Encounters with the Maverick Archaeologist of the Americas

August 18, 2024 7:18 AM

Hakai Magazine: Then in 1976, a 27-year-old American anthropological archaeologist named Tom Dillehay uncovered the campsite, now called Monte Verde, and found that the small group had made it nearly to the bottom of South America 14,500 years ago. This was 1,500 years too early: established archaeologists thought people didn’t even arrive in North America, up in Alaska, until around 13,000 years ago. The discrepancy seriously undermined the leading theory, and moreover came from a young Dillehay who hadn’t yet finished his doctorate. What followed was decades of academic warfare, sometimes nasty, which made Dillehay famous and in which he turned out to be right.
posted by ShooBoo (13 comments total)

'For the next 45 years, Dillehay asked the Mapuche questions about kinship and practices—not pure archaeology anymore, but ethnoarchaeology, that is, learning about a people not only from artifacts of their past but also by studying their living culture and by talking to them. He returned every year; María Catrileo, a linguist affiliated with Austral University of Chile and a Mapuche, says that Dillehay was good at talking to the sometimes stranger-averse Mapuche, not only as a researcher but also as a friend: “He just mixed up with the people and was so close to them,” she says. “He learned things other researchers could not get.”'

Emphasis mine. Right before the pandemic, I spent a few months in southern Chile, and visited the grounds of the Austral University in Valdívia, where Dillehay set up an anthropology department. I don't have Dillehay's gifts for getting to know people or sticking with one subject, but I admire them greatly.

And I'm glad that loving attention to detail and documentation won the day on the competing theories. I'm not sure that's even possible anymore.

Finally, I think that people can sense when a "stranger" is genuinely interested in them, not just their forebears, but how they live their lives today.
posted by rabia.elizabeth at 7:44 AM on August 18 [13 favorites]

In 1982, the specialists dated the site to an improbable 14,500 years ago, an outrageous contradiction of the theory, established for 70 years, called Clovis First.
thank you for this, ShooBoo. i have been excited to see all the research about early humans in the Americas. today i learned a name for the alternative theory: kelp highway [natgeo]
posted by HearHere at 8:40 AM on August 18 [2 favorites]

back in '89 in a general-ed elective Andean Civilization class, the prof for some reason mentioned the Monte Verde site & date, and hearing that 14,500 number instantly woke me out of my typical lecture semi-slumber and made me clarify the number I'd heard . . .

I caught the vibe that he was happy that somebody in class had sussed that that number was an outlier vs. the established narrative of peeps steadily filtering southwards at the end of the ice age.
posted by torokunai at 10:30 AM on August 18 [2 favorites]

Oh for ffs. Outing myself, here is the distilled version of my PhD dissertation. If you sense any exasperation in the following, you may understand why I gave up and left academia:

There are actually CHILEAN archaeologists, who have been doing a lot of archaeology in their OWN GODDAMN COUNTRY, including before, during, and after the gringos turned up. They are NOT STUPID, and have plenty of interesting things to say that are just as valid and scientific as what people who speak English with a US accent as their first language have to say. The Bolivian and Peruvian archaeologist would like to have done the same too, if the US archaeologists would have given them the chance.

"Maverick" my arse. Fuck it, I'm going back into retirement. I washed my hands of this whole discipline for good reason.
posted by EllaEm at 10:34 AM on August 18 [18 favorites]

As for the article -- I was an archaeology major a few years after the Monte Verde dating came out, when there was still a lot of desperate denial, but the kelp road hypothesis seemed so functional and possible that even then I thought the fear was overblown. So I always perk up when yet another older site is found, confirming and expanding our knowledge of the paths taken into the Americas.
posted by tavella at 12:10 PM on August 18 [2 favorites]

I gently mock the Clovis only archeologists... Why does their history begin there? Well, they just didn't dig any deeper. QED.
posted by Jacen at 12:19 PM on August 18 [2 favorites]

Mod note: One deleted. Please refrain from telling other users how to participate/show up in threads and let us mods know instead so we can determine if action is needed.
posted by travelingthyme (staff) at 12:29 PM on August 18 [1 favorite]

Btw, I'm not disputing any of the science. I would just like to pause and point out that this is a discipline in which star struck freelance journalists stumbling across charismatic emeritus professors with exciting stories to tell about their adventures in exotic places (and how much the natives loved them) are not exactly uncommon.

More to the point, said journalists, charmed as they are by that very 'maverick' quality, will never have the perspective necessary to stand back and notice that, oddly, all the people at the very top of this scientific community happen to be incredibly charming, charismatic (maverick, even), white men from the US.

They all seem to even give off the same vibe! Maybe they all have the same jokes and same kind of magnetism. Gosh, it's almost as if that singular quality that seemed so unique to the freelance journalist wasn't a personality trait, but something that was necessary in order to make it to the top of a highly competitive academic discipline.

An academic discipline that attracts all sorts of people. Some of whom are - and have been since the 1950s and 60s btw - women, people of color, people with disabilities, people from outside the United States. And people who were maybe just not charismatic. You don't make it to Emeritus without beating out a lot of other candidates along the way. If there is diversity at the bottom but only charming white men at the top, you'd think questions should be asked.

But THAT is how oppression happens in academia. Slowly, quietly, subtly - in ways you can't quite put your finger on. So insidious you end up just blaming yourself for being a "bad fit" when really the problem is you're just not a charming able bodied white man born in the USA.

And even then! The strange thing about archaeology is that it is 100% a team science. You can't be a single archaeologist and do anything at all. Everything described in this freelancer's article was, I guarantee you, the result of the hard work of 100s of people. But here, it's all ascribed to the personality and hardworkof one man. Not his position, nor his grad students, nor his lab or nor his dozens and dozens of collaborators...

And honestly I have no beef with Tom Dillehay at all, or any of them at all. It just is what it is. But apparently it still makes me mad to see this kind of thing because - damn! It's so hard to fight against charisma and the power of a good story.
posted by EllaEm at 1:12 PM on August 18 [18 favorites]

"It's so hard to fight against charisma and the power of a good story."

Depressingly, that reminds me of a (non-verified) quote:

"There are some stupid mistakes that only very smart people make, and one of them is the notion that a sensible argument seriously presented can compete with a really good piece of theatre." - Laurie Penny.
posted by aleph at 3:03 PM on August 18 [9 favorites]

star struck freelance journalists stumbling across charismatic emeritus professors with exciting stories to tell about their adventures in exotic places (and how much the natives loved them) are not exactly uncommon.

You could warn them, if only you spoke Hovitos.
posted by chavenet at 3:55 PM on August 18

I was compelled by how Dillehay spent 20 years working with a large interdisciplinary team to publish a definitive set of data about the site. That's worth something. It may will be that local researchers also knew this conclusion but there's something to be said for the persistence in building an ironclad case. I don't get the impression the anthropologist is particularly self-aggrandizing. The article does have a bit of a hero narrative.
posted by Nelson at 4:29 PM on August 18 [2 favorites]

There are actually CHILEAN archaeologists, who have been doing a lot of archaeology in their OWN GODDAMN COUNTRY, including before, during, and after the gringos turned up. They are NOT STUPID, and have plenty of interesting things to say that are just as valid and scientific as what people who speak English with a US accent as their first language have to say.

I note that the second photo in the article linked by the OP shows Dillehay working with a man identified in the caption as "geologist Mario Pino." I presume that is Chilean geologist Mario Pino Quivira.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 4:33 PM on August 18 [2 favorites]

Charles C. Mann's book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus describes how the debate between the Clovis First school and the other schools also feeds into an argument about the legitimacy of Indigenous claims to their land. Some people say that if Indigenous people came just after the end of the last Ice Age, and if they consisted of only a few scattered nomads, then Indigenous claims to America are not better than any European claim. That kelp highway map also has a place-holder for these European claims to North America. It shows the dotted line of possible European colonists coming to America between 24,000 and 18,000 years ago. As far as I know (pure amateur here), no genetic study of Indigenous Americans shows European ancestry before the Viking age.
posted by SnowRottie at 9:32 PM on August 22