Dr. Michael Collins

[Charlie Hatchett]

This guy completely fascinates me:

Archeologist digs up new truths in Central Texas

Dr. Michael Collins, a research associate at the University’s Texas Archeological Research Laboratory (TARL), has discovered some fascinating artifacts during his career. He has also discovered that old archeological theories can be as hard to break as the rock that holds those artifacts. After years of dedicated research, Collins has amassed substantial evidence to challenge 20th-century scientific thought on the origins of humankind in the Americas.

The saga began in 1990 with a phone call from a fossil-casting expert in Illinois. The man told Collins that an archeological antiquities collector had asked him to cast copies of some prehistoric spearheads and engraved stones unearthed at a site in Central Texas. The location, now known as the Gault site, had been plundered for years by collectors looking for ancient artifacts. The spearheads and stones were special because they indicated that the earliest known inhabitants of the Americas, known as the Clovis people, lived on the site between 12,500 and 13,500 years ago.

Things got really interesting a few years later when the Gault site changed hands and the new owners conducted their own dig. Uncovering the mandible of a mammoth and knowing they could not remove the find without destroying it, they called Collins. By then, he knew the site was rich with archeological information. Even though collectors had removed evidence of the last 9,000 years of human existence at the location, they hadn’t dug far enough to get to the era of the Clovis people. Collins and TARL were able to lease 34 acres of the site for three years, and in that time they roughly doubled the number of Clovis-era artifacts excavated to date in North America.
Recovered from the Gault site in Bell County, these tools were used by humans thousands of years ago to kill game, cut wood, and gather food.
Click here for larger image.

The artifacts tell a story far different from accepted thought on the earliest dwellers in the Americas. Until Gault, most archeologists subscribed to what is known as the Clovis First Theory, which holds that the first humans in the Americas arrived here some 13,500 years ago, making their way from Siberia to Alaska by walking over a now submerged land bridge in the Bering Strait. These migrating peoples traveled down a narrow corridor between two towering ice sheets into the Great Plains, which were teeming with prey, and began populating the Americas as a highly mobile, game hunting people.

Researchers began poking holes in the Clovis First Theory in the late 1970s with the discovery of the Monte Verde site in Southern Chile. Collins, who was associated with that project for more than 20 years, says Monte Verde’s inhabitants were settled tent dwellers and not nomads. Carbon dating indicates they lived there about 14,500 years ago, a thousand years earlier than the Clovis First Theory postulates.

Then came the Gault site, which Collins describes as “the poster child for debunking the Clovis First Theory. You couldn’t have designed a more perfect site.” Archeological excavation there — led by teams from TARL — shows that rather than being specialized, roaming mammoth hunters, Gault’s Clovis inhabitants lived at the site off and on for 200 to 300 years. They used stone tools to kill game, cut meat, work hide, and gather plants.

Clovis First has suffered other blows. The latest scientific studies show that the ice-free corridor into the Americas probably didn’t appear before 12,000 years ago. And because of Monte Verde and several digs in North America, Collins says, “we now believe people arrived in the Americas considerably earlier than we once thought — perhaps as long ago as 20,000 years.”

How they got here remains uncertain. But Collins and others believe the first Americans likely arrived by boat, and the scenarios vary as to how this happened. “Gault is having its intended effect and the Clovis First Theory is becoming less and less defensible,” says Collins. “But when you dismantle a paradigm, you’ve got to replace it. We’ve got a long way to go in formulating a new theory.”

The questions that must be answered, he says, are who were the first Americans, when did they get here, where did they come from, and how did they arrive? “When we answer these questions, our answers have to withstand the scrutiny of archeologists, human biologists, linguists, geologists, oceanographers, and paleoclimatologists,” he says. “We’ve got a big order.”

Much of the work done by Collins and his team of six researchers and scores of volunteers has come from private philanthropy. In fact, Collins’ father Walter, an independent oil and gas man who died in January, was a significant contributor. “He got me interested in archeology when I was a child,” Collins says, recalling that the two collected spearheads and other artifacts and studied them together. “He worked in his oil and gas office almost until the day he died at the age of 98. He was a pretty remarkable guy.”

Collin's was one of the first respected preClovis advocates.

[marduk]

he must be a busy man what with being a revolutionary Irish war leader and an astronaut as well
where does he find time

[Minimalist]

Fascinating.

[Beagle]

This may be the most exciting period of time in North American archaeology. The Topper site has yielded dates of 50KBP, the hypothesized 40,000 yo footprints in Mexico have been shown to probably be in error, new news from the Calico site, etc, etc.

Still too early to gush. Can't wait though.

[Charlie Hatchett]

he must be a busy man what with being a revolutionary Irish war leader and an astronaut as well
where does he find time

Silly, everyone knows he has a top secret time machine...geez, do your research

Here's a cool paper Collin's wrote concerning Monte Verde:

...This is a bona fide archeological assemblage, it is very old, and it has profound implications for American prehistory...


http://www.archaeology.org/online/featu ... llins.html

[War Arrow]

Pre-emptive apologies if this has already been covered but...

I remember reading something along the lines of the indigenous peoples of the southernmost tip of South America sharing an above coincidental quota of mitochondrial DNA with the Australian aborigines, although the author gave no particular conclusion.

Naturally I can't remember my source. I'll have a look, or at least make a note next time I come across it. Not that this automatically has any direct bearing on the Clovis-or-not-to-Clovis matter, or even the Monte Verde thing, although if I was able to remember my source, perhaps I'd be able to say it did. Or perhaps not. I don't know. Help.

Maybe it was all a dream.

Aha. Found it. Well, found something along similar lines, although I suspect this is old news to most of you:

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/102/51/18309

[marduk]

I remember reading something along the lines of the indigenous peoples of the southernmost tip of South America sharing an above coincidental quota of mitochondrial DNA with the Australian aborigines, although the author gave no particular conclusion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuegians

[Charlie Hatchett]

Subject: STAA's Annual Meeting Jan. 13th, 2007
>Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2006 11:22:49 -0600
>
>The meeting place is still being determined so check the STAA Calendar
>often.
>
>www.staa.org
>
>STAA TALK, 13 JANUARY 2007
>
>TITLE: Searching for the First Americans
>
>ABSTRACT: It has been 80 years since the finds at Folsom New Mexico
>established that humans had been in America before the end of the
>Pleistocene and the search was begun to learn more about when and how the
>Americas were first peopled. For most of those 80 years, Clovis was widely
>accepted as the first American archeological culture, but that is no longer
>a viable interpretation. Today, we still do not have a definitive account
>of who the first Americans were, when they arrived, by what route or routes
>they came, what their culture or cultures were like, and what the
>environmental conditions they experienced were like. We do know that
>people were in the Western Hemisphere before Clovis, that they likely came
>by boat, that their arrival was not an event but the culmination of a long
>process of maritime adaptations, and that by Clovis times, there were human
>populations in place in South and North America. Texas has contributed
>important evidence toward the recent theoretical shift toward acceptance of
>preClovis and will undoubtedly continue to do so.
>
>
>Collins Biographical Sketch:
>
>Michael B. Collins, PhD
>Research Associate
>Texas Archeological Research Laboratory
>The University of Texas at Austin
>
>Michael Collins began his interest in the prehistory of Texas during the
>drought of the 1950s when wind erosion exposed countless sites near his
>hometown of Midland. Finds of fossils of Pleistocene mammoth, horse,
>camel, and other animals as well as Paleoindian artifacts, sparked a
>particularly keen interest in the earliest cultures of North America which
>has been central to his career ever since. Collins studied geology and
>archeology at the University of Texas at Austin (BA 1965, MA 1968) and the
>University of Arizona (PhD 1974) and has since conducted research in the
>Near East and Europe, as well as South, Central, and North America. He has
>investigated or reported on several of the key Paleoindian sites of Texas,
>including Pavo Real, Wilson-Leonard, Kincaid, and Gault. Fifty of Collins'
>158 published articles, books, monographs, and book chapters are on
>Paleoindian topics. He is author of Clovis Blade Technology (1999,
>University of Texas Press) and Archeology in Central Texas in The
>Prehistoric Archaeology of Texas (2004, edited by T. K. Perttula, Texas A&M
>University Press), as well as editor and coauthor of Wilson-Leonard, an
>11,000-year Archeological Record of Hunter-Gathers in Central Texas (1998,
>Texas Archeological Research Laboratory and Texas Department of
>Transportation).
>
>Dr. Robert Ricklis will also speak on the infamous Buckeye Knoll Site
>(41VT98) near Victoria, Texas.