Clovis - Breaking Points (Notes)

The spearhead that transfixed American archaeologists for sixty years was uncovered in a dried up lake bed near Clovis, New Mexico in 1929.

Mammoth bones found in the proximity enabled scientists to date this kill to 13,500 years ago, making the projectile then the oldest Stone Age artifact discovered on the continent.

The fluted sides and sharp serrated edges of the Clovis point gave hunters a lethal weapon that decimated herds of mammoth, giant armadillo and other megafauna.

For much of the 20th century, mainstream archaeologists held fast to a "Clovis First" theory: Big game hunters from Asia crossing the Bering land bridge, drifting down to the killing fields on the plains and in the arroyos, becoming the ancestors of the first tribes of America.

In the 1970s, one of the earliest challenges to the Clovis Firsters came from James Adovasio excavating below the 13,500-year level at Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania: Adovasio’s meticulously detailed analysis dated occupation of the shelter to 16,000 years ago.

Initial scorn for the dissenters gave way to reluctant acceptance with the uncovering of no fewer than twenty-eight creditable pre-Clovis sites across North America, and in South America where Monte Verde in Chile was occupied between 14,220 to 13,980 years ago.

No finds were are dramatic than those at Topper in Allendale County, South Carolina. Archaeologist Al Goodyear and his team had already devoted fourteen years to probing an ancient chert quarry in the area, when flooding of the Savannah River forced them to the higher Topper ground in 1998.

In 2002, Topper artifacts returned a radiocarbon dating of 16,000-20,000 years ago. Two years later, Goodyear found stone age tools embedded in a white sand stone with a layer of charcoal from 50,000 years ago. While there are sceptics aplenty to chip away at Topper, Dr. Goodyear continues to dig deeper.

[Images: Clovis Point, courtesy National Park Service; Meadowcroft Rockshelter, Mark McConaughy; Meadowcroft Excavation Site, courtesy Heinz History Center; Topper artifacts, courtesy Topper Site Virtual Museum]

Beringia - The Ice Wall (Notes)

Imagine intrepid bands of Siberian migrant hunters stalking mammoth and other big game on Beringia 30,000 years ago.

Each summer sees the hunters, their women and children roaming further east; winters they hunker down in hide shelters braving the Arctic blasts that roar down from the northern wastes. Generations of Ice Age frontiersmen inch forward until their passage is blocked by impassable glaciers.

For fifteen millennia, the hardy people who will become the ancestors of Native Americans populate the far reaches of Beringia in growing isolation from their primeval Asian lineages.

Between 20,000 - 15,000 years ago, as the earth warms and the ice wall comes down, the long standstill ends. A swift migration of humans and beasts follows, perhaps five thousand people in all, crossing into the New World and moving down the western spine of the Americas as far south as Monte Verde in Chile.

These images derive from a ground-breaking study by 21 international geneticists led by Ripan Malhi of Illinois University’s department of anthropology. Science News has a good summary of their findings, New Ideas About Human Migration from Asia to the Americas. (A more detailed paper on the Beringian Standstill and Spread of Native American Founders is on PLoSone.)

[Image: Courtesy Ripan Mahli, Mahli Molecular Anthropology Lab, University of Illinois]

Beringia, Cahokia and Quivira [Notes]

Three early settings for the novel spring to mind ranging in time from the last Ice Age to the mid-sixteenth century.

Beringia, the land-bridge that spanned the Bering Straits between eastern-Siberia and Alaska, its connectivity fluctuating with the advance and retreat of the ice mass. Some scientists believe small bands of prehistoric nomads crossed to America 40,000 - 50,000 years ago; this first migration ended when sea levels rose during a period of global warming. About 12,000 to 15,000 years ago in the last Ice Age, the shallow seas again retreated opening up a thousand mile-wide steppe that linked the continents.

Cahokia, A.D. 1150, citadel of a Mississippian mound-building culture outside present-day St. Louis, Missouri: Already occupied for five hundred years, the mid-twelfth century saw the Golden Age of Cahokia, then larger than London and possessing 20,000 residents. One hundred and twenty mounds surrounded the center's ceremonial plazas, the Temple Mound standing ten-stories high.

Over the centuries, Cahokia's astronomors built a series of circular "Woodhenges,"the largest with sixty posts aligned with the rising sun. A two-mile long palisade fortified the inner court. Trade routes extended in every direction from "Cahokia," a seventeenth century French label derived from a local clan long after America’s first city was abandoned.

Quivira, A.D. 1540, the "El Dorado" sought by the conquistador Francisco Vásquez de Coronado on his expedition from Mexico City north to Tierra Neuva. The report of golden Quivira came from El Turco, "The Turk," as the Spaniards dubbed a "very dark and personable" Indian captive liberated from a pueblo near Zuni. Led on by El Turco, Coronado penetrated the heartland crossing endless plains through Texas, Oklahoma and into Kansas.

Quivira is as elusive as the legendary Golden One, its promoter garroted for his deception. There was no gold but when recalling the great march a decade later, Coronado’s chronicler, Pedro de Castenada knew he had glimpsed "the marrow of the land in these western parts,’ and wished he’d settled in this promised land.

Three places, one a gilded dream of America, each with an epic story played out before the first captain of England made a landfall on these shores.

[Images: Beringia map, courtesy of Illinois State Museum; Cahokia, 1150 A.D. Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, artist Art Grossman; Coronado by Frederic Remington, Wikipedia Commons]

Wrestling with Big Ideas - A Reading Blitz

My search for "America" begins with a reading blitz to fix the big ideas in mind.

I’ve the Boston core plotted from 1623 onwards, which will stand me in good stead when I navigate back to the "paradise of all those parts," as Captain John Smith called "New England." For the big picture, I need venture far beyond those rocky shores and that time period.

I intentionally picked up the simplest history on my shelves: American Heritage’s 16-volume Illustrated History of the United States. I’m dipping into the 1963 Oxford History of the American People, an equally venerable volume penned by Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison. I have the Annals of America at hand should I want to delve a little deeper at this stage.

Worth noting that when I began Brazil, one of the first books I read cover to cover was Robert Southey’s massive History of Brazil written in 1810, to this day a remarkable chronicle of the country’s early centuries. All the more amazing for the fact that the poet never set foot in Brazil gleaning his material in the private library of an uncle resident in Portugal for thirty years.

I’ve my revisionist favorites – Howard Zinn’s A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present (P.S.) is indispensable – but for now I want the facts, pure and simple. I’m planning fiction not a history book. What I read is there to fire my imagination and shape the story as I seek it out.

Top of my reading list this week: Tony Horwitz’s A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World, a very palatable mix of history and Horwitz’s trek on the trail of discoverers, conquerors and settlers who came before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth – from Vikings to Virginia adventurers, from Ponce de Leon of La Florida to Coronado of the Seven Cities of Cibola and Quivira. More than a century of lost endeavors, besides the Vinlanders’ voyages of ages past.

Lost as much as hidden behind American myths. I’ve visited these stories before in my work on Mexico and Florida and marveled at the veil thrown over such stirring events. One answer, of course, lies with the myth-makers themselves be they folksy storytellers or formal frock-coats of an Athens of America fashioning their tale for posterity.

Timing is Everything

Boston is undergoing a metamorphosis.

When James Michener and I finished our two-year stint together on The Covenant he said to me:

You unquestionably have the talent to write almost anything you direct your attention to. You are a great researcher and know how to put words together most skillfully as your work on the manuscript proved. You have also, from what I gleaned in our conversations on the long walks, an acute sense of timeliness in subject matter.

That acute sense of timing has been uppermost witnessing the election of Barack Obama. At Grant Park, Chicago, everywhere, whenever the TV cameras rolled people young and old said, "I want to be part of history." And they are...

Long before this when outlining my proposed Boston novel, it didn't escape me that while I focus on Boston, my story goes far beyond one city as a glance at the Outline and Working Notes shows: Puritans, Sons of Liberty, China Trade, Sons of Union, Convoy, Boston Common

As I worked I had the idea that I should be looking beyond Boston -- to a story of America.

Michener had been thinking caually about a book on South Africa for years. When the idea became a reality and we hunkered down at his Maryland home, he saw... "an immense amount of work to be done over the next two working years. The good feeling is that many persons who hear of the project say that they wish it were completed now. This augers well for the timeliness and the gravity; it would be most appropriate if it were in print right now, but I suspect it will be just as timely when and if it finally does appear."

Today, I have the same feeling about a book on "America."

I see my work on Boston as a good starting point with much of the 17th to mid-18th century well structured. I need extensions to early Virginia/slavery/maybe a Florida/New Orleans angle; and expanded 1776 material. But the Boston location is excellently placed for the core story leading to the early 1800s.

Then I begin moving my families out West. Without having plotted a line, I find Kansas City and some locale in Texas beckoning: Boston Irish-ranchers; the Mexican War; the California Gold Rush, for a start. The Boston families, Steeles, Tranes, Lynches and Flys will carry the story to the South and West.

So, for example, Farrell Lynch’s Irish background and story remains the same except that after landing in Boston he moves on west. Adam Trane’s line provides the adventurers, the explorers.

The Lynch line – Farrell + Malachy, the Water Rat – become the western movers and shakers. The Steeles of Boston remain in the East and via Captain Ben of Houqua fame continue to look outward and non-isolationist. Nixie Fly's descendants carry the slavery/abolition story – Boston, Kansas, Carolinas – on a bigger canvas than my original Orlando/Boston plotline but walking the same walk.

What I aim for with "America" is a book that will hopefully achieve what one Brazilian, Wilson Martins, saw in my novel, Brazil:

“Uys was the first to understand Brazil as an imaginary creation, coherent in its apparent incoherency, organic in its historic development, complimentary in its contradictions and antagonisms, unitary in its differences and obscurely answering to the famous “will of being a nation” that Julien Benda identified as the motivating force in the history of his own country.”

I've decided to leave my Boston working pages on the web and revise them as I go. After all, presenting a draft online involves the same thought that goes on in the attic! -- All the elements that go into the shaping of a novel. I expect to spend the rest of the year on the "metamorphosis" of the Boston outline.