Violent, Racist Archaeology

Michael Lemonick has posted a little profile of archaeologist James Adovasio that reminds me of everything I hate about American anthropology. Adovasio is a major partisan in the ongoing debate over when humans first came to the Americas. There are two theories: "Clovis first," which holds that the Clovis spear points of 13,500 years ago represent the first Americans, and something I am tempted to call "politicized radiocarbon literalism," which holds that people were here thousands of years earlier. As Lemonick tells the story, all archaeologists used to believe in Clovis first (which is not true, but never mind), until radiocarbon dates from the site that made Adovasio famous, the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter, came back thousands of years older:

Nevertheless, it took decades for the archaeological establishment to began to accept these findings, in part because several converging lines of evidence supported the previous model. For one thing, the spear tips that, for decades, were the oldest known human artifacts in North America—called Clovis points, because they were first discovered near Clovis, New Mexico—dated from about thirteen thousand years ago. For another, New World mastodons and other so-called megafauna went extinct around that time, too. And, although glaciers still covered parts of North America at the time, receding ice sheets opened up a corridor along the eastern Rockies that would have allowed Siberians to travel south from Alaska with relative ease.

The key problem with this whole scenario, Adovasio said, is “that five-hundred-year sprint down the hemisphere. People don’t just go running over the landscape. It takes a while to figure out what to eat, when to eat it, which plants will kill you, and so forth.” In part, he attributes the longstanding acceptance of this implausible story to the fact that, until relatively recently, most archaeologists were men. “I mean, who but a male would think that the ancestors of modern Native Americans sprinted to South America and killed everything in their path?”

If the first immigrants did arrive much earlier, the ice-free corridor through the glaciers wouldn’t have been available. But there’s an alternate route: they could have travelled down the coast in boats. “The colonization of Australia occurred even earlier,” Adovasio said. “It’s, in my opinion, simple racism that we never recognized before that the earliest populations in the Americas were capable of building boats.”

See? Adovasio and his ilk can't argue for their views based on the evidence, they have to throw around gratuitous accusations of sexism and racism. Why do they do this? I have the strong impression that they care much more about being on the right side of sexism and racism than they do about being right about the past. This is the great bane of anthropology. At least since Tacitus put pen to paper to write about the ancient Germans, most writers about other cultures have really been more interested in critiquing their own. Adovasio is part of the generation that grew up protesting the Vietnam War, and to him all theories involving violent, male-dominated hunting societies smell of napalm. That there really are violent, male-dominated hunting societies in the world, or that this is the most plausible description anyone has given of Clovis culture, matters not a whit to Adovasio; to think of the first Americans in these terms offends his political sensibilities, so it must be wrong.

The date of human entry into the Americas is a great intellectual problem: on the one hand you have the consistent, believable story of Clovis first, on the other the growing number of sites with earlier radiocarbon dates. Adovasio wants turn it this dispute from a debate into an exercise in mudslinging and political posture. When I read this crap I want to throw up my hands and walk away, but I won't. I refuse to let creeps like Adovasio ruin my exploration of the world.