Re: Question re. Copper artifact CanadianArcticformerRe:CopperCasting In America (Trevelyan)

From: Floyd L. Davidson (floyd_at_barrow.com)
Date: 07/24/04 

Date: Sat, 24 Jul 2004 03:15:00 -0800

"stevewhittet" <whittet@adelphia.net> wrote:
>"Floyd L. Davidson" <floyd@barrow.com> wrote:
>>
>> Despite the commonly stated "There are no Clovis artifacts in
>> Siberia" apparently there have been some found. But it also
>> appears that they might well have been manufactured in North
>> America and transported to Siberia too, because there just are
>> not enough to demonstrate any common usage or manufacture.
>
>Right. Siberia is a very big place with very few people in it c12,000 BC
>
>Citing a tool assemblage that's thousands of miles away from Alaska
>isn't a very effective argument. Even a tool assemblage in Kamchatka
>is a stretch.

But if you can say that, just look at how much farther removed
from reality that whole business of a connection between
European Solutrean and American Clovis has to be! Both time and
an impossible distance are involved. With the various Asian
connection the timing is a least right, and the miles are not
only not impossible, but clearly *were* traveled by some people.

>> >Tony Baker and Bruce Bradley are making observations about lithics
>> >which should probably be evaluated according to how well the reader
>> >figures they know their subject.
>>
>> I don't mind their observations about lithics. Their theory
>> human migration is silly on its face.
>
>You ruled Siberia and a land Bridge out, You could follow the
>refugia route but there is no population on the other side
>to make the trip if we don't allow its as easy for maritimes
>c 12,000 BP to use the Vikings route as the Aleutians
>where do they come from?

I certainly do not have any more of an answer than anyone else.
What I'm objecting to is speculation without any evidence, and
then presenting it as if there were some reason to believe it is
fact.

>> >> Those two are interesting, and provide good information. They
>> >> lack a broad enough base though, because they largley consider
>> >> only artifact distributions within what is now the Lower-48
>> >> United States.
>> >
>> >Actually they consider quite a range of sites in Europe, Asia,
>> >Canada, Alaska and the US
>>
>> But they "largley" [sic] stick with a limited range in North
>> America. The point I was making the the other sites are given
>> only casual accord.
>
>There is a long list of cites, after you have read all their
>references what comes across is that they kept trying to get
>peieces of the puzzle to fit the land bridge or Aleutians
>and the straw that finally broke the camels back was the
>similarities and differences in the lithic technologies.

Exactly. As I pointed out, even Kunz tried very hard to make
his data fit the accepted model, to the point of what I thought
absolutely silly postulation.

>> I think the problem is that the science and the collection of
>> information is too young. They lend weight to numbers, and the
>> numbers are biased by which areas are easiest to investigate
>> rather than where the artifacts were originally manufactured.
>
>This discussion has been ongoing at mamoth trumpet forever.

Yeah. I check it out every couple of years, but I don't really
make any effort to keep up with it.

>> >"Michael Kunz, who discovered Mesa in 1978, says the site's old date
>>
>> Keep in mind too that while the site was discovered in 1978, it
>> was not studied significantly until the 1990's. Kunz and
>> Reanier did more work in 1988-89 and discovered there had been
>> dating errors for what was done in 1979. That caused them to
>> become more interested, but of course it was several years
>> before enough work had been done to make it the heavy influence
>> that it is today.
>
>I can remember going to the library to get xerox copies of their
>articles before all this stuff was on the internet. Believe me their
>positions have all gone back and forth several times. The Beringa
>theory that dates to the fifties was something everyone has
>seemingly always just accepted.

And the biggest problem with it was not just that it wasn't
supported by any real evidence that ruled out other scenarios,
it was so ingrained that any data or analysis which didn't match
up was simply rejected (and the authors discounted).

That's why Kunz, while providing a plethora of evidence that it
was not so, wouldn't say so:

>> Kunz does not go out on limbs with chain saws in hand. He didn't
>> say that in 1978! He didn't say it in 1988 either! He would
>> barely admit it was possible in 1998, which is about when the
>> significance became so overwhelming that the accepted nature of
>> what it meant began to dramatically change.
>
>Yes
...

>> I don't understand what you mean. I don't believe that Barrow
>> was ever avoided by Eskimo cultures, though it certainly was
>> by the Paleo-Indian cultures that were at Mesa.
>
>The Mesa style lithic technology is generally found on the north
>slope of the Brooks range so what you have is two cultures
>with different technologies sharing some parts of the same range.

Not sharing it. They existed at different times, separated by a
couple thousand years. It is also clear that the Paleo-Indians
(just as with modern Indians) pretty much were inland, while the
Paleo-Eskimos (just as with modern Eskimos) pretty much were
coastal.

>> First, the area shown was not inhabited by Eskimos until much
>> later than the Paleo-Indian cultures. The maritime Eskimos
>> pretty much stuck to the coast, even before Thule Technology.
>> (There some who did not though, so that does not exclude inland
>> and riverine Eskimo cultures.)
>
>c 7600 BC in the Brooks range is more or less Archaic rather than Paleo
>Indian
>with on one side Pacific Eskimo and then the c 4000 BC Artic small tool
>tradition
>maritime dates for Barrow being mostly microliths as in Siberia and the
>Beaufort Sea
>lithics being fluted in the Mesa tradition representing an interface of two
>different cultures
>one much earlier than the other..

Yes. They were separated by both time and space, with fuzzy
edges on both.

>> There would have been no place along the coast where they did
>> not go. The difference is how long they stayed there, and how
>> much of their time they concentrate in such areas. Prior to
>> Thule Technology they would have been very much transient in the
>> area around Barrow for example. Afterwards this would be a base
>> of operations rather than a location they passed through.
>
>Most of the early sites were probably shallow beaches that are now submerged

That is very possible. There would not have been much more land
available north of Barrow, but in the northern Bering Sea and
in the Chukchi Sea north of the Bering Straits a 250 foot
difference in sea level would be dramatic. However, along the
Arctic Ocean coast the area between the coast and the Brooks
Range is not as productive for hunters as either the foothills
or the coast. Hence if prior to say 14,000k years ago the sea
level was lower, there would not likely be much evidence left
where we currently can find it.

If what was here prior to that was uniquely maritime, we aren't
going to finding artifacts to demonstrate it. As it stands, the
evidence we do find says the maritime people came later.

>> >What you get is a maritime based culture used to using kayaks
>> >in artic seas adapting to using dogsleds which are of a similar light
>> >construction to essentially portage between the north flowing rivers
>> >leading across Barrow into the artic ocean.
>>
>> But, even without dogs, they were still a *very* mobile people.
>> That is also very true of other (Indian) cultures in the Arctic.
>
>Mobile yes but territorial also with a given range of hunting and
>fishing grounds probably being wotked until it was exhausted
>before moving on.

How can we know that? We don't know if they were territorial.
We do know that Western centric bias has causes us to
misunderstand a great deal about Native cultures of Alaska in
the time periods immediately before and after contact.

I wouldn't make any such assumptions. We don't know either if
they may have been territorial nor if they worked an area to
exhaustion and moved on, or if they already understood the
faults with that philosophy. What we do know for sure is that
their descendants definitely knew better, and made huge efforts
to avoid exhausting any given area. (Indeed, they take that to
extremes in ways the Western observers have simply never been
able to understand.)

>> >Kuntz, Baker, Bradley, Collins and Fladmark among others all think
>> >we might want to look at the Aleutians and Greenland as possible
>> >waypoints on the routes for the maritime cultures that bring the
>> >Paleo Indians to the Americas.
>>
>> Chuckle. You left a name out of that. Dennis Stanford from the
>> Smithsonian is the most public backer of the whole concept of
>> European influence.
>
>There are many more names you could add to the list,
>I barely got past the ABC's. Personally I'm thinking
>you should put "European" in quotes since c 35,000 BC
>there really was no "Europe".

No. *They* should put it in quotes, because there is no evidence
and all they are spouting is Euro-centric bias.

>Anyway, the theory holds that Soultrean lithics in a maritime tradition
>could as easily as not have coasted land bridges and ice floes north
>from the continent through the British Isles c 20,000 BC

And how does 20,000 BC relate to the beginning of Clovis in
North America?

These guys made this voyage via a slow boat to China? Or they
hid in the New York slums for a few thousand years?

>>From there they might have reached Greenland c 8500 BC and the
>New World.shortly after with all of their coastal sites being now under
>water.

Sites from 8500 BC would not be submerged. Sites from 12,000
years ago would not be submerged. And a 3,500 year migration
isn't likely to have left evidence on both ends with nothing in
between.

>Unfortunately the earliest well-documented human occupations
>of the North American Arctic, between 10,000 and 7000 years BP,

Both the Mesa site just north of the Brooks Range and the Broken
Mammoth site just north of the Alaska Range have produced
multiple dates within a couple hundred years of 12K years BP.

And there is a great deal of evidence for human occupation in
Siberia in the 4K years prior to that...

>are assigned to a poorly defined phenomenon known as the Paleo-Arctic
>tradition. It is known only from lithic artifacts, especially microblades
>and small bifaces. The most diagnostic artifacts are wedge-shaped
>microcores and that is of course not the Soultrean technology that
>it is necessarty to f9ind there to make the theory work.
>
>Like the land bridge from Siberia that is all just speculation

Except that Land Bridge is much more than speculation. We *know*
*positively* that it was a route of some migration. The question
is not if people moved back and forth across it, but only if that
was mostly a one way migration and if it was either the first or
the most significant migration.

With the Solutrean technology, there is simply nothing other
than some fairly similar artifacts that date several thousands
of years apart. 

-- 
FloydL. Davidson           <http://web.newsguy.com/floyd_davidson>
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)                         floyd@barrow.com

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Question re. Copper artifact CanadianArcticformerRe:CopperCasting In America (Trevelyan)
    ... >> America and transported to Siberia too, ... Siberia is a very big place with very few people in it c12,000 BC ... supported by any real evidence that ruled out other scenarios, ... >> pretty much stuck to the coast, even before Thule Technology. ...
    (sci.archaeology)
  • Re: open letter to the Google company, on the value of the scientific groups
    ... Lake Baikal isn't in Siberia? ... Malta near Irkutsk was a Magdalenian outpost, ... but no cave art in Siberia, just mobile art. ... Yes, I provided ample evidence for bear as the furry one, ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: jugged hare
    ... its interactions with Russia and China. ... heard of America from people sailing the Atlantic, ... Did the Russians and Chinese really have no ... knowledge of Siberia or its peoples in medieval and early modern times? ...
    (alt.usage.english)
  • Re: Black hole vs earth
    ... caused the explosion in Siberia in 1905. ... It is based on some facts Bert ... The evidence suggests an air burst of an ~20 m asteroid or piece of ...
    (sci.physics)
  • The End, just like that?
    ... We don't even know why Uriy went to America. ... He was in Siberia, and then he became ... James Bond, and ended up in the nuthouse for 20 years??? ...
    (comp.ai.philosophy)