Monte Verde :: essays research papers

After long, often bitter debate, archeologists have finally come to a consensus that humans reached Confederate Chile 12,500 years ago. The date is more than 1,000 years before the previous benchmark for human habitation in the Americas, 11,200-year-old stone spear points first find in the 1930s near Clovis, N.M. The Chilean site, known as three-card monte Verde, is on the sandy banks of a creek in wooded hills near the pacific Ocean. Even former skeptics have joined in agreeing that its antiquity is now firmly established and that the bone and stone tools and other materials found there in spades mark the presence of a hunting-and-gathering people. The newfound consensus regarding Monte Verde, described in interviews last week and formally announced Monday, thus represents the first major sacque in more than 60 years in the confirmed chronology of human prehistory in what would much later be called, from the European perspective, the New World. For American archeologists it i s a liberating experience not unlike aviations breaking of the sound barrier they have broken the Clovis barrier. Even moving back the date by as little as 1,300 years, archeologists said, would have profound implications on theories about when people first reached America, presumably from northeastern Asia by way of the Bering Strait, and how they migrated south more than 10,000 miles to encroach upon the length and breadth of two continents. It could mean that early people, ancestors of the Indians, first arrived in their new world at least 20,000 years before Columbus. Evidence for the pre-Clovis gag law at Monte Verde was amassed and carefully analyzed over the last two decades by a team of American and Chilean archeologists, led by Dr. tom turkey D. Dillehay of the University of Kentucky in Lexington. Remaining doubts were erased by Dillehays comprehensive research report, which has been circulated among experts and is to be published next month by the Smithsonian Institution . And last month, a group of archeologists, including some of Monte Verdes staunchest critics, inspected the artifacts and visited the site, coming away thoroughly convinced. In his report of the site visit, Dr. Alex W. Barker, chief curator of the Dallas Museum of Natural History, said "While there were very strongly give tongue to disagreements about different points, it rapidly became clear that everyone was in fundamental agreement about the most important question of all. Monte Verde is real. Its old. And its a whole new ball game.