Little more than a tiny, fragile cranium and clavicle, the bones of the Anzick baby held their secrets for 12,650 years before a Montana backhoe accidentally unearthed the remains, scattered among elk-antler tools and stone points, in 1968. It was the oldest burial site found in North America, researchers determined. But so discovered, the Anzick baby did not give in. It clutched its secrets a few decades longer.
Only this month did a study mapping the Anzick baby’s DNA appear, to broad acclaim, in the journal Nature. The report carried momentous, if not wholly surprising, news: It appears that a single mass migration from Asia—not multiple waves, including populations from Europe or Polynesia, as some have speculated—gave rise to the vast majority of the Americas’ first and dominant settlers. Their genetic signature can be found throughout the hemisphere today.
“It shows that modern Native Americans are the direct descendants—strongly related to, genetically—of the first settlers,” says Michael R. Waters, a geoarchaeologist at Texas A&M University and director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans, who helped write the report.
For all its potential importance, especially to American Indians, the stories inside the Anzick baby’s DNA would have stayed hidden if it weren’t for Mr. Waters, a dogged researcher who has spent much of his career finding the ancient secrets of the Americas hidden in plain archaeological sight. He petitioned the Anzick family, the property owners who controlled the remains, for a year to gain access.
Indeed, the Anzick baby is one of the most prominent examples of a trend sweeping through Paleo-Indian archaeology, the discipline devoted to studying North America’s ancient settlers. Armed with next-gen tools, researchers are revisiting sites once thought too difficult or geologically sketchy. Some call it the “archaeology of archaeology.” And if the field has a grandmaster, it is Mr. Waters.
“You can really learn a lot, fast, by going back to some of these sites that … have always had giant question marks associated with them,” he says.
To an extent, archaeologists have always revisited old sites. For one thing, in a time of tight budgets, it’s a less risky endeavor, since you’re likely to find something. But when it comes to the Paleo-Indian era, sites are so rare that good spots have almost certainly already been dug, says Dennis L. Jenkins, a senior staff archaeologist at the Museum of Natural and Cultural History at the University of Oregon.
“If you’re looking for the Taj Mahal, it’s probably already been destroyed,” Mr. Jenkins says. “If you want to investigate, you’re going to have to go to the foundations and deal with previous depredations. That means revisiting sites.”
Driven by Technology
This surge of interest is driven in large part by the gradual erosion of the Clovis compact, a former consensus among archaeologists that a clutch of 13,000-year-old sites scattered across North America, sharing distinctive stone, bone, and ivory tools, represented the land’s oldest human inhabitants, called the Clovis people. For decades, archaeologists dismissed sites where researchers claimed pre-Clovis origins, claims that often relied on uncertain stratigraphy or methods.
“The evidence just wasn’t there,” says Mr. Waters, who wrote a review in 1985 finding fault with most of the pre-Clovis sites. But over time, a batch of new sites appeared, and he did something that’s not always easy for an established researcher: He changed his mind. There were people before Clovis. The bones said so.
The overturning of “Clovis First,” and the work that Mr. Waters and others have done since in revisiting sites, is driven by technology. DNA sequencing has arrived. Geophysical sensors run the jargon spectrum: handheld X-ray fluorescence; cesium magnetometry; electromagnetic induction. And radiocarbon dating, archaeology’s lifeblood, has made huge leaps. Today’s machines, driven by atomic accelerators, require far less material: Once it took an archive box full of bone to get a date; today, just a short rib will do.
Armed with that updated technology, Mr. Waters went out into the archives and saw problems to fix. It was time to go back and redate these sites. Time to fill in the pre-Clovis map. He hasn’t been alone in this work.
Out in Oregon, Mr. Jenkins has spent more than 10 years excavating the Paisley Caves, a site discovered in 1938. Previous work had found human artifacts tied to its Pleistocene camel, bison, and horse remains. But the dig was poorly documented, and its results unaccepted. Mr. Jenkins went back and discovered coprolites—fossilized human feces, essentially—dating back 14,300 years. Mr. Jenkins is mostly done with Paisley, but he hopes he’s left it in good shape.
“We all hope that archaeologists in the future will come along behind us,” he says. “Certainly we hope to be respected. But we also want them to do a better job than we did.”
Along the Salmon River, in Idaho, Loren G. Davis, director of Oregon State University’s Pacific Slope Archaeological Laboratory, is revisiting a site from the 1960s. If its evidence holds up, it will stand as the most intensive occupation by early peoples in North America.
And in Alaska, Kelly E. Graf, a research assistant professor at Texas A&M, is reinvestigating Dry Creek, the state’s oldest Paleo-Indian site.
The Telling Spearpoint
Still, just a few minutes spent exploring the archaeology of archaeology will find Mr. Waters as the common stratum. And among the many former digs he has worked on, two stand out.
In 1977, Emanuel Manis discovered a mastodon skeleton while digging a pond on his farm near Sequim, Wash., with—what else—a backhoe. Carl E. Gustafson, now an emeritus archaeologist at Washington State University, excavated the bones and found what appeared to be a bone spearpoint thrust into the chest. If the finding held up, it would be clear evidence of pre-Clovis occupation.
Archaeologists pointed to the flaws. There were large error bars on Mr. Gustafson’s radiocarbon dating. What if the backhoe had shoved the tip into the chest? Or an elk had somehow done the deed?
The site lingered in ambiguity until Mr. Waters called Mr. Gustafson. The bones originated 800 years before Clovis, their redating found, and high-resolution scans clearly showed a broken-off spearpoint. DNA analysis made clear that the point came from another mastodon. Humans had killed this creature. Science published the researchers’ work in 2011. It brought closure for Mr. Gustafson after decades of uncertainty.
“People have poured their heart and souls into these sites,” Mr. Waters says. When Mr. Gustafson received the updated evidence, his wife later said she had never seen him so happy, Mr. Waters recalls.
Across the continent, in the Florida Panhandle, another mastodon rested underwater at the bottom of a sinkhole in the Aucilla River. Discovered in the 1980s by James S. Dunbar, a local archaeologist, the bones dated to at least 14,000 years ago. At least a few of the bone and ivory artifacts seemed to have cut marks from human activity. But that was it. The site entered limbo, rarely cited, with few professional archaeologists trained to work in the Aucilla’s tannin-stained waters.
“That place is as remote to you as the moon,” says Jessi Halligan, an assistant professor of archaeology at the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse, who specializes in underwater excavation. “It’s like diving in the darkest iced tea you can imagine.”
Ms. Halligan studied under Mr. Waters until recently, and with Mr. Dunbar they have revisited the site since 2012. This past summer, they excavated 14 square plots in the mastodon layer and made a remarkable, not-yet-published discovery: the broken tip of a hand ax. In a moment, the site went from interesting to potential evidence of humans in Florida a thousand years before Clovis.
More work will come this summer to confirm the geological setting, but everything about the discovery’s context seems solid so far. “It’s opened up new worlds,” Ms. Halligan says.
So more points of light are appearing in the map of pre-Clovis culture. And many of these points have been mapped by Mr. Waters.
This low-hanging fruit won’t always be around. There are only so many Anzick babies, whether cataloged in museums or waiting to be found in previously known sites.
“I wonder how long we’re going to be able to ride this wave,” says Mr. Davis, of Oregon State. “Eventually we’re going to run out of sites that you can go back and evaluate. The next generation of students might have to go find sites themselves.”