The Day the Johnboat Went up the Mountain: Stories from My Twenty Years in South Carolina Maritime Archaeology

Dredging for the First Americans

69 Dredging for the First Americans Huge cypress trees rising from the waters of Smiths Lake Creek in Allendale County shaded us from the August sun as we prepared our scuba gear. On the opposite bank, an eight-foot alligator slithered into the water, surfacing no more than thirty feet from where we intended to enter the creek. The critter nonchalantly eyed our activities—supposing, of course, that alligators are ever nonchalant. We ignored the threat. He would move off as soon as we entered the water. At least he had every day so far. To our right the creek narrowed, and the waterscape took on the appearance of a swamp. Here the cypress trees crowded the water, making passage by boat nearly impossible. Spanish moss dripping from the branches added to the primordial setting. Wading in the shallows near a small patch of dry ground, a great blue heron searched for a meal. A cover of dwarf palmetto fronds growing along the edge of the water disguised his movements. The large water moccasin that greeted us on the first day had moved off to a more peaceful area. We furtively scanned the area nevertheless. All was quiet except for the calls of some nearby birds and the clank of our aluminum scuba tanks as we unloaded them from the rear of our Suburban. Smiths Lake Creek was a place of seething beauty and familiar danger. If I didn’t know better, I would think the scene hadn’t changed in thousands of years. On second thought, perhaps it hadn’t. It was the summer of 1995, and SCIAA archaeologist Albert Goodyear had brought SCIAA’s Underwater Archaeology Division to Allendale to search the bottom of Smiths Lake Creek for evidence of early Native American occupation. To the dive team, it was just another project in the backwaters of South Carolina. Little did we know that this site held the potential of helping answer one of the most elusive archaeology mysteries in the Western Hemisphere: when did humans first arrive here? 70 The Day the Johnboat Went up the Mountain When I was in high school, back in the 1960s, I learned that humans arrived in North America about twelve thousand years ago. Teachers taught this as scientific fact. All the experts agreed. There was irrefutable evidence, specifically two pieces of evidence. First, the oldest artifacts found in North America dated no older than twelve thousand years. Second, the land bridge between Asia and North America, through which the first Americans supposedly migrated, did not open up until twelve thousand years ago. This was the start of what many archaeologists call the Paleoindian period. Archaeologists believed these people lived in highly mobile small bands of hunter-gatherers, hunting megafauna (mastodon and mammoth), bison, and caribou. The most abundant artifacts remaining from these people are stone tools. The famous Clovis point, named after Clovis, New Mexico, where this type of spear point was discovered in context with mastodon bones, has become symbolic of these early Americans. Archaeologists often refer to their way of life as “the Clovis culture.” Clovis points can be six or seven inches long but are usually shorter. Their fluted stems identify and define these points. Today archaeologists are discovering that the 12,000 b.p. (before present) date for the first Americans may not be correct. Over the past few decades several archaeology sites in North and South America have provided evidence that humans culturally different than the Clovis people may have actually populated the Western Hemisphere far earlier. Three of the most prominent of these “pre-Clovis” sites are Monte Verde in Chile, Meadowcroft in western Pennsylvania, and Cactus Hill in Virginia. At Monte Verde, Tom Dillehay of the University of Kentucky has recovered lithic artifacts that show that people inhabited the area by 14,500 b.p. Dillehay believes these people subsisted on a varied diet that included mussels, crawfish, potatoes, fruits and nuts, small game such as birds, and the occasional mastodon. They lived in low, tentlike structures lashed together with cord and covered with bark and mastodon hide. The stone tools found by Dillehay consist of sharp-edged flakes or faceted pebbles that show signs of use. The Meadowcroft site in Pennsylvania consists of an overhang jutting from a rock face forty-three feet above the ground. Excavations under James Adovasio of Mercyhurst College revealed an unfluted point and small bladelike flakes in a layer radiocarbon dated to...