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PALEO-INDIAN MIGRATION ROUTES
North America, 10,000
B.C.

Researchers had previously noted the temporal coincidence between the paleo-Indians’ arrival and the mass extinction, but they didn’t believe that small bands of hunters could wreak such ecological havoc. Paul Martin, a paleontologist who was one of Haynes’s Arizona colleagues, thought otherwise. Extinction, he claimed, was the nigh-inevitable outcome when beasts with no exposure to
Homo sapiens
suddenly encountered “a new and thoroughly superior predator, a hunter who preferred killing and persisted in killing animals as long as they were available.”

Imagine, Martin said, that an original group of a hundred hunters crossed over Beringia and down the ice-free corridor. Historical records show that frontier populations can increase at astonishing rates; in the early nineteenth century, the annual U.S. birthrate climbed as high as 5 percent. If the first paleo-Indians doubled in number every 20 years (a birthrate of 3.4 percent), the population would hit 10 million in only 340 years, a blink of an eye in geological terms. A million paleo-Indians, Martin argued, could easily form a wave of hunters that would radiate out from the southern end of the ice-free corridor, turning the continent into an abattoir. Even with conservative assumptions about the rate of paleo-Indian expansion, the destructive front would reach the Gulf of Mexico in three to five centuries. Within a thousand years it would strike Tierra del Fuego. In the archaeological record, Martin pointed out, this hurricane of slaughter would be visible only as the near-simultaneous appearance of Clovis artifacts throughout North America—and “the swift extermination of the more conspicuous native American large mammals.” Which, in fact, is exactly what one sees.

Not everyone was convinced by Martin’s model. Paleontologists noted that many non-game species vanished, too, which in their view suggests that the extinction wave was more likely due to the abrupt climatic changes at the end of the Pleistocene; Martin pointed out that previous millennia had experienced equally wild shifts with no extinction spasm. In addition, similar extinctions occurred when human beings first invaded Madagascar, Australia, New Zealand, and the Polynesian Islands.

Despite overkill’s failure to enjoy full acceptance, it helped set in stone what became the paradigmatic image of the first Americans. Highly mobile, scattered in small bands, carnivorous to a fault, the paleo-Indians conjured by archaeologists were, above all, “stout-hearted, daring, and voracious big-game hunters,” in the skeptical summary of Norman Easton, an anthropologist at Yukon College, in Whitehorse. Clovis people were thought to have a special yen for mammoth: great ambulatory meat lockers. Sometimes they herded the hairy creatures en masse into gullies or entangling bogs, driving the animals to their doom with shouts, dogs, torches, and, possibly, shamanic incantations. More often, though, hunters stalked individual beasts until they were close enough to throw a spear in the gut. “Then you just follow them around for a day or two until they keel over from blood loss or infection,” Charles Kay, an ecological archaeologist at Utah State University, told me. “It’s not what we think of as sporting, but it’s very effective and a hell of a lot safer than hand-to-hand combat with a mammoth.”

Shifting location to follow game, the Clovis people prowled roughly circular territories that could have been two hundred miles in diameter (the size would vary depending on the environmental setting). With any luck, the territory would contain flint, jasper, or chalcedony, the raw material for spear points, meat scrapers, and other hunting tools. Bands may have had as many as fifty members, with girls going outside the group to marry. At camp, women and girls made clothes, gathered food—wild plums, blackberries, grapes—and tended babies. Men and boys went hunting, possibly as a group of fathers and sons, probably for days at a time.

As the extinctions proceeded, the Clovis people switched from mammoths to the smaller, more numerous bison. The spear points grew smaller, the hunting more systematic (with prey becoming scarcer, it needed to be). Bands camped on ridges overlooking ponds—the men wanted to spot herds when they came to drink. When the animals plunged their muzzles into the water, hunting parties attacked, forcing the startled bison to flee into a dead-end gully. The beasts bellowed in confusion and pain as the paleo-Indians moved in with jabbing spears. Sometimes they slaughtered a dozen or more at once. Each hunter may have gobbled down as much as ten pounds of bison flesh a day. They came back staggering under the load of meat. Life in this vision of early America was hard but pleasant; in most ways, archaeologists said, it was not that different from life elsewhere on the planet at the time.

Except that it may not have been like that at all.

CONTINENTAL DIVIDE

In the early 1980s a magazine asked me to report on a long-running legal battle over Pacific Northwest salmon. A coalition of Indian tribes had taken Washington State to court over a treaty it had signed with them in 1854, when the state was still part of the Oregon Territory. In the treaty, the territory promised to respect the Indians’ “right of taking fish, at all usual and accustomed grounds and stations,” which the tribes interpreted as guaranteeing them a share of the annual salmon harvests. Washington State said that the treaty did not mean what the Indians claimed, and in any case that circumstances had changed too much for it still to be binding. The courts repeatedly endorsed the Indian view and the state repeatedly appealed, twice reaching the U.S. Supreme Court. As the Indians approached final victory, tension rose in the fishing industry, then almost entirely controlled by whites. The magazine wanted me to write about the fight.

To learn more about the dispute, I visited the delta of the Nisqually River, at the southern tip of Puget Sound. Housing the Nisqually tribe, the sliver of land that is their reservation, and the riverbank meadow on which the treaty was signed, the delta is passed through, unnoticed, every day by the thousands of commuters on the interstate highway that slices through the reservation. At the time of my visit, the Nisqually had been annoying state authorities for decades, tenaciously pursuing what they believed to be their right to fish on their ancestral fishing grounds. I met the Franks, the stubborn, charismatic father-and-son team who then more or less ran the tribe, in a cluttered office that in my recollection occupied half of a double-wide trailer. Both had been arrested many times for “protest fishing”—fishing when the state said they couldn’t—and were the guiding spirits behind the litigation. After we spoke, Billy Frank, the son, told me I should visit Medicine Creek, where the Nisqually and eight other tribes had negotiated the treaty. And he asked someone who was hanging around to give me a tour.

That someone introduced himself as Denny. He was slim and stylish with very long black hair that fell unbound over the shoulders of his Levi jacket. Sewn on the back of the jacket was a replica of the American eagle on the dollar bill. A degree in semiotics was not required to see that I was in the presence of an ironist. He was not a Nisqually, he said, but from another Northwest group—at this remove, I can’t recall which. We clambered into an old truck with scraped side panels. As we set off, Denny asked, “Are you an archaeologist?”

Journalist, I told him.

“Good,” he said, slamming the truck into gear.

Because journalists rarely meet with such enthusiasm, I guessed—correctly—that his approval referred to my non-archaeological status. In this way I learned that archaeologists have aroused the ire of some Native American activists.

We drove to a small boat packed with fishing gear that was tied down on the edge of the Nisqually. Denny got the motor running and we puttered downstream, looking for harbor seals, which he said sometimes wandered up the river. Scrubby trees stood out from gravel banks, and beneath them, here and there, were the red-flushed, spawned-out bodies of salmon, insects happy around them. Freeway traffic was clearly audible. After half an hour we turned up a tributary and made land on a muddy bank. A hundred yards away was a tall snag, the dead stalk of a Douglas fir, standing over the meadow like a sentinel. The treaty negotiations had been conducted in its shelter. From under its branches the territorial governor had triumphantly emerged with two sheets of paper which he said bore the X marks of sixty-two Indian leaders, some of whom actively opposed the treaty and apparently were not at the signing.

Throughout our little excursion Denny talked. He told me that the claw holding the arrows on the back of the one-dollar bill was copied by Benjamin Franklin from an incident in Haudenosaunee lore; that the army base next door sometimes fired shells over the reservation; that Billy Frank once had been arrested with Marlon Brando; that a story Willie Frank, Billy’s father, had told me about his grandparents picking up smallpox-infected blankets on the beach was probably not true, but instead was an example of Willie’s fondness for spoofing gullible journalists; that Denny knew a guy who also had an eagle on the back of his jean jacket, but who, unlike Denny, could make the eagle flex its wings by moving his shoulders in a certain way that Denny admired; that most Indians hate the Internal Revenue Service even more than they hate the Bureau of Indian Affairs, because they believe that they paid taxes for all time when the federal government forced them to give up two billion acres of land; and that if I really wanted to see a crime against nature, I should visit the Quinault reservation, on the Olympic Peninsula, which had been plundered by loggers in the 1950s (I did, a few weeks afterward; Denny was right). He also explained to me why he and some other Indians had it in for archaeologists. The causes were many, in his telling, but two of them seemed especially pertinent: Aleš Hrdlička and the overkill hypothesis.

Hrdlička’s zeal for completeness made him accumulate as many Indian skeletons as possible. Unfortunately, his fascination with the bones of old Indians was not matched by an equivalent interest in the sensibilities of living Native Americans. Both his zeal and his indifference were gaudily on display on Kodiak Island, Alaska, where he exhumed about a thousand skeletons between 1932 and 1936 at Larsen Bay, a village of Alutiiq Indians. Many of the dead were two thousand years old, but some were ripped from recent Alutiiq graves, and a few were not Alutiiq at all—the wife of a local salmon-cannery manager, eager to help Science, shipped Hrdlička the cadavers of Chinese workers when they died.

Larsen Bay was the single most productive excavation of Hrdlička’s long career. Confronted with what he viewed as an intellectual treasure trove, this precise, meticulous, formal man was to all appearances overcome by enthusiasm and scholarly greed. In his pop-eyed hurry to pull bones out of the ground, he tore open the site with a bulldozer and didn’t bother taking notes, sketching maps, or executing profile drawings. Without documentation, Hrdlička was unable afterward to make head or tail of the houses, storage pits, hearths, and burial wells he uncovered. He pored through old Russian and American accounts of the area to find answers, but he never asked the people in Larsen Bay about their own culture. Perhaps his failure to approach the Alutiiq was a good thing. Hrdlička’s excavation, made without their permission, so angered them that they were still steaming when Denny was there on a salmon boat fifty years later. (In 1991 the Smithsonian gave back the skeletons, which the townspeople reburied.)

Overkill was part of the same mindset, Denny told me. As the environmental movement gathered steam in the 1960s, he said, white people had discovered that Indians were better stewards of the land. Indigenous peoples were superior to them—horrors! The archies—that was what Denny called archaeologists—had to race in and rescue Caucasian self-esteem. Which they did with the ridiculous conceit that the Indians had been the authors of an ecological mega-disaster. Typical, Denny thought. In his view, archaeologists’ main function was to make white people feel good about themselves—an opinion that archaeologists have learned, to their cost, is not Denny’s alone.

“Archaeologists are trapped in their own prejudices,” Vine Deloria Jr., the Colorado political scientist, told me. The Berkeley geographer Carl Sauer first brought up overkill in the 1930s, he said. “It was immediately knocked down, because a lot of shellfish and little mammals also went extinct, and these mythical Pleistocene hit men wouldn’t have wiped them out, too. But the supposedly objective scientific establishment likes the picture of Indians as ecological serial killers too much to let go of it.”

To Deloria’s way of thinking, not only overkill but the entire Clovis-first theory is a theoretical Rube Goldberg device. “There’s this perfect moment when the ice-free corridor magically appears just before the land bridge is covered by water,” he said. “And the paleo-Indians, who are doing fine in Siberia, suddenly decide to
sprint
over to Alaska. And then they
sprint
through the corridor, which just in time for them has been replenished with game. And they keep sprinting so fast that they overrun the hemisphere even faster than the Europeans did—and this even though they didn’t have horses, because they were so busy killing them all.” He laughed. “And these are the same people who say traditional origin tales are improbable!”

Activist critiques like those from Denny and Deloria have had relatively little impact on mainstream archaeologists and anthropologists. In a sense, they were unnecessary: scientists themselves have launched such a sustained attack on the primacy of Clovis, the existence of the ice-free corridor, and the plausibility of overkill that the Clovis consensus has shattered, probably irrecoverably.