Download or read book The Search for the First Americans written by Robert V. Davis and published by . This book was released on 2023-03-07 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who were the First Americans? Where did they come from? When did they get here? Are they the ancestors of modern Native Americans? These questions might seem straightforward, but scientists in competing fields have failed to convince one another with their theories and evidence, much less Native American peoples. The practice of science in its search for the First Americans is a flawed endeavor, Robert V. Davis tells us. His book is an effort to explain why. Most American history textbooks today teach that the First Americans migrated to North America on foot from East Asia over a land bridge during the last ice age, 12,000 to 13,000 years ago. In fact, that theory hardly represents the scientific consensus, and it has never won many Native adherents. In many ways, attempts to identify the first Americans embody the conflicts in American society between accepting the practical usefulness of science and honoring cultural values. Davis explores how the contested definition of "First Americans" reflects the unsettled status of Native traditional knowledge, scientific theories, research methodologies, and public policy as they vie with one another for legitimacy in modern America. In this light he considers the traditional beliefs of Native Americans about their origins; the struggle for primacy--or even recognition as science--between the disciplines of anthropology and archaeology; and the mediating, interacting, and sometimes opposing influences of external authorities such as government agencies, universities, museums, and the press. Fossil remains from Mesa Verde, Clovis, and other sites testify to the presence of First Americans. What remains unsettled, as The Search for the First Americans makes clear, is not only who these people were, where they came from, and when, but also the very nature and practice of the science searching for answers.

Download or read book Origin written by Jennifer Raff and published by Twelve. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! From celebrated anthropologist Jennifer Raff comes the untold story—and fascinating mystery—of how humans migrated to the Americas. ORIGIN is the story of who the first peoples in the Americas were, how and why they made the crossing, how they dispersed south, and how they lived based on a new and powerful kind of evidence: their complete genomes. ORIGIN provides an overview of these new histories throughout North and South America, and a glimpse into how the tools of genetics reveal details about human history and evolution. 20,000 years ago, people crossed a great land bridge from Siberia into Western Alaska and then dispersed southward into what is now called the Americas. Until we venture out to other worlds, this remains the last time our species has populated an entirely new place, and this event has been a subject of deep fascination and controversy. No written records—and scant archaeological evidence—exist to tell us what happened or how it took place. Many different models have been proposed to explain how the Americas were peopled and what happened in the thousands of years that followed. A study of both past and present, ORIGIN explores how genetics is currently being used to construct narratives that profoundly impact Indigenous peoples of the Americas. It serves as a primer for anyone interested in how genetics has become entangled with identity in the way that society addresses the question "Who is indigenous?"

Download or read book The First Amerns Search and Research written by Thomas D. Dillehay and published by CRC-Press. This book was released on 1991-08-13 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume addresses key issues involved in the process by which the first Americans made it to the New World. Key topics discussed include the cultural dynamics of human migration and adaptation, as well as the nature and status of the archaeological record of their migratory processes; the cultural and natural forces forming this record; the archaeologist's perception of data, analytical techniques, and conceptual discordances; and a reconsideration of criteria for evaluating variability in the record. The book also attempts to explicate and enlarge on the theoretical, methodological and conceptual tools employed to guide research and understand the archaeological record. This is a book for archaeologists, anthropologists, and others interested in how and why early people may have come to the Americas.

Download or read book Across Atlantic Ice written by Dennis J. Stanford and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Who were the first humans to inhabit North America? According to the now familiar story, mammal hunters entered the continent some 12,000 years ago via a land bridge that spanned the Bering Sea and introduced the distinctive stone tools of the Clovis culture. Drawing from original archaeological analysis, paleoclimatic research, and genetic studies, noted archaeologists Dennis J. Stanford and Bruce A. Bradley challenge that narrative. Their hypothesis places the technological antecedents of Clovis technology in Europe, with the culture of Solutrean people in France and Spain more than 20,000 years ago, and posits that the first Americans crossed the Atlantic by boat and arrived earlier than previously thought."--Back cover.

Download or read book The First Americans written by James Adovasio and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2009-01-16 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: J. M. Adovasio has spent the last thirty years at the center of one of our most fiery scientific debates: Who were the first humans in the Americas, and how and when did they get there? At its heart, The First Americans is the story of the revolution in thinking that Adovasio and his fellow archaeologists have brought about, and the firestorm it has ignited. As he writes, “The work of lifetimes has been put at risk, reputations have been damaged, an astounding amount of silliness and even profound stupidity has been taken as serious thought, and always lurking in the background of all the argumentation and gnashing of tenets has been the question of whether the field of archaeology can ever be pursued as a science.”

Download or read book Fossil Legends of the First Americans written by Adrienne Mayor and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-04-11 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The burnt-red badlands of Montana's Hell Creek are a vast graveyard of the Cretaceous dinosaurs that lived 68 million years ago. Those hills were, much later, also home to the Sioux, the Crows, and the Blackfeet, the first people to encounter the dinosaur fossils exposed by the elements. What did Native Americans make of these stone skeletons, and how did they explain the teeth and claws of gargantuan animals no one had seen alive? Did they speculate about their deaths? Did they collect fossils? Beginning in the East, with its Ice Age monsters, and ending in the West, where dinosaurs lived and died, this richly illustrated and elegantly written book examines the discoveries of enormous bones and uses of fossils for medicine, hunting magic, and spells. Well before Columbus, Native Americans observed the mysterious petrified remains of extinct creatures and sought to understand their transformation to stone. In perceptive creation stories, they visualized the remains of extinct mammoths, dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and marine creatures as Monster Bears, Giant Lizards, Thunder Birds, and Water Monsters. Their insights, some so sophisticated that they anticipate modern scientific theories, were passed down in oral histories over many centuries. Drawing on historical sources, archaeology, traditional accounts, and extensive personal interviews, Adrienne Mayor takes us from Aztec and Inca fossil tales to the traditions of the Iroquois, Navajos, Apaches, Cheyennes, and Pawnees. Fossil Legends of the First Americans represents a major step forward in our understanding of how humans made sense of fossils before evolutionary theory developed.

Download or read book Paleoamerican Odyssey written by Kelly E. Graf and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 590 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As research continues on the earliest migration of modern humans into North and South America, the current state of knowledge about these first Americans is continually evolving. Especially with recent advances in human genomic studies, both of living populations and ancient skeletal remains, new light is being shed in the ongoing quest toward understanding the full complexity and timing of prehistoric migration patterns. Paleoamerican Odyssey collects thirty-one studies presented at the 2013 conference by the same name, hosted in Santa Fe, New Mexico, by the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A&M University. Providing an up-to-date view of the current state of knowledge in paleoamerican studies, the research gathered in this volume, presented by leaders in the field, focuses especially on late Pleistocene Northeast Asia, Beringia, and North and South America, as well as dispersal routes, molecular genetics, and Clovis and pre-Clovis archaeology.

Download or read book The Search for the First Americans written by Robert V. Davis and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Case study of the practice of science in its search for the First Americans and examines: (1) the conflicts between the methods of science and the traditional beliefs of modern Native Americans; (2) the power struggles for primacy of place internal to the sciences themselves; and (3) the interactions with external authorities such as government agencies, the press, universities, and museums. It examines how First American issues have been defined and how differences in cultural myths, scientific theories, research methodologies and public policy remain unsettled in modern America. It also investigates the blurred boundaries between science and myth as well as between fact and theory that ultimately weaken the credibility of science as a cultural mechanism for interpreting the natural world"--

Download or read book The Prehistory of Texas written by Timothy K. Perttula and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-24 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paleoindians first arrived in Texas more than eleven thousand years ago, although relatively few sites of such early peoples have been discovered. Texas has a substantial post-Paleoindian record, however, and there are more than fifty thousand prehistoric archaeological sites identified across the state. This comprehensive volume explores in detail the varied experience of native peoples who lived on this land in prehistoric times. Chapters on each of the regions offer cutting-edge research, the culmination of years of work by dozens of the most knowledgeable experts. Based on the archaeological record, the discussion of the earliest inhabitants includes a reclassification of all known Paleoindian projectile point types and establishes a chronology for the various occupations. The archaeological data from across the state of Texas also allow authors to trace technological changes over time, the development of intensive fishing and shellfish collecting, funerary customs and the belief systems they represented, long-term changes in settlement mobility and character, landscape use, and the eventual development of agricultural societies. The studies bring the prehistory of Texas Indians all the way up through the Late Prehistoric period (ca. a.d. 700–1600). The extensively illustrated chapters are broadly cultural-historical in nature but stay strongly focused on important current research problems. Taken together, they present careful and exhaustive considerations of the full archaeological (and paleoenvironmental) record of Texas.

Download or read book The Early Settlement of North America written by Gary Haynes and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-11-14 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Early Settlement of North America is an examination of the first recognisable culture in the New World: the Clovis complex. Gary Haynes begins his analysis with a discussion of the archaeology of Clovis fluted points in North America and a review of the history of the research on the topic. He presents and evaluates all the evidence that is now available on the artefacts, the human populations of the time, and the environment, and he examines the adaptation of the early human settlers in North America to the simultaneous disappearance of the mammoths and mastodonts. Haynes offers a compelling re-appraisal of our current state of knowledge about the peopling of this continent and provides a significant new contribution to the debate with his own integrated theory of Clovis, which incorporates vital new biological, ecological, behavioural and archaeological data.

Download or read book First Peoples in a New World written by David J. Meltzer and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2009-05-27 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than 12,000 years ago, in one of the greatest triumphs of prehistory, humans colonized North America, a continent that was then truly a new world. Just when and how they did so has been one of the most perplexing and controversial questions in archaeology. This dazzling, cutting-edge synthesis, written for a wide audience by an archaeologist who has long been at the center of these debates, tells the scientific story of the first Americans: where they came from, when they arrived, and how they met the challenges of moving across the vast, unknown landscapes of Ice Age North America. David J. Meltzer pulls together the latest ideas from archaeology, geology, linguistics, skeletal biology, genetics, and other fields to trace the breakthroughs that have revolutionized our understanding in recent years. Among many other topics, he explores disputes over the hemisphere's oldest and most controversial sites and considers how the first Americans coped with changing global climates. He also confronts some radical claims: that the Americas were colonized from Europe or that a crashing comet obliterated the Pleistocene megafauna. Full of entertaining descriptions of on-site encounters, personalities, and controversies, this is a compelling behind-the-scenes account of how science is illuminating our past.

Download or read book The Settlement of the American Continents written by C. Michael Barton and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2016-03-04 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When many scholars are asked about early human settlement in the Americas, they might point to a handful of archaeological sites as evidence. Yet the process was not a simple one, and today there is no consistent argument favoring a particular scenario for the peopling of the New World. This book approaches the human settlement of the Americas from a biogeographical perspective in order to provide a better understanding of the mechanisms and consequences of this unique event. It considers many of the questions that continue to surround the peopling of the Western Hemisphere, focusing not on sites, dates, and artifacts but rather on theories and models that attempt to explain how the colonization occurred. Unlike other studies, this book draws on a wide range of disciplines—archaeology, human genetics and osteology, linguistics, ethnology, and ecology—to present the big picture of this migration. Its wide-ranging content considers who the Pleistocene settlers were and where they came from, their likely routes of migration, and the ecological role of these pioneers and the consequences of colonization. Comprehensive in both geographic and topical coverage, the contributions include an explanation of how the first inhabitants could have spread across North America within several centuries, the most comprehensive review of new mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosome data relating to the colonization, and a critique of recent linguistic theories. Although the authors lean toward a conservative rather than an extreme chronology, this volume goes beyond the simplistic emphasis on dating that has dominated the debate so far to a concern with late Pleistocene forager adaptations and how foragers may have coped with a wide range of environmental and ecological factors. It offers researchers in this exciting field the most complete summary of current knowledge and provides non-specialists and general readers with new answers to the questions surrounding the origins of the first Americans.

Download or read book South American Contributions to World Archaeology written by Mariano Bonomo and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-11-08 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on South American archaeology and its contributions to the broader global archaeological discussion in theory, methods and new interpretations of the archaeological record. These include discussions on human peopling and colonization of the continent, domestication of plants and emergence of complex societies. This volume covers a wide variety of sub-disciplines in archaeology, including archaeobotany, zooarchaeology, molecular archaeology, bioarchaeology, geoarchaeology. The chapters span from the pre-Columbian to contemporaneous indigenous societies for all the main geographical and ecological zones of South America. The book discusses how particular cases of South American archaeology have contributed to the understanding of a global and basic issue: human relations with their environments and landscapes during the past. The authors focus on the latest results produced by multidisciplinary studies carried out at archaeological sites in several areas of South America ranging from studies of early hunter-gatherers through the historic period. This work would be of interest to researchers in archaeology and Latin American studies.

Download or read book Archaeology of Piedra Museo Locality written by Laura Miotti and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-02-04 with total page 543 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book highlights the knowledge about landscapes and characteristics of the earliest hunter-gatherer lifeway in Southern Patagonia. It presents an analysis of the archaeological investigations carried out during three decades by an interdisciplinary team that involved archaeologists, anthropologists, paleontologists, geologists and specialists in pollen and diatoms. The database yielded was recovered from systematic survey and excavations from the Pleistocene and Holocene stratigraphic layers of the rockshelter known as AEP-1, Piedra Museo Locality, situated in the central plateau of Santa Cruz Province, Argentina. Piedra Museo is a unique place in the world of high academic interest with some of the earliest archaeological remains in the Americas. Researchers defined two strata and several Stratigraphic units in the site based on the sedimentological and pedological characteristics. The depositional zones contain archaeological remains that are interpreted as hunting events corresponding to two main different occasions in the human colonization of the region, and a third human occupation during the Middle Holocene. Last one occurred then of the massive rockshelter roof colapse. The faunal remains led to a new approach to the palaeoenvironmental evolution of this enclosed basin. This volume describes the management of lithic raw materials and social networks from first human occupation of the Patagonian region to territorial consolidation of hunter-gatherer societies.

Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Global Indigenous History written by Ann McGrath and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-30 with total page 979 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to Global Indigenous History presents exciting new innovations in the dynamic field of Indigenous global history while also outlining ethical, political, and practical research. Indigenous histories are not merely concerned with the past but have resonances for the politics of the present and future, ranging across vast geographical distances and deep time periods. The volume starts with an introduction that explores definitions of Indigenous peoples, followed by six thematic sections which each have a global spread: European uses of history and the positioning of Indigenous people as history’s outsiders; their migrations and mobilities; colonial encounters; removals and diasporas; memory, identities, and narratives; deep histories and pathways towards future Indigenous histories that challenge the nature of the history discipline itself. This book illustrates the important role of Indigenous history and Indigenous knowledges for contemporary concerns, including climate change, spirituality and religious movements, gender negotiations, modernity and mobility, and the meaning of ‘nation’ and the ‘global’. Reflecting the state of the art in Indigenous global history, the contributors suggest exciting new directions in the field, examine its many research challenges and show its resonances for a global politics of the present and future. This book is invaluable reading for students in both undergraduate and postgraduate Indigenous history courses.

Download or read book America Before the European Invasions written by Alice Beck Kehoe and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-11 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning with the immigrants from Asia, through inventions of agriculture, cities and kingdoms, American First Nations are integral to the history of the United States. They explored the continent, pioneered its waterways and mountain passes, cleared forests, irrigated deserts, and ranched its great plains. Invading Europeans justifies their conquests by denying the evidence of American Indian civilisations. Using her familiarity with the archaeological remains and remnants, Alice Kehoe builds a fascinating prehistory, highlighting the research puzzles along the way. This book presents an enthralling look at the depth and diversity of American history - before the Europeans and the deadly epidemics they brought with them decimated whole nations.

Download or read book When the Land Was Young written by Sharman Apt Russell and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2022-12-06 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An award-winning science and nature writer “presents a lively, confident, and free-flowing history of archaeology in America” (Booklist). Digging up the relics of the past is not without controversy. With insight and eloquence, Sharman Apt Russell reveals here that when it comes to archaeological study, there is more than one way to examine history. Raising provocative questions anew about subjects such as the role of humans in the extinction of the large land mammals of the Pleistocene epoch and the repatriation of Native American graves, Russell, winner of the John Burroughs Medal—whose recipients include Rachel Carson—explores the question of what we owe to our past. Through a series of interviews with archaeologists and activists who have helped modernize the field, Russell provides fascinating ideas about the role of archaeology in the stewardship of antiquity, as well as the implications for our common future. “Russell’s work is thoughtful, beautifully written, and well documented. A good way for lay readers to become more informed.” —Library Journal “Agile, cerebral, ruminative, entirely satisfying.” —Kirkus Reviews