps.

Reevaluating the paradigm' “Here in the forbidding thorn forests of the Piaui

state, archaeologists say their discoveries are/ contributing to a pivotal reevaluation of the

peopling of the Americas,” says NewYbrk Times Brazil bureau chief

M|:_|¢|r:‘-, Simon Romero. What archaeolo-zgl--wwllm ° gists have found in this remote

Bmzif site is evidence of human habita-tion going back tens of thousands

ofyears, which upends previous the--AL ories of human migration across the

7J1, Bering Strait, across North America,/ across the Amazon rain forest, and into\ / this part of Brazil.

One model embedded in the minds ofNorth American archaeologists, Clovis-First,

maintains that humans first arrived in the Ameri-cas about 13,000 years ago after crossing the Ber-ing Land Bridge linking Asia and Alaska and thenrapidly spread southward. Named the Clovis cul-ture after flint spearheads found in the 1930s at~ '1

lies the Serra da Capivara National Park, a UNESCO C“ a site in Clovis, New Mexico, they occupied sitesWorld Heritage Site. In 1978, Guidon petitioned the Brazilian spanning the breadth of North America and from Canada togovernment to create the park and has since been responsible Mexico. Clovis archaeological sites, which date to the periodfor the area's preservation, development and management. The 13,250—12,800 CALYBP, are considered in most publications

January I 2018 J

is TRUMPET

the first evidence of human occupation in the Americas. University and co-PI Mike Waters recovered from a cushion ofIn recent years, however, many archaeological assemblages mastodon digesta a bifacial fragment of a blade that bears no

that predate Clovis have been identified. evidence of Clovis toolmaking technology. Vegetal matter in theGeoarchaeologist Mike Waters, Director of the Center for digesta returned acalibrated radiocarbon date of 14,550 CALYBP,

the Study of the First 'ully 1,500 years before the birth of theAmericans, and his Clovis culture.team unearthed more Interestingly, the toolkit used by thesethan 15,000 stone ar- )re-Clovis individuals is lighter than thattifacts at the Debra L. ised by Clovis, which suggests they wereFriedkin site in Texas(MT 27-2, “Butter- Iave paintings from Boqueirao da Pedra

I

milk Creek”). Using urada (left) two anthropomorphs (humanoptically stimulated 'gures) face each other in a vignette thatluminescence (OSL), ras become known as the “kiss scene";which dates the depo- below) polychromatic (red,gray, yellow, andsition of sedimentary vhite) paintings represent anthropomorphslevels by calculating ind zoomorphs (animal figures), includingthe time elapsed since izards, cervids, and felines.the quartz grainswithin the sediments mobile hunter-gatherers moving acrosswere last exposed to the landscape and left only small ephem-light (MT 18-3, “Lu- eral campsites and workshops, unlikeminescence dating of the larger campsites we find in ClovisQuaternary sediments: and later cultures.“I think we're movingNew methods for dating toward understanding that the peoplingarchaeological c0mpo- of the Americas was not a singular eventnents”), the researchers like the Clovis-First model would havedated these artifacts us believe,” says Waters. Instead, it “wasto between 13,200 and a process with people probably arriving15,500 years old. The at different times and taking differentCSFA team found no routes and potentially coming from dif-evidence that the arti- ferent places.”facts had migrated fromyounger sediment levels and thereby confirmed that the arti- Non-Asian immigrants? Boat people?facts date to a time before Clovis people came on the scene. Contrary to a fundamental precept of Clovis-First, Guidon con-The discovery doesn’t suggest Clovis started earlier in North tends that the First Americans probably weren’t all of Asian ori-America than previously thought. Instead, it suggests that gin. One piece ofevidence comes from David Reich’s genetics labpeople using different tool types were present before Clovis ap- at Harvard. While analyzing the genomes from cultures in Cen-peared on the landscape and that this tral and South America, Pon-early technology could have evolved tus Skoglund, a researcherinto the classic tools we see in Clovis in Reich’s lab, noticed thatassemblages. the Surui and Karitiana peo-

Some critical members of the scien- ple of the Amazon share withtific community withhold accepting the Aleutian Islanders and Atha-Friedkin assemblage as pre-Clovis on bascans a genetic affinity tothe grounds that OSL dating technology indigenous groups in Aus-lacks the bona fides of time-tested ra- tralasia—Australians, Newdiocarbon dating. At the Friedkin site, Guineans, and Andamanwhere sediments are starved of carbon- Islanders (MT 32-1, “Ge-bearing materials, no other method of netic clues answers funda-dating could be used. No such reserva- mental questions about thetions can be brought to bear, however, peopling of the Americas”).on indisputable pre-Clovis artifactsfound by fieldwork in 2012-2014 at Guidon.the submerged Page-Ladson site in .the Florida Panhandle (MT 32-2, “The Page-Ladson site”). Supporting evidence comes from Walter Neves, an evolutionaryHere underwater archaeologist Jessi Halligan of Florida State anthropologist at the University of S50 Paulo, who reports that

‘ ;‘I'llUMPE‘|'I0 _ "A""°f|,| Voluine 33 I Numberl

an 11,000-year-old skull found in Brazil resembles aboriginalAustralians more than Asians. (Gruhn cautions, however,against putting too much weight into craniometric data withouta confirming genetic profile.)

A recent discovery likewise refutes the migration route ofthe First Americans proposed by the Clovis-First model. Ac-cording to the model that dominated Peopling of the Ameri-cas thought for half a century, immigrants from NorthernAsia via the Bering Land Bridge entered the lower regionsof North America by way of the Ice-Free Corridor, a passagebetween the Cordilleran and Laurentide Ice Sheets. Beforethey separated, the consolidated glaciers barred overlandtravel from Beringia to N0] iand South America. Researby paleogeneticist Eske Willslev of the University of Copehagen, however, disputes ttime when the Ice-Free Cordor became a habitable passafor humans (MT 32-4, “Vithe Ice-Free Corridor the rotfollowed by the First Amecans?"). To construct a pture of the environment asemerged from the Ice Age, Werslev’s team analyzed en-vironmental DNA (eDNA) incores taken from beneathtwo lakes in what was thelast stretch of the corri-dor to melt. The first plantlife—thin grasses andsedges—appears 12,600years ago. The region grad-ually became lusher and

Aerial views of the sites of gSerra da Capivara.

attracted mammals. Not until around 12,500 years ago did thecorridor accumulate the resources needed to sustain hunter-gatherers on the 1,500-km journey. That’s nearly 1,000 yearsafter the formation of the Clovis culture, and even longer afterother, pre-Clovis cultures settled the Americas.

The dates calculated by Willerslev rule out the corridor as apossible avenue of entry by Clovis people and earlier colonizersof the Americas. Instead, the first emigrants from Beringia wereprobably boat people who skirted the Pacific coast in search ofa fruitful, less brutal environment. Thus has been reinvigoratedthe Coastal Migration model of the Peopling of the Americas,first introduced by Simon Fraser archaeologist Knut Fladmarkin the mid 1970s and pursued in recent years by such notableanthropologists as Jon Erlandson of the University of Oregon(MT 26-4, “A story of ancient mariners"), Loren Davis of Or-egon State University (MT 24-3, “Putting muscle into coastal-entry research”), Alan Bryan and Ruth Gruhn of the Universityof Alberta (MT 17-2, “The Baja connection"), and Jim Dixon of

the University of Colorado (MT20-4, “Exploring the Northwestcoast: E. James Dixon and the peopling of the New World”).

The importance of Monte VerdeThe Coastal Migration model garnered support from theground-breaking findings at Monte Verde in southern Chile,the earliest site on the Pacific coast. The idea that people en-tered the Americas in watercraft and migrated south along thePacific coast was supported by the presence of this early site inthe southernmost portion of South America. At this site, struc-tures, lithic artifacts, perishable materials, and many otherartifacts show that people were occupying the site 14,500 years

ago. The discoveries made atMonte Verde, the first to shatterthe Clovis-First model so en-trenched in the minds of NorthAmerican archaeologists, of-fered an alternative view of hu-man colonization.

From 1977 to 1985, Tom Dille-hay of the University ofKentuckyexcavated atMonte Verde. Radio-carbon dates on water-saturateddeposits, which account for theexcellent preservation of organicremains, placed the level (desig-

ited MV-II) at 12,500 RCYBP (about-,500 CALYBP). This date precedeslovis sites in North America by all millennium. Moreover, the siters about 15,000 km from the Ber-g Strait, the place according to theaditional model where immigrantsitered the Americas from Asia.Artifacts identified at Montezrde have raised questions ofhen and how people reached the) of South America without leav-g much other evidence in the New

World. In “Monte Verde: Seaweed, Food, Medicine, and thePeopling of South America," Dillehay examines the remains ofnine species of marine algae recovered from hearths and otherfeatures at Monte Verde II. These findings, which indicatethat the occupants used seaweed from distant beaches andestuarine environments for food and medicine, corroborateDillehay's contention that early settlement of South Americawas along the Pacific coast and that seaweeds were importantto the diet and health of early humans in the Americas.

Pedra FuradaAlthough Monte Verde may be the earliest site on the Pacificcoast, Pedra Furada is the earliest on the Atlantic, dated to morethan 40,000 years ago. In 1963. while Guidon was still workingfor the Paulista Museum in Sao Paulo, a visitor to the expositionon rock art in Brazil (at that time only the sites in Minas Geraishad been discovered) showed her photos of paintings that heclaimed existed in the south of the State of Piaui. “He gave me

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I2 Volume 33 I Number 1

the name of the town close to these sites," Guidon recalls. “InDecember ofthat same year, I tried to drive to Piaui, but the rainshad flooded a bridge over the Sao Francisco River, and I couldn’tpass.” In fact, when she started in the 1970s, the largest obstaclewas a lack of roads to access the sites. Further hindrances werea lack of electricity and other modern conveniences.

In 1970, Guidon joined a French mission to the natives ofGoias and took that opportunity to visit the south of Piaui. Vil-lagers of Varzea Grande, whenasked about the paintings,guided her on a tour offive siteswith abundant renderings ofpictographs, which she photo-graphed. In 1973 she receivedfunding for a research mis-sion from the French NationalCenter for Scientific Research(Le Centre National de la Re-

How is this for a nimble octo-genarian! Guidon scaling a rockyoutcrop in the Serra Branca near

the Toca do Conflito (Den ofConflict) archaeological site.

cherche Scientifique). Within a month she had discovered andphotographed 50 sites with paintings. Her team also did groundsurveys at some of the sites. Her initial efforts still bear fruittoday: The permanent mission to Piaui, created by the FrenchMinistry of Foreign Affairs, continues to pursue research in theregion.

“Because of the large number of paintings at Pedra Furada,”Guidon explains, “we started excavations there that lasted 10years.” When her team finally hit rock at a depth of 12 m, they hadobtained samples of charcoal and heated quartzites whose dat-ing suggests that humans may have arrived in the region morethan 60,000 years ago. The diversity of the lithics industry, ce-ramics, burials, and other evidence of human occupation todaystill attract Brazilian and foreign researchers. Guidon rejoicesthat “every excavation brings new discoveries!”

An impressive legacyGuidon says that what surprised her most during her 30 yearsof excavating at these sites has been the remarkably advancedtechnology evident in lithic and ceramic artifacts, and “the factthat we have proven that the rock art is as old as that of Europe,that it has several different perspectives and a wide variety ofcolors and subjects. Here, the ceramics industry also startedto be practiced around the same time as in Africa and Europe.

_nunm ‘ ' 'That allows us to formulate the hypothesis thatHomo sapiens, asa single species, has an identical genome regardless ofwhere hesettled in the world. Therefore, during his evolution and adapta-tion to the environment, he created the elements necessary forhis survival. We cannot continue to claim that one technologywas created in a certain region and then migrated to other areasfrom there.”

Although Guidon is now retired from active research, otherscontinue her work. As scholarsadvance beyond Clovis-First,this long-impoverished regionis now emerging as a flash pointfor research and discovery.FUMDHAM (the National ParkofSerra da Capivara) now boastsa museum, laboratories, anda public university that trainsyoung archaeologists, many ofwhom come from areas near

: the stunning park. Christelle1 Lahaye, Associate Professor‘ in Archaeometry at Bordeaux* Montaigne University and a5 key member of Guidon’s cur-

.__ rent research team, says thatif you “take a coffee with Guidon, you learn all about not onlyarchaeology but the history of Brazil, her stay in France. Allabout life.” @

-Katy Dycus

How to contact the principals of this article:Ruth GruhnProfessor Emerita of AnthropologyDepartment of AnthropologyUniversity of Albertae-mail: rgruhn@ualberta.caNiéde Guidone-mail: guidon@fumdham.org.brChristelle LahayeAssociate Professor in ArchaeometryDepartment of ArchaeologyUniversity of Bordeaux Montaignee-mail: clahaye@u-bordeaux-montaigne.frEric BoedaProfessor of AnthropologyDepartment of AnthropologyUniversity of Parise-mail: boeda.eric@gmail.com

Suggested ReadingsBoéda, E., et al. 2013 The late-Pleistocene industries of Piaui,

Brazil: New data. Paleoamerican Odyssey, editors K. E. Graf, C. V.Ketron, and M. R. Waters. pp. 445-65. Center for the Study of theFirst Americans, College Station, Tx.

Lahaye, C., et al. 2013 Human occupation in South America by

20,000 BC: The Toca da Tira Peia site, Piaui, Brazil. journal ofArchaeological Science, pp. 2840-47.

Meltzer, D. J., J. M. Adovasio, and T. D. Dillehay 1994 On a Pleis-tocene human occupation at Pedra Furada, Brazil. Antiquity, pp.695-714.

Website FUMDHAM (the National Park ofSerra da Capivara): http://www.fumdham.org.br/?lang=en