First Peoples in a New World: Colonizing Ice Age America / Edition 1

by David J. Meltzer

Overview

More than 12,000 years ago, in one of the greatest triumphs of prehistory, humans colonized North America, a continent that was then truly a new world. Just when and how they did so has been one of the most perplexing and controversial questions in archaeology. This dazzling, cutting-edge synthesis, written for a wide audience by an archaeologist who has long been at the center of these debates, 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. David J. Meltzer pulls together the latest ideas from archaeology, geology, linguistics, skeletal biology, genetics, and other fields to trace the breakthroughs that have revolutionized our understanding in recent years. Among many other topics, he explores disputes over the hemisphere's oldest and most controversial sites and considers how the first Americans coped with changing global climates. He also confronts some radical claims: that the Americas were colonized from Europe or that a crashing comet obliterated the Pleistocene megafauna. Full of entertaining descriptions of on-site encounters, personalities, and controversies, this is a compelling behind-the-scenes account of how science is illuminating our past.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520267992
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	11/30/2010
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	464
Sales rank:	339,669
Product dimensions:	10.08(w) x 11.44(h) x 1.16(d)

About the Author

David J. Meltzer is Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory in the Department of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is the author of Folsom: New Archaeological Investigations of a Classic Paleoindian Bison Kill (UC Press) and Search for the First Americans, among other books.

Table of Contents

Preface
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

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"A must read for anyone interested in what is undeniable the greatest debate in American archaeology. . . . Essential."—Choice

"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."—Antiquity

"A good review of topics and controversies surrounding the peopling of North America."—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."—Journal of Iowa Archeological Society

Editorial Reviews

A must read for anyone interested in what is undeniable the greatest debate in American archaeology. . . . Essential.

Choice

[Meltzer] has written the most in-depth synthesis of the history of the debate about the early peopling of North America yet published.

Journal Of Iowa Archeological Society - Juliet E. Morrow

A good review of topics and controversies surrounding the peopling of North America.

Great Plains Research - Susan C. Vehik

Informative and entertaining.

Antiquity - E. James Dixon

A masterful exploration and encapsulation of the last two centuries of American archaeology and the first five millennia of the earliest Americans.

American Scientist

The book is . . . sharply written and narratively compelling.

Journal Of World History - Mark Dailey

It was long axiomatic among archeologists that the prehistoric Clovis people of the Southwest were the first people in the Americas, arriving 12,000 years ago. Meltzer synthesizes controversial recent evidence that humans arrived in the Americas earlier than that and may not all have come across the Bering Strait from Asia. Meltzer also conveys well the heated debates among archeologists on this crucial subject (an argument among experts after examining evidence in South American turns rather ugly). Drawing on archeology, linguistics, geology, genetics and other disciplines, anthropologist Meltzer (Search for the First Americans) explores that evidence, as well as what we know about the Clovis people, such as evidence regarding Ice Age terrain indicating prehistoric peoples' ability to adapt to an uninhabitable and unfamiliar continent, and the speed with which they might have moved across the new world. Sometimes dense and academic, often lively and occasionally bemused, Meltzer's study-part detective story and part archeological research-is stimulating and sometimes tantalizingly controversial. 16 color and 64 b&w illus. (Apr.)

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