Introduction

The search for the first inhabitants of South America requires an unbiased analysis. The peopling of the American continents is oriented towards two ideas: a traverse of the Beringia land bridge by foot and a coastal migration by boat. Traveling by foot would get the humans into Alaska but access into the interior of North America was blocked by merging of the Laurentide and the Cordilleran ice sheets. This obstacle remained until the eventual retreat of the ice. A coastal migration route along the western coastline of North America would bypass the land that was covered by the ice. However, still questions arise: How long would this journey have taken? Would they have gained nautical expertise through this experience or did they have it before they left their homeland? It is the goal of this project to examine a possible nautical migration route to the one of the first American settlements and why it is different from other early sites. This requires a different view of the Americas.



Monte Verde is located in the present South American country of Chile at coordinates: 41o30'17" S and 73o12'16" W.  This archaeological site challenges the theories of how humans came to populate the American continents. Professor Thomas Dillehay states, “In 1977, when the find was brought to my attention, I was head of the anthropology department at the Southern University of Chile in Valdivia. That year I formed an international interdisciplinary team, which eventually grew to eighty members, and we began to excavate the site” (Dillehay 1997:29). The site provided the excavators with various artifacts that included plant remains and wooden objects (both of which were preserved extremely well in the bog environment of that time) as well as animal bones (Dillehay 2000:160-161). It is this preservation that allows for carbon dating to be applied. There are actually two sites at Monte Verde: Monte Verde I which is 1.2 meters deeper than Monte Verde II (Dillehay 1997:31; Dillehay 2000:167). The above mentioned artifacts were found at Monte Verde II. The dating of those artifacts corresponds to about 12,500 BP (Cowen 2005:304; Dillehay 1997:32; Dillehay and Meltzer 1999:61). The Monte Verde I site has been dated much earlier as Dillehay states, “radiocarbon analysis of charcoal from two of the burned features dated around 33,000 B.P. In addition, several radiocarbon dates obtained from non-cultural materials lying both above and below this layer help to bracket the age of this possible older component between 35,000 and 30,000 B.P.” (Dillehay 2000:167). These dates, of both Monte Verde I and Monte Verde II, raise the question of just when did the first people arrive into the Americas. If we look at specifics, “Monte Verde is only about 1300 years older than the oldest known Clovis sites in North America, Monte Verde is 16,000 km (10,000 mi.) south of the Bering Strait” (Crabtree and Campana 2006:182). next page