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the native americans 11 1 THE NATIVE AMERICANS The mammoth was huge, perhaps twelve feet tall at the shoulder. Its forelegs were the forelegs of a behemoth. Its long, curved tusks swept the space in front of it like the antennae of a giant insect frozen in ivory. And even though it fed on grasses, not flesh, one blow from its feet or one swing of its tusks would have crushed any predator foolish enough to threaten it. Yet somehow, eleven thousand years ago, a small band of hunters crept close enough to hurl at least eight stone-tipped spears into the upper right side of this massive creature ’s body. The spears may not have killed the mammoth, at least not immediately . The bones that eroded out of an arroyo a mile northwest of Naco, Arizona , just north of the modern Mexican border, show no signs of butchering. But even if the mammoth eluded its pursuers to die alone, the audacity of those ice-age hunters transfixes our imaginations. Armed with nothing more powerful than wood and stone, they stalked an animal larger than any land mammal alive today. The fluted spear points those paleolithic people left behind are the first incontrovertible evidence we have of human society in the Southwest. Arizona history did not begin when emigrants from Europe first put pen to paper, but its early chapters are written in stone and clay, not ink. Some call this “prehistory” to distinguish it from the written record that followed hundreds of generations later. That distinction is an artificial one. The Naco mammoth is a text to be interpreted, just like a letter from a Jesuit missionary or a federal census manuscript. All tell the story of people through space and time. All are history—Arizona history—a part of our past. Paleo-Indians and Archaic Peoples And history is a selective and interpretive discipline. As Steve Lekson argues in his provocative A History of the Ancient Southwest, our knowledge of the preColumbian past reflects a series of orthodoxies that slowly crumble through 12 arizona the patient accumulation of evidence. One such orthodoxy is the Clovis-first hypothesis. For decades, most scientists contended that the first humans in the Americas were so-called Paleo-Indians who fashioned stone spear points named for the site near Clovis, New Mexico, where the first point was found. Ancestors of the people who stalked the Naco mammoth, these small bands of big-game hunters crossed Beringia, the land bridge that linked Siberia with Alaska during the last ice age, when sea levels were lower. Massive ice sheets blocked their progress southward until an ice-free corridor emerged around 10000 bc. The Clovis people quickly fanned out across North America, encountering mammoths, camels, ground sloths, and horses that had never faced human hunters before. The result, in the opinion of geoscientist Paul Martin, was “Pleistocene overkill”—the rapid decimation of nearly all species of large ice-age mammals. In a sense, the hunters who pursued the Naco mammoth may have represented the first of Arizona’s many cycles of boom and bust, creating a society that relentlessly exploited a resource until that resource was depleted or destroyed between 12,000 and 10,500 years ago. All the sites where Clovis points have been recovered fall within a brief period around 9000 bc. So how does the Clovis-first hypothesis account for Monte Verde, a small community five hundred miles south of Santiago, Chile, with bone and charcoal dating about 10550 bc, approximately one thousand years before the earliest Clovis sites? More and more archaeologists are now acknowledging pre-Clovis migrations to the Americas, probably along the Pacific coast, which was free of ice by no later than 12500 bc. Those earlier immigrants may have traveled by boat rather than on foot. Excavators collected nine species of marine algae from the upper levels of Monte Verde, suggesting that seaweeds played an important role in the diet of early Americans. Some scientists even argue that people were following a resource-rich “kelp highway” that undulated along the Pacific Rim from Japan to the Andean coast of South America. Rather than specializing in big game, those pioneers hunted, gathered, and fished for a wide variety of resources, much like the people who followed. Those seafaring groups may never have moved as far inland as Arizona; there is no widely accepted pre-Clovis site in the state. But even if the mammoth hunters were Arizona’s first humans...

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