1. What my book is about is how come we had perfect Pleistocene sites at Valsequillo with in situ technological evolution (blades to bifaces), and art, and then forget about it? I think it is a dandy question worth answering, don't you? I would also like to know what happened to all those artifacts and art pieces.


2. Mean and nasty -- stated in a kind of loose way, but easily backed up. This is from a great article in the Atlantic Monthly. Fagan, as you know, was not shy about his disdain for the non-orthodox, so much so he was used as a text for many lower division classes (e.g. In the beginning). This is kind of nasty stuff. I certainly do not regard it as anything remotely akin to science.


"... for Brian Fagan, an influential professor of anthropology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, diffusionism is exasperating. "Why do such lunatic ravings persist?" he asked in his book The Great Journey: The Peopling of Ancient America (1987). "To read the crank literature on the first Americans is to enter a fantasy world of strange, often obsessed, writers with a complex jargon of catchwords and 'scientific' data to support their ideas." The Colgate University astronomer and anthropologist Anthony Aveni tends to be more sympathetic, perhaps because the field of archaeo-astronomy, which he has helped to ennoble, was itself an academic pariah until recent years. Nevertheless, Aveni's sympathies go only so far. "I think there is, beneath all this dialogue about diffusionism, a will to believe in bizarre ideas," he says. "This is a romantic idea that we're talking about here, after all. These are bizarre tales of an imagined era in an imagined past. And like the occult beliefs they resemble, they're really just wishful thinking. It's a belief that we can wish into existence the universe we desire and deserve."
[[Marc K. Stengel, The Diffusionists Have Landed, The Atlantic Monthly; January 2000]]

In other words, "Get thee to a rubber room!" And my point is that, they are charging the diffusionists with "truthiness," when it turns out that the Clovis Firsters suffered from the same syndrome in spades. If there is emotional pain about that, well, have a few shots and let's get busy finding out what is really the case, or at least try to get closer.

I'm an archaeologist, got a MA at U. of AZ. So I do have some history behind me in all this, especially with the epistemological aspects of of lithics studies going back to Flintknapper's Exchange (ca late 1970s). And I will brazenly say, if you are unaware of the variability of bipolar flaking you are going to miss a lot.

3. The thing about the Clovis-Solutrean question is a point about material evidence versus the ideological assumptions of Clovis First. Kat, try and find me that site ref about established proto-Clovis folks in Siberia. If it is what I think it is, it dates to about 25-30k, Lena River? Should we think that there should have been something left around in Alaska during the intervening 15-20k before Clovis shows up?.

Besides Clovis First, there was also the grande assumption of precolumbian isolationism that was at the root of American Anthropology theories. This I believe is a big time player in the way we used to think about things. Just supposin'.

Of course the Solutrean Connection is a hypothesis, but unlike Clovis First, it is replete with material evidence. Stanford and Bradley, who know rock, saw nothing similar in Siberia. And besides, they would be the first to say it is a hypothesis they are testing,

Conversely, what Clovis First wanted us to believe is not only the independent invention of Clovis tech, but instant invention with no precedent in the archaeological record anywhere north of the U.S. Bifacial reduction does not mean Clovis, per se. Siberia had Volkswagens and Clovis are corvettes. The Siberian points, if anything, are closer to San Dieguito types.

So far, there is absolutely nothing yet found, after a half century, that shows where the tech evolved into some of the best lithic behaviors on the planet at the time. Also, when it becomes okay to theorize that folks came down the West Coast, there is no reasonable reason to deny travellers to the east coast, other than for the sake of cherished ideological traditions. Seems there was even an ice bridge that connected the northern Atlantic shores that they may have hugged.

Now if all this is total poppycock, if we are stuck on instant and omnipresent invention for Clovis, I can only ask what is your established precedent? Or is this the only time it ever happened?

Further, a 4:1 to 8:1 width:thickness ratio is not easy to achieve, It takes lots of rock.
Where is it? Shouldn't we expect mountains of flakes somewhere that showcase this great invention? This level of bifacial thinning was outstanding, and it just happens with no connecting stages between the siberian forms (they average about 2:1 to 3:1 w/t)?? Without material evidence, how is the Clovis instant invention scenario not a faith-based posture? The only traditional agency for this, and I think it has fallen out of favor, is psychic unity, and I don't think I want to go there.


Another gem that Stanford told me about is that you have more Clovis artifacts on a small Maryland peninsula than AZ, CO, UT, NM combined; and in general a lot more Clovis stuff is in the east than the west. An east to west diffusion is now generally assumed for Clovis.

The thing about hypotheses is that it is all we have. And though we can throw out this or that reference about previous writings about earlier sites, they changed nothing on the policy level. The real proof that gringo archaeology was fairly hardened in its ways is the absolute paucity of prestigious grants for preclovis research, at least until 1999. And in the world of CRM archaeology, there is not one preclovis site that was ever located and/or recognized, officially at any rate. And please, I am wide open for any corrections on this. But now that we are talking about things like the Kelp Highway and 20-30k sojourns down the west coast, it looks like we have been missing a good chunk of stuff, and I think we should have been listening to the Canadians all along (Gruhn, Bryan, Fladmark).

I think all this is going to be a lot of fun. Should be quite a ride.
Chris