The Great Paleolithic War: How Science Forged an Understanding of America's Ice Age Past

The Great Paleolithic War

The Great Paleolithic War

How Science Forged an Understanding of America’s Ice Age Past

David J. Meltzer

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

David J. Meltzer is the Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory at Southern Methodist University, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is the author of Folsom and First Peoples in a New World. He lives in Dallas.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2015 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2015.

Printed in the United States of America

24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-29322-6 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-29336-3 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226293363.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Meltzer, David J., author.

The great Paleolithic war : how science forged an understanding of America’s ice age past / David J. Meltzer.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-29322-6 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-29336-3 (ebook) 1. Archaeology—United States—History. 2. Paleoanthropology—United States—History. 3. Natural history—United States—History. I. Title.

CC101.U6M45 2015

930.1'2—dc23

2015006581

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Suzanne,

who has been there since the beginning of this lengthy project,

and was mostly sure I’d see it through to the end.

Contents

Roster of Individuals

CHAPTER ONE A Study in Controversy

1.1 Beginning and ending

1.2 A powerful lens

1.3 Approaching the inquiry

1.4 The data of history

1.5 The scope and structure of controversy

CHAPTER TWO Setting the Stage

2.1 Establishing the parameters

2.2 Bringing the Paleolithic to America

2.3 Rude Americans?

2.4 Looking anew

2.5 Where to next?

CHAPTER THREE Establishing the American Paleolithic, 1872–1881

3.1 Charles Abbott builds the foundation

3.2 Frederic Ward Putnam comes aboard

3.3 Firming up the structure

3.4 The Trenton paleoliths go public

3.5 Subdividing the glacial epoch

3.6 Abbott’s Primitive Industry

3.7 The sound of the applause

3.8 The creed of George Frederick Wright

3.9 Seeking his just reward

CHAPTER FOUR The American Paleolithic Comes of Age, 1882–1889

4.1 The Paleolithic comes in quartz

4.2 Lest Trenton be forgotten

4.3 The American Paleolithic comes together

4.4 Abbott takes center stage

4.5 Pushing the antiquity envelope

4.6 Thomas Chamberlin and the question of glacial history

4.7 The Kettle Moraine moves east

4.8 Mapping the Pennsylvania moraine

4.9 An uneasy association

4.10 Hard times for the USGS

4.11 Wrangling over the glacial boundary

4.12 Synthesis and antithesis

4.13 Wright’s Ice Age in North America

4.14 The bandwagon rolls

4.15 Looking to the future of the past

CHAPTER FIVE The Great Paleolithic War, 1890–1897

5.1 The Bureau of Ethnology takes the field

5.2 William Henry Holmes and the lessons of Piney Branch

5.3 Abbott returns fire

5.4 The gathering storm

5.5 The preliminary skirmish

5.6 The Great Paleolithic War

5.7 The Betinseled Charlatan affair

5.8 Mounting a defense

5.9 Collateral damage

5.10 Holmes’s march through the American Paleolithic

5.11 Point/counterpoint

5.12 On the unity or diversity of the glacial period

5.13 Showdown in Madison

5.14 Interregnum

5.15 Returning to the field of battle

5.16 An end and a beginning

CHAPTER SIX Cro-Magnons in Kansas, Neanderthals in Nebraska, 1899–1914

6.1 Human skeletal remains emerge from the Trenton Gravel

6.2 Aleš Hrdlička

6.3 The Trenton femur: A preliminary look

6.4 Hrdlička finds his method

6.5 Holmes gets his man

6.6 Cro-Magnons in Kansas?

6.7 On the origin and age of loess

6.8 Loess and the Lansing man

6.9 Remedial lessons

6.10 Dressed for battle, no one to fight

6.11 Neanderthals in Nebraska?

6.12 Hrdlička’s Skeletal Remains Suggesting or Attributed to Early Man in North America

6.13 Over before it began

6.14 Lansing to Long’s Hill: Loess to dust

6.15 Trenton redux?

CHAPTER SEVEN Dangerous to the Cause of Science, 1915–1925

7.1 Oliver Hay offers a faunal solution

7.2 Men and mammoth at Vero

7.3 A nonharmonic convergence

7.4 Spinning the message

7.5 Turf wars

7.6 Finding Vero’s place on the human family tree

7.7 Violating the sacred confines

7.8 Eras’ ends

7.9 Dangerous to the cause of science

7.10 With friends like these

7.11 Speaking of old evidence

CHAPTER EIGHT In the Belly of the Beast, 1921–1928

8.1 Harold Cook and Jesse Figgins—willful revolutionaries

8.2 Anthropoid apes in America?

8.3 Another head of the Hydra

8.4 When it rains . . .

8.5 Bearding the lion

8.6 What’s in a name?

8.7 Mammoths and metates

8.8 Baiting the trap

8.9 From the lion’s den . . .

8.10 . . . to the belly of the beast

8.11 Seeking a new identity

8.12 Hedging bets

8.13 Will the rising tide lift all boats?

8.14 Whereas, Folsom

8.15 Coming apart at the (mu)seams

8.16 Once more, with feeling

8.17 Dead men walking

8.18 The sound of victory, the silence of defeat

CHAPTER NINE Fast Forward, 1930–1941

9.1 Lining up the shot

9.2 Scattered around like a dog buries bones

9.3 Still fighting the last war

9.4 Not just another old site

9.5 Refining the Pleistocene

9.6 Converging on a chronology

9.7 The peopling process

9.8 Recognizing variation and change

9.9 A Philadelphia story

9.10 What have the bones to say?

9.11 Profiling

9.12 Finding the time

9.13 Fast forward

CHAPTER TEN Controversy and Its Resolution

10.1 The medium is not the message

10.2 Challenging context

10.3 Ascertaining antiquity

10.4 Numbers going nowhere

10.5 Flattening the past

10.6 Savaging the present

10.7 Hrdlička’s lament

10.8 When disciplines collide

10.9 Last days of the tyro

10.10 All scientists are equal, but some are more equal than others

10.11 Be sure to mention Kidder

10.12 Victims of the Matthew Effect

10.13 Prehistory repeats itself

10.14 Living in an old New World

10.15 Controversy and its resolution

Appendix: Whatever became of . . . ?

Notes

Bibliography

A. Manuscript sources

B. Printed sources: Primary

C. Printed sources: Secondary

Acknowledgments

Index

Roster of Individuals

Those whose names follow participated in one degree or another in the long dispute over human antiquity in North America. This is not a comprehensive list, omitting as it does mention of those participating before the dispute got started, as well as the anthropologists, archaeologists, and others who throughout the long years of controversy occasionally commented from the sidelines.

Each entry provides the name, birth and death dates, education, and a brief identifying description of the occupation and affiliation of the individual at the time he or she was involved in the controversy, as well as the site or sites in which they worked or with which they were associated. Some, like Holmes and Hrdlička, were involved at virtually all the sites, and hence no particular ones are specified. Chapter 10 discusses in greater depth the relative status of different individuals connected with the controversy; however, a quick snapshot of the standing of individuals can be garnered from whether they were elected as fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS Fellow), received a star in the American Men of Science (AMS), or were elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). These honors are noted in the entries that follow, along with the year of AAAS or NAS election or, in the case of the AMS star, the volume number.

1. ABBOTT, Charles C. (June 4, 1843–July 27, 1919), physician, naturalist, popular author and archaeologist, Trenton gravels. Highest earned academic degree: MD 1865, University of Pennsylvania. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1883.

2. BABBITT, Frances (January 24, 1824–July 6, 1891), Minnesota schoolteacher, Little Falls. Highest earned academic degree: None. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1887.

3. BALDWIN, Charles C. (December 2, 1834–February 2, 1895), judge, Western Reserve Historical Society. Highest earned academic degree: JD 1857 Harvard University. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1891.

4. BARBOUR, Erwin (April 5, 1856–May 10, 1947), paleontologist, Nebraska state geologist, director of the Nebraska State Museum, Long’s Hill. Highest earned academic degree: PhD 1887, Yale University. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1898.

5. BLACKMAN, Elmer E. (1865–September 13, 1942), archaeologist, Nebraska State Historical Society, Long’s Hill. Highest earned academic degree: None. Honors: None.

6. BRINTON, Daniel G. (May 13, 1837–July 31, 1899), anthropologist, University of Pennsylvania, contributing editor to Science. Highest earned academic degree: None. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1885.

7. BROWN, Barnum (February 12, 1873–February 5, 1963), paleontologist, American Museum of Natural History, Folsom. Highest earned academic degree: BS 1908, University of Kansas. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1931.

8. BRYAN, Kirk (July 22, 1888–August 20, 1950), geologist, Harvard University, Folsom. Highest earned academic degree: PhD 1920, Yale University. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1925; AMS 5.

9. CALVIN, Samuel (February 2, 1840–April 17, 1911), geologist, Iowa Geological Survey, Lansing. Highest earned academic degree: PhD 1888, Lenox College. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1889; AMS 1.

10. CARR, Lucien (December 15, 1829–January 27, 1915), archaeologist and administrative assistant, Peabody Museum, Harvard University, Trenton. Highest earned academic degree: AB 1846, St. Louis. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1877.

11. CHAMBERLIN, Rollin (October 20, 1881–March 6, 1948), geologist (son of Thomas), University of Chicago, Vero. Highest earned academic degree: PhD 1907, University of Chicago. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1909; AMS 3; NAS 1940.

12. CHAMBERLIN, Thomas Chrowder (September 25, 1843–November 15, 1928), glacial geologist, University of Chicago, chief of United States Geological Survey Glacial Division, founder and editor Journal of Geology. Highest earned academic degree: AM 1869, Beloit College. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1877; AMS 1; NAS 1903.

13. CLAYPOLE, Edward W. (June 1, 1835–August 17, 1901), geologist, Buchtel College, Ohio (now University of Akron), editorial board of American Geologist. Highest earned academic degree: DS, 1888, London. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1882, Fellow Geological Society of London 1879.

14. COOK, Harold J. (July 31, 1887–September 29, 1962), paleontologist, honorary curator, Colorado Museum of Natural History, Snake Creek, Lone Wolf Creek, Frederick, and Folsom. Highest earned academic degree: None. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1911.

15. COPE, Edward Drinker (July 28, 1840–April 12, 1897), paleontologist, University of Pennsylvania. Highest earned academic degree: None. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1875; NAS 1872.

16. CRESSON, Hilborne (1848?–September 6, 1894), physician and archaeologist, Field Assistant Peabody Museum, Harvard University, Claymont, Medora, Holly Oak pendant. Highest earned academic degree: None. Honors: None.

17. DALL, William H. (August 21, 1845–March 27, 1927), naturalist, invertebrate paleontologist, United States Geological Survey. Highest earned academic degree: None. Honors: AAAS 1874; AMS 1; NAS 1897.

18. FIGGINS, Jesse D. (August 17, 1867–June 10, 1944), naturalist, artist, and administrator, director of the Colorado Museum of Natural History, Lone Wolf Creek, Frederick, and Folsom. Highest earned academic degree: None. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1932.

19. FOWKE, Gerard (June 25, 1855–March 5, 1933), archaeologist and field assistant, Bureau of American Ethnology, Lansing. Highest earned academic degree: None. Honors: None.

20. GIDLEY, James W. (January 7, 1866–September 26, 1931), paleontologist, United States National Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Melbourne. Highest earned academic degree: MS 1901, Princeton University. Honors: None.

21. GILDER, Robert F. (October 6, 1856–March 7, 1940), artist, printer, and journalist, Omaha World Herald, Long’s Hill. Highest earned academic degree: None. Honors: None.

22. GODDARD, Pliny E. (November 24, 1869–July 12, 1928), linguist, American Museum of Natural History, New York. Highest earned academic degree: PhD 1904, University of California. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1912; AMS 3.

23. GREGORY, William K. (May 19, 1876–December 29, 1970), paleontologist and physical anthropologist, American Museum of Natural History, Hesperopithecus. Highest earned academic degree: PhD 1910, Columbia University. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1925; AMS 3; NAS 1927.

24. HAY, Oliver P. (May 22, 1846–November 2, 1930), paleontologist, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Vero, Melbourne, Lone Wolf Creek, Frederick, Folsom. Highest earned academic degree: PhD 1884, University of Indiana. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1901; AMS 2.

25. HAYNES, Henry W. (September 20, 1831–February 16, 1912), archaeologist, Boston Society of Natural History. Highest earned academic degree: AM 1851, Harvard University. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1884.

26. HOLMES, William H. (December 1, 1846–April 20, 1933), archaeologist, artist, geologist, Bureau of American Ethnology and United States National Museum, Smithsonian Institution. Highest earned academic degree: AB 1870, McNeely Normal College. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1883; AMS 1; NAS 1905.

27. HRDLIčKA, Aleš (March 29, 1869–September 5, 1943), physical anthropologist, United States National Museum, Smithsonian Institution, founder and editor American Journal of Physical Anthropology. Highest earned academic degree: MD 1892, Eclectic Medical College New York. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1897; AMS 1; NAS 1921.

28. INGALLS, Albert G. (January 16, 1888–August 13, 1958), editor Scientific American, New York. Highest earned academic degree: BS 1914, Cornell University. Honors: None.

29. JENKS, Albert E. (November 28, 1869–June 6, 1953), anthropologist, Folsom, Minnesota Man, Brown’s Valley Man, Sauk Valley Man. University of Minnesota. Highest earned academic degree: PhD 1899, University of Minnesota. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1902.

30. KIDDER, Alfred V. (October 29, 1885–June 11, 1963), archaeologist, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Folsom. Highest earned academic degree: PhD 1914, Harvard University. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1929; AMS 3; NAS 1936.

31. KNAPP, George (unknown), geologist, New Jersey Geological Survey, Trenton. Highest earned academic degree: BS, University of Wisconsin. Honors: None.

32. KUMMEL, Henry B. (May 25, 1867–October 23, 1945), geologist, New Jersey Geological Survey, Trenton. Highest earned academic degree: PhD 1895, University of Chicago. Honors: AMS 1.

33. LESLEY, J. Peter (September 17, 1819–June 1, 1903), geologist, University of Pennsylvania, director of Pennsylvania Geological Survey. Highest earned academic degree: DD 1844, Princeton Theological Seminary. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1874; NAS 1863.

34. LEVERETT, Frank (March 10, 1859–November 15, 1943), geologist, United States Geological Survey, Ohio paleoliths to Minnesota Man. Highest earned academic degree: BS 1885, Iowa Agricultural College. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1891; AMS 1; NAS 1929.

35. LEWIS, Henry C. (November 16, 1853–June 21, 1888), geologist, Geological Survey of Pennsylvania, Trenton. Highest earned academic degree: MA 1876, University of Pennsylvania. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1880.

36. LOOMIS, Frederick B. (November 22, 1873–July 28, 1937), geologist and paleontologist, Amherst College, Melbourne. Highest earned academic degree: PhD 1899, University of Munich. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1913; AMS 4.

37. MACCURDY, George (April 17, 1863–November 15, 1947), archaeologist, Yale University, Vero. Highest earned academic degree: PhD 1905, Yale University. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1900; AMS 4.

38. MASON, Otis (April 10, 1838–November 5, 1908), ethnologist, United States National Museum, Smithsonian Institution. Highest earned academic degree: PhD 1875, Columbian [George Washington University]. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1877; AMS 1.

39. MATTHEW, William D. (February 19, 1871–September 24, 1930), vertebrate paleontologist, American Museum of Natural History and University of California, Hesperopithecus and Snake Creek. Highest earned academic degree: PhD 1895, Columbia University. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1906; AMS 3; NAS 1919. (Matthew’s NAS election was subsequently rescinded when it was learned he held Canadian citizenship.)

40. MCGEE, William John (WJ) (April 17, 1853–September 4, 1912), geologist and anthropologist, United States Geological Survey and Bureau of American Ethnology, Trenton. Highest earned academic degree: None. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1882; AMS 1.

41. MCGUIRE, Joseph D. (November 26, 1842–September 6, 1916), attorney and archaeologist, Bureau of American Ethnology and United States National Museum. Highest earned academic degree: None. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1891.

42. MERCER, Henry C. (June 24, 1856–March 9, 1930), archaeologist, curator University of Pennsylvania. Highest earned academic degree: BA 1879, Harvard University. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1893.

43. MERRIAM, John C. (October 20, 1869–October 30, 1945), paleontologist and administrator at University of California, later president of Carnegie Institution of Washington, Rancho La Brea, Los Angeles. Highest earned academic degree: PhD 1893, University of Munich. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1905; AMS 2; NAS 1918.

44. MILLS, William C. (January 2, 1860–January 17, 1928), archaeologist, Ohio State University, New Comerstown. Highest earned academic degree: MS 1902, Ohio State University. Honors: None.

45. MOOREHEAD, Warren K. (March 10, 1866–January 5, 1939), archaeologist, Phillips Academy, editor Archaeologist. Highest earned academic degree: None. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1890.

46. NELSON, Nels (April 9, 1875–March 5, 1964), archaeologist, American Museum of Natural History. Highest earned academic degree: ML 1908, University of California. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1925; AMS 3.

47. OSBORN, Henry Fairfield (August 8, 1857–November 6, 1935), paleontologist and director, American Museum of Natural History, Long’s Hill, Hesperopithecus, and Snake Creek. Highest earned academic degree: DSc 1880, Princeton University. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1883; AMS 1; NAS 1900.

48. OWEN, Luella (September 8, 1852–May 31, 1932), geologist, Lansing. Highest earned academic degree: None. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1911.

49. PEET, Stephen D. (December 2, 1831–May 24, 1914), editor American Antiquarian. Highest earned academic degree: AB 1851, Beloit College. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1881.

50. POWELL, John Wesley (March 24, 1834–September 23, 1902), anthropologist, director United States Geological Survey, founder and director Bureau of American Ethnology. Highest earned academic degree: None. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1875; NAS 1880.

51. PUTNAM, Frederic Ward (April 16, 1839–August 14, 1915), archaeologist and administrator, director Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology (Harvard University) and Peabody Professor of American archaeology. Highest earned academic degree: None. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1874; AMS 1; NAS 1885.

52. RAU, Charles (1826–July 25, 1887), archaeologist, United States National Museum, Smithsonian Institution. Highest earned academic degree: None. Honors: None.

53. ROBERTS, Frank H. H. (August 11, 1897–February 23, 1966), archaeologist, Bureau of American Ethnology, Folsom, Lindenmeier. Highest earned academic degree: PhD 1927, Harvard University. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1931; AMS 5.

54. ROMER, Alfred (December 28, 1894–November 5, 1973), vertebrate paleontologist, University of Chicago, Pleistocene faunal sequence. Highest earned academic degree: PhD 1921, Columbia University. Honors: NAS 1944.

55. RUSSELL, Frank (August 6, 1868–November 7, 1903), physical anthropologist, Peabody Museum, Harvard University, Trenton. Highest earned academic degree: PhD 1898, Harvard University. Honors. AAAS Fellow 1897.

56. SALISBURY, Rollin D. (August 17, 1858–August 15, 1922), geologist, University of Chicago, glacial geology, Trenton. Highest earned academic degree: AM 1884, Beloit College. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1890; AMS 1.

57. SELLARDS, Elias H. (May 2, 1875–February 11, 1961), geologist, Florida state geologist, and (later) Texas state geologist, Vero. Highest earned academic degree: PhD 1903, Yale University. Honors: AMS 5.

58. SHALER, Nathaniel S. (February 20, 1841–April 10, 1906), geologist, Harvard University, Trenton. Highest earned academic degree: BS 1862, Harvard University. Honors: AMS 1.

59. SHIMEK, Bohumil (June 25, 1861–January 30, 1937), malacologist and sedimentologist, University of Iowa, loess, Lansing, and Long’s Hill. Highest earned academic degree: CE 1883, University of Iowa. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1904.

60. SHULER, Ellis (October 15, 1881–January 2, 1954), paleontologist, Southern Methodist University, Lagow Pit. Highest earned academic degree: PhD 1915, Harvard University. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1931.

61. SPIER, Leslie (December 13, 1893–December 3, 1961), archaeologist, American Museum of Natural History, University of Oklahoma, Trenton, Frederick. Highest earned academic degree: PhD 1920, Columbia University. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1931; AMS 5; NAS 1946.

62. STOCK, Chester (January 28, 1892–December 7, 1950), vertebrate paleontologist, California Institute of Technology, Los Angeles, Clovis. Highest earned academic degree: PhD 1918, University of California. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1921; AMS 6; NAS 1948.

63. TODD, James E. (February 11, 1846?–1922), geologist, South Dakota Geological Survey, United States Geological Survey, Lansing. Highest earned academic degree: AM 1870, Yale University. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1886; AMS 1.

64. UPHAM, Warren (March 8, 1850–January 29, 1934), geologist and archaeologist, Minnesota Historical Society, editor American Geologist, Little Falls to Lansing Highest earned academic degree: AB 1871, Dartmouth College. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1880; AMS 1.

65. VAUGHAN, T. Wayland (September 20, 1870–January 16, 1952), geologist, United States Geological Survey, Vero. Highest earned academic degree: PhD 1903, Harvard University. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1906; AMS 1; NAS 1921.

66. VOLK, Ernst (August 25, 1845–September 17, 1919), archaeologist, field assistant Peabody Museum, Harvard University, Trenton. Highest earned academic degree: None. Honors: None.

67. WARD, Henry B. (March 4, 1865–November 30, 1945), anatomist, physician, and dean of the Medical College, University of Nebraska, Long’s Hill. Highest earned academic degree: PhD 1892, Harvard University. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1899; AMS 3.

68. WHITE, Israel C. (November 1, 1848–November 25, 1927), geologist, West Virginia University, director West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey. Highest earned academic degree: PhD 1880, University of Arkansas. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1882; AMS 1.

69. WHITNEY, Josiah D. (November 23, 1819–August 15, 1896), geologist, Harvard University, and California Geological Survey, Calaveras. Highest earned academic degree: BA 1839, Yale University. Honors: NAS 1863, resigned 1874.

70. WILLISTON, Samuel W. (July 10, 1852–August 30, 1918), paleontologist and physician, University of Chicago, 12 Mile Creek, Lansing. Highest earned academic degree: MD 1880, Yale University. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1902; NAS 1915.

71. WILSON, Thomas (July 18, 1832–May 4, 1902), archaeologist, United States National Museum, Smithsonian Institution. Highest earned academic degree: None. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1888.

72. WINCHELL, Newton (December 17, 1839–May 2, 1914), geologist, Minnesota state geologist, editor American Geologist, Little Falls, Lansing, Kansas. Highest earned academic degree: AM 1869, University of Michigan. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1874; AMS 1.

73. WISSLER, Clark (September 18, 1870–August 25, 1947), anthropologist, American Museum of Natural History, Trenton. Highest earned academic degree: PhD 1901, Columbia University. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1906; AMS 2; NAS 1929.

74. WRIGHT, George F. (January 22, 1838–April 20, 1921), geologist and minister, chair of the Harmony of Science and Revelation, Oberlin College, Trenton, Newcomerstown, Nampa, Lansing. Highest earned academic degree: AM 1862, Oberlin College. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1882.

75. YOUMANS, William J. (October 14, 1838–April 10, 1901), editor Popular Science Monthly. Highest earned academic degree: MD 1863, New York University. Honors: AAAS Fellow 1889.

CHAPTER ONE

A Study in Controversy

Florida State Geologist Elias Sellards had watched for over a year as excavations in the rich fossil beds at Vero produced bones of mammoth, mastodon, sloth, tapir, horse, and other extinct Pleistocene animals. Then in October 1915 they yielded a nearly complete human skeleton; two more were found in the summer of 1916. Here at last were human traces in undoubted Pleistocene deposits, prime evidence, he was sure, to resolve the long-standing dispute over human antiquity in America. Sellards fired off letters to the scientific Goliaths of his day, inviting them to Vero to examine the evidence: glacial geologist Thomas Chamberlin (of the University of Chicago and the United States Geological Survey [USGS] Glacial Division), vertebrate paleontologists Oliver Hay (Carnegie Institution of Washington), Samuel Williston (University of Chicago), and—tempting fate—the Smithsonian Institution’s archaeologist William Henry Holmes and its physical anthropologist Aleš Hrdlička.¹

Hrdlička was happy to come down but warned Sellards that "the occurrence of human remains in ancient strata while a great incentive . . . is, per se, not of course as yet a proof of the antiquity of the [human] remains."² Privately, Hrdlička sneered that Mr. S. [Sellards] is so cocksure of his ‘discovery’ . . . that the case inspires rather suspicion than confidence.³ Still, it was important to the morale of the profession, as Chamberlin put it, that such finds be subject to critical examination.⁴ And so they were.

Hrdlička went to Vero in late October 1916, and was joined there by geologists Rollin Chamberlin (also of the University of Chicago, substituting for his father Thomas) and T. Wayland Vaughan of the USGS, Yale University archaeologist George MacCurdy, and Hay. They met Sellards, examined the Vero deposits, and haggled over whether the human remains and those of the extinct mammals were associated. Hrdlička had little to say, though Sellards guessed he would find objections.⁵ Sellards was right.

In Washington a week later Hrdlička happily assured Holmes he would able to cast the age and nature of the skeletal remains . . . in the true light. ⁶ Of course he would: Hrdlička was rarely plagued by doubts. When you came back to Hrdlička, a longtime colleague observed (with little hint of affection), he was always there, just where the Lord created him, on the rock of ultimate Hrdličkian knowledge.⁷

Not everyone shared Hrdlička’s version of Vero’s true light. There was not then nor in the years to follow consensus on the age of its human remains.⁸ They were either from the Early or Middle Pleistocene (according to Hay and Sellards), the Historic era (Hrdlička and Holmes), or the hundreds of thousands of years in between (MacCurdy and others). Even so, Holmes claimed the critics called the matter into question so decidedly, that the world will not be in haste to accept [Sellards’s] radical views. ⁹

The irreconcilability of interpretations badly strained relations among the participants and dissolved rapidly into interdisciplinary bickering among archaeologists, vertebrate paleontologists, and geologists. In 1918 Holmes insisted he would not stand in the way of legitimate conclusions in geology or paleontology, but imperiously dismissed Sellards’s Vero work (and Hay’s efforts to bolster its antiquity) as illegitimate determinations [that] have been insinuating themselves into the sacred confines of science and history. He made no apology for his criticism, and in fact returned to that theme seven years later, publicly denouncing the Vero evidence as not only inadequate but dangerous to the cause of science.¹⁰

Sellards, new to the fierce controversy over human antiquity of which Holmes and Hrdlička were hardened veterans, was hurt, embittered, and deeply humiliated.¹¹ He soon left Florida for Texas, carrying with him the scars of Vero. More than a decade later and several years after a Pleistocene human antiquity was demonstrated at Folsom, New Mexico in 1927, Sellards gathered the nerve to ask Holmes his opinion about human antiquity in America in general and Vero in particular. Holmes, then 83 years old, dodged the question, saying no trace whatever remained of his earlier antagonism and he had dropped the matter entirely.¹²

That was not acceptable. Sellards did not want indifference: he wanted vindication. Over the next three decades, and long after his own retirement in 1945, Sellards continued to press the case for Vero and obsessively sought sites testifying to a great human antiquity. More stones to heap on Hrdlička’s grave, his colleagues said as they watched and knowingly nodded their heads.¹³ In 1952, at the age of 77 and suffering with an abdominal hernia long overdue for surgery, Sellards returned to Vero to collect charcoal or bone suitable for the newly invented technique of radiocarbon dating. He would prove Vero was just as old as he had said it was. His longtime field assistant Glen Evans accompanied him, having left Texas with careful instructions from Sellards’s physician about what to do if the hernia suddenly bulged. It did, and Sellards collapsed unconscious at the excavation. Evans propped him under the shade of a tree, treated him as best he could, and made plans to transport him to a hospital. But the moment Sellards regained consciousness he insisted on continuing to excavate.¹⁴ Nearly four decades after Vero, Sellards still desperately wanted to show that he and not his long-dead critics had been right all along.¹⁵

Sellards was not the only casualty in the long and bitter dispute over human antiquity in America, though perhaps he was one of the more obsessed. And just as this controversy profoundly influenced the careers of the scores who participated in it, so too it forever changed North American archaeology and helped set the discipline’s course into the twentieth century.

1.1 Beginning and ending

It took hardly any time at all. Only a few years after the discovery in Europe in the late 1850s that humanity had roots predating history and the Biblical chronicles and reaching deep into the Pleistocene came the suggestion that North American prehistory might be just as old.¹⁶ And why not? There seemed to be an exact synchronism [of geological strata] between Europe and America, and so by extension there ought to be a parallelism as to the antiquity of man.¹⁷ That triggered an eager search for traces of the people who may have occupied North America in the recesses of the Ice Age.

It quickly became obvious, however, that North America’s archaeological record was not Europe’s. Here caves and river valleys were not producing rich layers of primitive stone artifacts intermingled with the massive bones of extinct Ice Age animals. But perhaps there were other indications: in the 1870s Charles Abbott began finding stone artifacts along the banks of the Delaware River near his Trenton, New Jersey home. He pronounced these alike in form and evolutionary grade to those of the European Paleolithic (Stone Age), and reasoned that if these artifacts were similar in form they must be comparable in age. Certainly, the artifacts were distinct from those of the Lenni Lenape, the historically known tribe of the region, and were found in gravels that could be Pleistocene in age. Abbott was sure that "had the Delaware River been a European stream the implements found in its valley would have been accepted at once as evidence of the so-called Paleolithic man."¹⁸

Abbott’s apparent discovery of an American Paleolithic triggered a cascade of claims, and within the decade scattered reports of paleoliths came in from the East, Midwest, and Great Basin. Their precise age was difficult—impossible, really—to pin down.¹⁹ Yet, the specimens so readily mimicked European specimens of undeniable antiquity that it was thought they must be as old. Comparison, Thomas Wilson famously asserted, was as good a rule of evidence in archaeology as in law.²⁰

By 1889 the American Paleolithic was accepted fact. The idea that the earliest North Americans were here thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years ago when the continent’s northern latitudes lay shrouded in glacial ice was triumphantly paraded in symposia, feature articles, and books.²¹ European savants praised Abbott as America’s Boucher de Perthes, whose Somme River valley collections had tipped the balance on the question of the European Paleolithic.²² The only lingering issue was how much earlier the first peoples may have arrived in the New World. Some speculated America’s prehistoric roots might reach into the Pliocene or even the Miocene.²³

Yet, scarcely a year later the American Paleolithic was under withering fire, led by William Henry Holmes of the Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnology. His studies of stone tool manufacturing debris at the Piney Branch quarry site in Washington, DC, revealed a fatal flaw in the assumption that form corresponded to age. As he saw it, artifact production transformed rounded cobbles into long leaf-shaped bifaces through successive degrees of elaboration. Drawing on biologist Ernst Haeckel’s then-popular refrain that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, Holmes argued that if a stone tool was discarded or rejected early on in the manufacturing process (stone tool ontogeny), it would naturally resemble the rude and ancient stone tools of Paleolithic Europe (early stages of stone tool phylogeny), but of course that meant resemblance alone had no chronologic[al] significance whatever.²⁴

Holmes used artifact form not to infer antiquity but to deny it. Demonstrating the Pleistocene age of archaeological remains, he insisted, was entirely a matter of geology. But then Holmes cynically assumed that any artifact found within unconsolidated, demonstrably glacial-age deposits was an adventitious inclusion, effectively eliminating the possibility of a Pleistocene antiquity. And he was neither modest nor lacking in ambition. He declared his intent to revolutionize American archaeology, and deemed his Piney Branch study one of the most important periods of [my] labors in the field of science, and one of the most important in the history of American archaeological research. He even insinuated that the reason American and European paleoliths looked alike was that many European specimens were themselves manufacturing rejects that prehistorians there had failed to recognize as such. Perhaps, as one onlooker tartly put it, Boucher de Perthes may turn out to have been the Dr. Abbott of France.²⁵

Abbott and Holmes were both notoriously stubborn and uncompromising, and what started as a difference of opinion grew quickly into mistrust and then raced on to mutual loathing. They angrily debated one another on archaeological matters and called on their allies in geology to testify that the deposits in which those supposed paleoliths were found were indeed Pleistocene in age (George Frederick Wright in Abbott’s corner), or most assuredly were not (Thomas Chamberlin seconding Holmes). The controversy that exploded that spring of 1890 ultimately went unresolved for nearly four decades, as archaeologists and nonarchaeologists alike sought evidence of a Pleistocene human antiquity.

The question being asked was straightforward enough: had people arrived in North America in Ice Age times? But easily asked was not easily answered. Throughout the dispute critics admitted the possibility that people were here during the Pleistocene: the great variety of Native American languages, cultures, and physical appearance certainly suggested as much.²⁶ Of course, that was circumstantial evidence, and it rested heavily on the assumption that the arrivals in America were of a single or homogeneous stock and that vast time was required to produce that much diversity among its descendants. Until that assumption was demonstrated, Holmes argued, there was no reason to suppose it true, and equally plausible reasons to doubt it: one could as readily argue that early Americans descended from many different groups, for whom the passage through the new and constantly changing conditions of the New World further greatly accelerated differentiation, rendering Native American diversity moot as a measure of antiquity.²⁷

Unlike scientific controversies in which a phenomenon is known to exist and dispute centers on, say, its causes or consequences,²⁸ in this instance there was no guarantee the phenomenon even existed. Demonstrating that it did proved enormously challenging and at times extraordinarily complicated, for that required developing a deeper understanding of the archaeological record, laying secure chronological foundations (with the necessary, if not always welcome, help of geologists and vertebrate paleontologists), and building conceptual frameworks for making sense of the evidence. Looking back a half-century later, Emil Haury thought the Folsom discovery in 1927 finally brought the human antiquity controversy to an end because it provided unequivocal evidence of man and extinct animals.²⁹ That it did. But it was only possible to recognize Folsom for what it was because the decades of dispute leading up to that moment had closed critical conceptual gaps in archaeological, geological, and paleontological knowledge. Were it otherwise, the controversy would have been over in 1896 at the 12 Mile Creek site in Kansas (a site that gained little purchase at the time but in retrospect proved to be Pleistocene in age).³⁰ Having the right site matters, of course, but even more so the ability to recognize it as such.

As it was, the effort to resolve the question ultimately involved dozens of sites and claims as well as scores of participants haggling over what those meant, and was a shape-shifting affair in its empirical content. It began in the 1870s with supposed American Paleolithic tools, but when those failed to prove the case attention turned to primitive human skeletal remains ostensibly reminiscent of earlier fossil humans such as Pithecanthropus or Neanderthals. When these too were deemed inadequate to the task, they were followed by claims of skeletal remains of anatomically modern humans from deposits with the bones of extinct Pleistocene animals. In the 1920s attention shifted once again, this time to sites in which stone artifacts were found in apparent association with those Ice Age animals. It was a process of adaptive response to what was at times intense scientific selective pressure in this environment of controversy.

Each of these types of evidence came with its own suite of analytical problems and interpretive baggage, though common to all were questions of a specimen’s context or its association with geological time markers. These were questions often rendered difficult by the happenstance nature of discoveries, the degree of trust one placed on the finders’ ability to report accurately what they had seen of the specimen while it was in situ, and the lack of agreed-upon rules for reading and transforming archaeological field data into evidence.

Then too there were methodological and theoretical concerns, which participants approached from very different perspectives. For some the Native Americans were here and must be recognized in every theory, must be a factor in every conclusion. Unabashed uniformitarians they were, and they worked from the known (ethnographic present) to the unknown (archaeological past), an approach that demanded continuity between present and past and its corollary, a shallow past.³¹ Yet, those who sought a Pleistocene human presence, possibly of a distant unrelated people, knew little about modern tribes and cared less.³² Native Americans were merely the latest in a parade of races that had migrated to the continent, making analogies to Indians and their quarry sites irrelevant. And what did a deep antiquity, or a shallow one for that matter, say about cultural evolutionary notions of historical progress? If American Indian prehistory began, as prehistory did in Europe, in Pleistocene times, why had Native Americans not fully transcended Lewis Henry Morgan’s savagery stage and achieved civilization?³³

There were differences too in how and to what degree participants sought to harmonize the archaeological and human fossil records of the Old World and the New. Although the questions being asked and the evidence being examined were unique to these shores, the story of global human prehistory was not one of parallel and separate tracks in the two hemispheres, but a biological and cultural skein that began in the Old World and ended in the New. The more or less constant tugging at one end of the evolutionary thread, such as the dispute in Europe over whether Neanderthals were our immediate ancestors and when modern humans first appeared, was felt at the other. So it was that the 1912 discovery of the Piltdown fossil, which seemingly affirmed that modern-looking humans existed in the Early Pleistocene, had repercussions in distant Vero, Florida. Divergent views of human evolution, the rate and degree of anatomical change over time (and its corollary, the question What should a Pleistocene human look like?), and indeed varying views of the one or more mechanisms of evolution itself drove controversy.

That was likewise true of artifacts, except for them expectations and tolerances were broader, insofar as cultural evolutionary sequences were seen as more variable than those in the human fossil record (there were far more structural constraints on cranial variation and rates of anatomical change than on artifact change). American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) archaeologist Nels Nelson vigorously objected to the Colorado Museum of Natural History’s Jesse Figgins and Harold Cook’s claims that metates and arrowheads at the Frederick, Oklahoma, site could be 365,000 years old: if that were so, he growled, we shall have to revise our entire world view regarding the origin, the development, and the spread of human culture.³⁴ He was not ready to do that on principle, but what exactly was the principle? That was not so evident.

That such questions were raised in the complete absence of any comprehensive or guiding theory in archaeology made efforts to find answers all the more challenging, with the result that with each discovery arguments flared anew.

Yet, this controversy was about more than just archaeological and related anthropological issues. Throughout, efforts to determine the relative or absolute age of artifacts and human fossil remains were hopelessly entangled in disputes not of archaeology’s making. There was general, though not universal, agreement that a site’s antiquity had to be determined independently by geological methods, associating artifacts or skeletal remains with glacial-age deposits—such as glacial gravels or loess—or with the bones of extinct fauna thought to be Pleistocene in age. There were no easy answers from that quarter, either, for at the outset of this controversy glacial geologists were themselves grappling with fundamental questions in their own field, such as when the Pleistocene ended, how many separate glacial episodes there had been over the Ice Age, and even how to recognize a Pleistocene-age deposit beyond the limits of the continental ice margin. For their part, paleontologists had only an incomplete listing of extinct vertebrate taxa, and it was not known whether those had disappeared during the Pleistocene or if they had survived into the Recent period (the latter was suspected to be the case for many taxa).

As a result there were wide-ranging disagreements over archaeological and nonarchaeological evidence and issues. Joint visits to the sites in question, necessary at a time when antiquity had to be assessed from circumstances on (and in) the ground, mostly served to widen rather than narrow the gap between antagonists. There was scant agreement about what the empirical record meant, and even less about the methods to interpret it, even as attention shifted from stone tools to human skeletal remains to artifacts associated with extinct fauna. Facts are facts, Harold Cook had assured John Merriam as Cook was trying to convince Merriam of the antiquity of several sites, but Cook was wrong.³⁵ Facts were not just facts: they were theory-laden and controversy-laden observations about the empirical realm.³⁶ Until the end of this dispute, the facts were never viewed in quite the same way by all who saw them.³⁷

Incommensurability led to impasse, as neither side show[ed] an inclination to recede from the advanced position it had taken.³⁸ Impasse triggered fierce intradisciplinary and interdisciplinary border wars in which no one was quite sure what belonged to whom. These sparked harsh exchanges in print and led to fiery encounters at meetings, especially at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which yearly brought the participants together from across the disciplines.

Widening the sphere of controversy further, these differences played out amid struggles between amateurs (as most everyone was), an emerging professional class (to which many aspired), and those jockeying for elite status within the professional community (as only a few could be). Whatever the official myth of democratic equality in science, Martin Rudwick observes, all of its practitioners know deeply and viscerally that not everyone is created equal. Some are more equal than others. Such inequality is often most visible and matters most during episodes of controversy, when the stakes are highest.³⁹ Inevitably, there were some who sought to delegitimize others, and fierce disputes broke out over who among them was entitled to write and speak to the public on behalf of science.⁴⁰

The controversy took place among institutions (and newly created specialized journals) vying to establish their preeminence and centrality and in a climate of intense competition for patronage and support. There were few fair fights: the desperate need for funding badly hobbled most, while those in research bureaus within the federal government (its own role in science then rapidly expanding) flexed considerable financial muscle.⁴¹ As this was happening, the ground beneath the discipline shifted from its longtime base in local scientific societies and museums to government research bureaus and finally to the burgeoning university system. With these transitions the theoretical disposition and direction of archaeology and anthropology changed, along with its membership and sociopolitics.⁴²

Exacerbating matters was the fact that archaeological sites are inherently contested spaces: they are unique, fixed spots on a landscape. Their factual claims cannot be independently replicated by others.⁴³ The sites in this dispute were usually located on what someone considered their home turf, at a time when there was still overt territoriality and tension between eastern and western scientific institutions, and between federal and state governments. Friction was often unavoidable between locals who found and interpreted the sites and those from distant museums, federal agencies, or universities who swooped in (not always by invitation) to reinterpret their meaning. Nor was that friction unique to archaeology: the latter decades of the nineteenth century contained recurring strains between state and federal geological surveys over glacial mapping in the states, which at times bore directly on the dispute over the number of glacial epochs.⁴⁴

Finally, and perhaps most important of all, this controversy took place at a time when archaeology, as with many turn-of-the-century disciplines, was self-consciously attempting to define its boundaries and create an intellectual identity while others were threatening to breach its borders.⁴⁵

As a result, battles over the content of science spilled over into the conduct of science, and from there into raw personal, institutional, disciplinary, regional, and political conflicts. It created a toxic atmosphere of distrust and suspicion between advocates and critics. One of those moments, a Thomas Chamberlin-orchestrated venomous assault on Wright’s Man and the Glacial Period, even sparked an angry wildfire that blazed into the halls of Congress. In such a wide open field there were few rules of engagement; the controversy grew heated and bitter and left lasting wounds, like the ones an aged Sellards sought to heal.

The result was one of the longest-running feuds American archaeology has ever experienced, one that at times was so vicious that the purposeful search for early sites was most harmfully discouraged and many were actually frightened away from participating. ⁴⁶ Nelson, sufficiently fearless that he thought little of plunging into the remote Gobi Desert for long stretches of archaeological fieldwork, nonetheless advised others in the midst of this controversy to do what he did, lie low for the present. ⁴⁷

Yet, for all its ambiguity and acrimony and after stubbornly defying resolution for nearly forty years, the controversy over human antiquity in North America suddenly evaporated at Folsom in the fall of 1927. Folsom was not the long-sought evidence of an American Paleolithic or a human presence deep in the Pleistocene (or at least not by Old World standards). It was something very different. But then, after decades of dispute, nothing ended up looking quite the way it was expected it would at the beginning.

In its time, the problem of human antiquity engaged and defined as few others did the emerging discipline of American archaeology. It did so not just because some of the best and brightest of several generations of archaeologists—as well as glacial geologists, physical anthropologists, and vertebrate paleontologists—were attracted to it, though they were. Nor was it because the participants thought this was a significant problem, though they did. Rather, this problem loomed so large because it cut so deep into American archaeology’s conceptual core, forcing the nascent field to confront haziness in its theories, methods, and evidence, all while past time and everything that flowed from it vital to understanding the prehistory of North America was held hostage.

Until it was released, American archaeologists labored under what Alfred Kroeber called a flat past, where time and space seemingly collapsed in on one another⁴⁸ and where they had to stuff a tremendous lot of cultural events into an ever-shrinking chronological container. ⁴⁹ As James Snead observes, even after Alfred Kidder, Kroeber, and Nelson in the second decade of the twentieth century developed and applied new methods to detect chronological change (seriation and stratigraphy), the past remained merely an older version of the present.⁵⁰ That would not change until Folsom.

In retrospect it is significant but hardly surprising that Kidder, the greatest archaeologist of his generation, instantly responded when Frank Roberts called from Folsom urging him to come see for himself a projectile point that had just been found in situ between the ribs of an apparently extinct bison. By his own admission, Kidder had long dodged the issue of origins and comforted [himself] by working in the satisfactorily clear atmosphere of the late periods. But he was acutely aware of the stakes of the game and that resolution of the human antiquity question would have repercussions across American archaeology and beyond.⁵¹ Kidder knew nothing of the Folsom site when Roberts reached him, but as he drove to Folsom that early September day in 1927 he was absolutely certain American archaeology had been waiting decades for this moment to arrive.

1.2 A powerful lens

The demonstration of a Pleistocene human presence in America inspired a complete rethinking of the colonization of the New World. And because of the lessons learned at Folsom (not least, how to find more sites like it), within a dozen years an entirely new understanding of early North American prehistory was crafted and became the foundation of the next half-century of research into what came to be called the Paleoindian period. That was to be expected, of course, but was hardly the only result of consequence.

Folsom also revealed a vast chasm in North American prehistory. American archaeologists found themselves staring into a gap many thousands (possibly tens of thousands) of years wide between the Late Pleistocene and the Late Prehistoric, with no idea what happened in between.⁵² Filling in that gap gave the discipline a mission and method that guided work over the next half-century and forced a rethinking of core assumptions about the relationship of archaeology to anthropology: the use of ethnohistory and ethnographic analogy were never the same afterward.⁵³ So too, arguably, the relationship between archaeologists and Native Americans, a change with repercussions that flared up at century’s end.

With the demonstration of a Late Pleistocene antiquity, the New World found itself with much-needed chronological elbow room. No longer, as Kidder observed with palpable relief, did it appear that New World civilizations had no chronological on-ramp, an idea that had fueled hyperdiffusionist claims that these civilizations had not arisen on their own but had had outside (Old World) help.⁵⁴ No longer, Franz Boas announced, did linguists have to worry about revising their views about the stability of language types and of fundamental grammatical forms.⁵⁵ And no longer, Kroeber declared, did one have to conjure complex racial migration scenarios to account for the physical and cultural diversity of Native Americans present and past, when gradual in situ population divergence was a feasible alternative.⁵⁶

In the end this controversy and its consequences revolutionized American archaeology, though scarcely in ways Holmes earlier imagined. Disciplinary revolutions are not always the result of controversy, nor, for that matter, do controversies inevitably provoke disciplinary revolutions—but that is where the smart money bets.⁵⁷ Scientific controversies in general can be pivotal (as certainly this one in particular was) in a discipline’s historical trajectory.⁵⁸

A controversy as long, complex, and bitter as this offers an especially powerful lens for examining late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American archaeology. This is so because controversy occurs when consensus over an issue breaks down and yet substantial parts of the scientific community see some merit on both sides of a public disagreement.⁵⁹ The disagreement is deemed worthy of being taken seriously, is debated publicly (allowing others to judge the merits of the case or join), involves sustained argument and counterargument, and is held to be determinable by scientific means.⁶⁰

As such, controversy strips away the veneer and exposes—as tranquil times rarely do— the internal workings of a field (and the sometimes spectacularly boorish behavior of its practitioners⁶¹), the process by which new knowledge is created, the relative status of participants, and the intellectual and social context in which these developments occur.⁶² Controversies can range freely and spread rapidly with no a priori limits as to where it will stop in its questioning of entrenched beliefs, concepts, methods, modes of interpretation, data, criteria of relevance, norms of formulation, acceptance and rejection of hypotheses, and other components of the scientific enterprise. ⁶³ Controversy, as Marcelo Dascal and Victor Boantza put it, allows for the eventual conciliation of opposite views in the construction of a new theory and even for a new methodology. It thus contributes to the development of knowledge by paving the way for innovation. More simply, it forges the keys to its own solution, one to which both sides contribute even if, Rudwick adds, one of them fails to admit it. ⁶⁴

This is assuming, of course, that a controversy ends in resolution, though as Ernan McMullin observes, not all of them do: some are abandoned when the community as a whole is unable to resolve matters, sees no hope in doing so, and loses interest; others might end as a result of nonepistemic pressures, such as a loss of research funds or from political pressure, in which case the controversy has closure but no solution.⁶⁵ The human antiquity controversy began as a woefully underdetermined problem but was resolved despite years of false starts and dead ends. Progress was made by rejecting different sites and claims, and by trial and error that made clear what needed to be learned. There was nothing teleological about the process.

Not surprisingly, historians of science find controversies to be fertile ground. Although few have shown a great deal of interest in the history of archaeology (as Matthew Goodrum notes, that is slowly changing⁶⁶), there have been studies of historical controversies that involve archaeology and anthropology (the examples come almost entirely from the Old World), as well as studies of disputes in the nearby fields of geology and natural history (biology).⁶⁷ Some of these works, such as the several richly detailed volumes exploring nineteenth-century British geology, each devoted to one of the major disputes in which the British geologist Roderick Murchison was deeply involved, are valuable exemplars (though the unwavering spotlight on Murchison prompted one of the authors to ask, if somewhat self-consciously, whether readers had already had enough of Murchison and his quarrels).⁶⁸

Although long recognized as a seminal episode in American archaeology, the controversy over human antiquity in North America receives only passing mention in broader histories of the field (and, for that matter, in histories of glacial geology), or in biographies of its major figures. Even the best of those works—such as those by Curtis Hinsley, Frank Spencer, and Bruce Trigger—review a few key individuals in the controversy and gloss the central issues, sites, and outcome before moving on. In so doing, they acknowledge how this episode fits into the overall evolution of the field, or in the work of an individual or institution, but while granting its larger importance do not explore it in detail. More particulars emerge in article-length histories devoted to this episode, but their coverage is necessarily limited and often uneven, and they do not plumb the complex analytical depths of an episode that spanned decades, involved scores, and ranged widely across multiple disciplines.⁶⁹

I hasten to add that I tar myself with this same broad brush: my earlier writing on the topic has focused on a few key participants, on specific moments, or on overviews in this decades-long controversy. These were often written for the purpose of providing a deeper historical context and a broader understanding of the current controversies over the origin and antiquity of the first Americans (the details have changed, but the broad questions we archaeologists ask have remained much the same).⁷⁰ And none of them approaches the extent or depth of coverage in this book, and indeed each is essentially superseded by it. More importantly, this is history solely for history’s sake. The goal is to understand why the evidence was seen in the manner in which it was seen given the knowledge available at the time.

Important as this question—along with the controversy and its resolution—is for our understanding of the prehistory of North America and for American archaeology writ large, it has not received the historical attention it deserves for the transformative impact it had. It is principally for this reason, and as a contribution to the broader intellectual history of North American archaeology, that I undertook the study presented here.

There is more to it than that, however. I would not necessarily privilege the significance of the human antiquity controversy in North America in the grand scheme of the history of science. But this dispute is unusual in one respect that arguably makes its study of wider historical interest and import.

Common to most scientific controversies is that the core of the dispute is intradisciplinary: rich as the Murchison volumes are in revealing the social processes that helped shape geological knowledge in Victorian England, those controversies were driven primarily by geological questions that were asked by geologists and resolved by geological methods. The human antiquity controversy was different: there was no archaeological answer to this archaeological question. The dispute that began in 1890 over whether artifact form (later, human skeletal morphology) scaled with antiquity led to no resolution at all, but merely exposed the challenge of reading time from stone tools or anatomy. Demonstrating antiquity had to be and was ceded, grudgingly in many quarters, to geology and paleontology.

Central precepts in these disciplines, however, were themselves unsettled. Contemporary glacial geologists were at odds with one another as to how supposed Pleistocene-age deposits—most especially glacial gravels or loess—were to be recognized in the field, particularly when those deposits were located beyond the margins of North America’s terminal moraines (where, as it happened, virtually all of the purported Pleistocene-age archaeological sites were located). One had to distinguish whether gravels had been deposited by a glacier or meltwater rivers draining the ice sheet, whether that took place during a glacial period or in close temporal proximity, or if those deposits were a result of later reworking and redeposition of glacial materials or simply recent river flow. That in turn raised the question, about which there was much debate but little agreement, as to when the Late Glacial became the Postglacial. Loess presented an additional challenge, as initially it was still unclear if it was water laid or windblown, the two mechanisms implying very different temporal relationships to glaciation. In the aqueous theory, loess came with the summer melting of northern glaciers; but if loess was aeolian in origin, its age was free to vary independently of glacial episodes, for all that was needed were winds to blow the sediment.

But even if it could be established that a gravel or loess was glacially derived, it still had to be determined when that occurred within what was still an unsettled Pleistocene sequence. At the very outset of the human antiquity controversy, as noted, it was believed there had been a single advance of glacial ice during the Pleistocene: the number of advances crept up to two by century’s end largely as a result of fieldwork in the Midwest (an idea stoutly resisted by many glacial geologists who worked in eastern North America, where there seemed to be just one terminal moraine). The number rose to six a decade or so later, though by the late 1920s it was back down to four. Yo-yoing along with the changing relative sequence were the estimated ages for those periods of ice advance and retreat, and by extension the potential antiquity of any archaeological materials that might be related to those separate glacial episodes.

Yet, even as those issues were being resolved it became apparent that the chronological resolution afforded by dating artifacts or skeletal remains by the geological deposits in which they were found was too coarse to be of archaeological use. With that, attention shifted to associated extinct vertebrates for age control, though at that time (the second decade of the twentieth century) the chronological and taxonomic details of the evolution and extinction of Pleistocene vertebrate faunas were still poorly known. There was a reasonably secure listing of extinct genera, such as mammoth, mastodon, horse, and camel (among others). It proved far more challenging to identify extinct species within surviving genera—bison, for example, which were still extant in western North America yet were found in potentially ancient archaeological sites. Even if a taxon was identified as extinct, opinions were sharply divided over whether that animal had survived past the end of the Pleistocene (whenever that geological moment was) or whether it had disappeared earlier, and if so how much earlier.

Resolving these questions ought to have been a strictly intramural affair, one for geologists and paleontologists to hammer out on their own. After all, on its face it mattered little to archaeologists how to sort glacial moraines of different ages (or even whether there were moraines of different ages), or if the snails found in the loess were terrestrial or aquatic, or the taxonomic details of extinct species.

But it did matter. The debates over those issues became thoroughly entangled in the human antiquity controversy for several reasons, not least because it was disputes over the age of archaeological sites that often brought those issues to the fore. As well, most of the major figures in glacial geology and vertebrate paleontology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were themselves deeply involved in the archaeological controversy. In fact, by the turn of the century and in the decades that followed most of the sites were investigated and advocated by geologists and paleontologists, not archaeologists. And, finally, because when the results of one discipline came into conflict with another, neither backed down. Hrdlička deemed it scarcely safe for the geologist or the paleontologist to assume that the problem of human antiquity is his problem. He thanked them for every genuine help they can give anthropology, but warned that they should not clog our hands.⁷¹ The erstwhile paleontologist Figgins drew