Description
Book SynopsisOver 12,000 years ago, in one of the greatest triumphs of prehistory, humans colonized North America. This title tells the scientific story of the first Americans: where they came from, when they arrived, and how they met the challenges of moving across the vast, unknown landscapes of Ice Age North America.
Trade Review"A must read for anyone interested in what is undeniable the greatest debate in American archaeology... Essential." Choice "The book is ... sharply written and narratively compelling." -- Mark Dailey Journal Of World History "A masterful exploration and encapsulation of the last two centuries of American archaeology and the first five millennia of the earliest Americans." American Scientist "Informative and entertaining." -- E. James Dixon Antiquity "A good review of topics and controversies surrounding the peopling of North America." -- Susan C. Vehik Great Plains Research "[Meltzer] has written the most in-depth synthesis of the history of the debate about the early peopling of North America yet published." -- Juliet E. Morrow Journal Of Iowa Archeological Society "Often lively and occasionally bemused, Meltzer's study-part detective story and part archeological research-is stimulating and sometimes tantalizingly controversial." Publishers Weekly: Nonfiction (2)
Table of ContentsPreface
Acknowledgments
1. Overture
On Dates and Dating
2. The Landscape of Colonization: Glaciers, Climates, and Environments of Ice Age North America
The Younger Dryas: It Came from Outer Space?
3. From Paleoliths to Paleoindians
A Mammoth Fraud in Science
4. The Pre-Clovis Controversy and Its Resolution
A Visit to Monte Verde
5. Non-archaeological Answers to Archaeological Questions
And Then There Was Kennewick
6. American Origins: The Search for Consensus
Looking for Clovis in All the Wrong Places
7. What Do You Do When No One’s Been There Before?
8. Clovis Adaptations and Pleistocene Extinctions
Is Overkill Dead?
9. Settling In: Late Paleoindians and the Waning Ice Age
Back to Folsom
10. When Past and Present Collide
Further Reading
Notes
References
Index
Plates
