People and culture in ace age Americas. New dimensions in Paleoamerican Archaeology

Abstract

It is hard to identify another topic in world archaeology still as hot, controversial, mysterious, shifing, and continuously confictive as the Ice Age archaeology of Americas. For decades, passions have surged, egos have clashed, academic politics have boiled, and paradigms have risen and changed. Now, almost a century since the initial discoveries that began to challenge the thick ice of preconceptions, we are living in a new era of exciting fnds that show us that archaeological knowledge is never defnitive. America’s two hemispheres have lived these experiences in separate manners and from relatively divergent positions. To the north, the more homogenous Anglo world (principally, the United States) was long haunted by the conservative theories of single-route recent human arrival on the continent. Scholars developed a culture of caution and skepticism around the strongholds of tough paradigms such as Clovisfrst. To the south, the more rebel and eclectic Latin world traditionally stood apart from the northern postures and felt freer to sustain outof-the-box ideas, ofen constructed upon expedient conjectures, and frequently cemented by their own regional paradigms. Between the two, dialogue and constructive communication were not the rule, and the creation of models upon the particular archaeological records of the North and the South manifested as parallel, rarely compatible interpretations of the past.