It began like many archaeological discoveries in the Americas: woodcutters working along the banks of Chinchihuapi Creek, a tributary of the Maullín River about 36 miles from the Pacific coast of southern Chile near Puerto Montt, observed the bones of very large animals protruding from an eroded bank.
The investigations that followed, however, beginning in the 1970s at what became known as the Monte Verde archaeological site, revealed more than just the dwelling place of some of Chile’s earliest residents. Findings there, including radiocarbon dates indicating a human presence as early as 14,500 years ago, led to a controversy that shook the foundations of American anthropology, upending past thinking on not only who had been the first to arrive at sites like this one—now a proposed UNESCO World Heritage Site—but more fundamentally, whether people initially migrated into the Americas far earlier than previously ever imagined.
For many years, the debate over whether sites like Monte Verde provided unequivocal evidence that there were people in the New World prior to the appearance of the Clovis culture—long recognized as the oldest confirmed cultural manifestation in the Americas, and dating to no earlier than around 13,500 years ago—remained one of American archaeology’s most challenging questions.
With time, however, and a growing number of similar discoveries at sites in North and South America that would follow, the debate appeared to have been settled: pre-Clovis had become the accepted paradigm, and the scientific data first uncovered by archaeologist Tom Dillehay, Ph.D, at Monte Verde clearly showed it.
However, that doesn’t mean there haven’t been a few holdouts who continue to argue that the once widely accepted “Clovis horizon” may still be closer to the mark, in terms of when the first large-scale migrations into the Americas began. While their numbers have diminished somewhat within the 21st century, some archaeologists like Dr. Todd Surovell, a Professor and Department Head of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wyoming, have kept the debate alive by challenging what he and a few colleagues view as a kind of new orthodoxy that has slowly emerged out of what was once considered a fringe idea in American archaeology.
Now, as evidenced by a recent study by Surovell and several co-authors published in Science, not only is the debate still burning after many decades, but the enigmatic Monte Verde archaeological site appears to have maintained its place at the center of the controversy.
Hellbound and Down 