A team of researchers from UW, alongside other institutions, published work exploring the date at which humans first migrated to the Americas.
According to Archaeology Department Head and researcher Todd Surovell, the work is part of a long-standing debate over when humans first arrived.
“Certain aspects of it we know better than others. For example, we know people came from northeast Asia, we know it happened during the last ice age, but we don’t exactly know when it happened or the route by which it happened,” Surovell said.
“You’d think it would be a pretty simple question to answer and not only has it proved challenging, it’s incredibly contentious; it’s a debate that’s often not polite.”
Surovell said that much of the contention comes from the fact that the archeological record is very poorly preserved.
In order to examine the integrity of the stratigraphic record, Surovell and other researchers looked at a series of sites across North America and determined how intact the sites were.
The study found clear evidence of humans in Alaska by around 14,000 years ago, and evidence of human presence in the contiguous U.S. by around 13,000 years ago.
“Our results suggest a very traditional model of new world colonization, one that has been around since the 1930s,” Surovell said. “The majority of the field feels strongly that that’s wrong, that people were here thousands of years before 13,000 years ago.”
Surovell said the research is also valuable because of the applicability of the methods of studying stratigraphic integrity that were performed.
“You can take any archaeological site and count the artifacts that you dig and plug it into an equation, and it tells you how strati-graphically intact your site is, and it doesn’t matter how old or where it is,” Surovell said. “I would like to see that people have taken this method and applied it widely to other archaeological sites around the world and applied it to other questions.”
While Surovell said the date of arrival for humans in the Americas is not completely certain, the field of archaeology is getting closer to finding an answer.
“There’s always the possibility that there’s something out there older that we haven’t found yet,” Surovell said. “That means you will never know with certainty the date of arrival, but my gut tells me that the field is getting good enough and the technology is getting good enough and we can combine enough lines of evidence that we should be able to reach an answer sometime soon.”
“We look at a huge range of sites across the continent that pattern beautifully in time and space and this one simply measures and tells a pretty clear story; it’s not the end of the story. We’ll see.”
