Название: A Big History of North America: From Montezuma to Monroe
Автор: Kevin Jon Fernlund
Издательство: University of Missouri Press
Год: 2022
Страниц: 388
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true)
Размер: 10.1 MB
The question of when humans first arrived in the Americas is as old as the founding of the American anthropology profession in the late nineteenth century. The question was initially dominated by the Smithsonian Institution’s foremost expert on American antiquity, a cultural evolutionist named William Henry Holmes, and his close associate, the Czech-born Ales Hrdlicka. In 1902 Holmes succeeded John Wesley Powell— the one-armed explorer of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River— as chief of the Bureau of American Ethnology, and as such Holmes was the US government’s leading authority on the American Indian. To answer the antiquity question, he insisted that his fellow archaeologists— and by this, he meant professionals as opposed to amateurs and enthusiasts— use multiple lines of evidence and adhere to the strictest evidentiary standards. At Monte Verde, Dillehay and his team of eighty scientists dated evidence unearthed beside Chinchihuapi Creek, a small tributary of the Maullín River, and found that humans had occupied the area around 12,500 years ago.