Pre Clovis SC site?

[GL]

http://www.aikenstandard.com/FeatureColumns/612-TomMack
"Topper is the oldest radiocarbon-dated site in North America."
Wowee!

 

[Tnmountains]

Wow ! They have been trying to prove this for some time. Maybe this will help.
Thanks GL

 

[Ohio_Doug]

50,000 yrs old

 

[Tnmountains]

Radio-carbon dating alone is not sufficient evidence of age.

I am neither disputing nor agreeing with the proposed dating of the site. I am just making a point.

Plehbah are you knapping now Lol Just kiding you. This would be cool to re write some time lines...

 

[Th3rty7]

Radio-carbon dating alone is not sufficient evidence of age.

I am neither disputing nor agreeing with the proposed dating of the site. I am just making a point.

what else is needed? RC tests are the most advanced technology available, right? Combined with the knowledge and research of experts in the field, what else is available?

 

[naturegirl]

Wow! This is so cool! I like it that we aren't close to having the answers, makes the search ever more enticing.

naturegirl

 

[uniface]

If anybody wants to spend a rainy day off reading a collection of articles about this,

http://web.mac.com/michaelruggeri/T...IKE_RUGGERIS_PRE-CLOVIS_AND_CLOVIS_WORLD.html

will keep you busy taking notes for a while.

 

[naturegirl]

Uniface thanks for the above link, I will return to it many times.

naturegirl

 

[uniface]

Glad to be of service, NG

 

[uniface]

And that's fine, Plehbah. Anybody can propose anything he wants to.

But,in his scheme, only a minority of paleo sites would qualify as "real" paleo sites. The rest of them wouldn't. To heck with whether his scheme interprets the evidence -- the evidence is supposed to fit his scheme, or else it isn't to be accepted as "evidence." That's pretty presumptuous, I (and others) think.

People are always trying to pull stuff like that -- coming up with a definition of something that excludes what the definer doesn't want included. They do the same with pre-Clovis. A lot. Pre-Clovis is so scarce, and so different from site to site, that insisting that material from a site like Meadowcroft, has to fit within a "well-defined cultural horizon known from a number of widely-spaced locations" just rules it out of being considered at all. Which, I suspect, is the point of the exercise. To make it go away the same way a lawyer tries to get evidence against his case ruled inadmissible so it doesn't have to be dealt-with.

IMHO, way too little is known about this stuff for anybody to be making sweeping pronouncements like that. People have done it before and been embarassed.

As long as the arguments appeal to the evidence for support, fine. It's when they don't that we get appeals to stuff like "the concensus of scholarly opinion." Which is fine, too -- as far as it goes. But a hundred times zero still equals zero, whether the zeros have PhDs or not. At that point, the debate has gone from the interpreting the evidence (Science) to what some group believes. And once you're into beliefs, every card in the deck is wild.

 

[creek astronaut]

in clovis new mexico what evidence do they have to support their timeline of 13,000 years?How does it stack up to the Topper sites evindence??Besides Rc dating and the artifacts themselves what other test were done at both sites and which werent??Can either of you answer those questions plehbah and uniface?

 

[uniface]

Not arguing for or against, G-R. Just trying to clarify the broad outline of (some of) what the arguments involve.

Seeing as site reports are not only written after the discoveries are made, but often many years later, I've no idea what's up at Topper except what we all read.

As far as Clovis goes (and every other site), leaving some of it undisturbed for future investigation, when better tools and technologies have come along (like determining climate by pollen analysis) holds out the promise of more data than was possible with 1930s technology.

Here's looking forward.

 

[Neanderthal]

My problem with Al Goodyear's Topper site isn't with the dates at all. It's the same that I have with the Burnham site and a few others. The "artifacts" that they are getting from those levels / dates may not be artifacts at all. You can get 75,000 dates from associated rocks all you want, but if they don't exhibit absolute signs of being humanly modified or utilized artifacts...then they're just fractured rocks.

 

[uniface]

The funny part of this is, everybody's right. There are just different takes on right that hinge on varying perspectives.

Nearly always, it seems, arguments in archaeology are not so much about interpreting evidence as they are about whose procrustian bed the evidence "has to" fit into. The social aspect hijacks the objective.

Relevant Quotations :

"Science advances one funeral at a time."

"Human -- All too human."

 

[uniface]

edit : Turns out that I was writing this while you were writing yours.

Plehbah --

Nice post !

Greatly looking forward to your posting images of your stuff.

Western Clovis is greatly interesting in a number of aspects. For one, generalizations (like Don Dragoo's) from 50 years ago noted that, out west, sidescrapers were common while endscrapers were scarce in comparison to eastern Clovis which showed the reverse. I wonder how well that's stood up over the years.

I wonder too about the genesis of western paleo endscrapers. Tony Baker's seem to be (?) showing that they depended on locally available chalcedonies, agates &c for scraper material, which were in short supply in many places. From memory, that it would take a week of hunting to fill a five gallon bucket with good, tough tool stone. So right off the bat you'd have a different reduction strategy than you'd find in Ohio-Kentucky-Tennessee-Northern Alabama, where good stuff was in such good supply and in good sizes that they could go about making tools systematically rather than improvising them.

Lots of interesting questions -- basic ones. Like, again from TB, that it took cores and blades from the Gault and Christian Co. Ky. sites to convince him that Clovis had a polyhedral blade technology at all. What he was familiar with from his area showed no evidence of this.

Then, once you're into this, the differences of opinion start. One guy says that polyhedral blade technology disappeared around the pleistocene-holocene border, being replaced by bipolar reduction strategies. TB's view seems to be that the PC blade strategy (related to preform end-thinning) was a new idea that came along during the Clovis era. Another lady opines that Clovis points from the Illinois sites she studied began as blades struck from cores rather than from bilaterally-reduced nodules . . .

It just goes on and on. And it's fascinating as all get out, no ?

Looking forward