the UNTITLED 'Pre-Clovis' Story
They say they don't go there because the old ones do not want anybody there. They will take your manhood if you go back once they've told you to stay away.
'Take your manhood'? What is that supposed to mean?
I don't know, and I don't want to find out.
1. Pre-Pre-Clovis
I like to be called Tina although my real name is Katherine Tatyana Johnson.
And something else before we even get started, I don't like the label 'Feminist Archeology' or 'Gyno-centric Anthropology' or anything like that.
I am an Archeologist-In-Training who specializes in the mundane aspects of life in prehistoric times. And that's it. Where others on a dig just see a pit of ash and partially burnt charcoal, I notice the impression in the middle of it where a cooking stone had been laid. To me, that speaks volumes of how the people lived. Especially when we find that very stone off to one side of the fire with burn marks on it. And I didn't want to be one of those 'classroom archeologists', I wanted to be in the field, working, digging, and while I knew I would probably have to write articles or teach classes to enable me to do the fieldwork, I was hoping that I could be on a team somewhere where there would be somebody else designated to do that part of it.
Throughout my school years I've always been fascinated by the past. In grade school I couldn't get enough of the stories of the Pilgrims. And then when I found out that the Vikings had been here before them, and that the oldest natives had been here while the glaciers were melting away. Like the ancient peoples around my home town, the idea that people had been using what was called the Traverse Corridor for thousands and thousands of years just amazed me. Even then, I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
I've still got a scrapbook of those articles that I collected in High School in Michigan. And I still look through them. Mostly to see just how wrong some of those theories were, no matter how widely accepted they were just before being disproven.
The further I went in college, the further back my interest went. Until finally I was standing with Doctor Reginald Smith in a hole in the ground in South Carolina looking at remnants of a settlement that might confirm that beings that we could easily call homo-sapiens lived there before the height of the last maximum glacial advance. Possibly a long time before.
The visiting scholar in charge of this phase of the project at the new dig, just downstream of the original Topper site, said the dates here were concurrent with those from the other site.
And maybe, just maybe, a touch younger, Professor Charles said with his broad European accent.
So there is no doubt that this is pre-Clovis, Reggie asked him.
No. No doubt at all. This is even pre-pre-Clovis.
I crouched down in the pit and looked at the tiny fragments that they had left around their camp along the coastline. There were clear evidence of seashells and fish bones.
They were following the retreating ocean down as the ice advanced north of here? I asked him.
Possibly, Professor Charles said, then he nodded to Reggie. Your girl is quite sharp.
Reggie put a steadying hand on my shoulder to keep me from getting up too quickly, otherwise, the good Professor might have become an artifact in his own dig. Yes, she is very sharp.
Then he realized what he had said, I didn't mean to imply that a woman can't be a fully qualified archeologist. We have several in my own department that.... he never finished taking his foot out of his mouth and just walked over to another test trench. Over here, we have the boundary layer between the chert and the sterile underlayment with a possible hearth excavation from the period through the boundary.
We were doing a continent-wide survey that had the potential to become a hemisphere-wide survey of similarities and differences between a large number of sites that claimed to be pre-Clovis. Our final paper would be a significant part of my doctoral thesis.
First, we'd gone to several well known and almost universally recognized locations where the so called Clovis Point making culture flourished. We saw their ubiquitous spear points and several other of their relics. We had measurements and photographs and even samples enough to write yet another book about the people who had for many years been assumed to be the first settlers of North America.
We were hoping our survey would be a major work that did the same thing, one way or the other, for the pre-Clovis culture. Our working premise had been decided on as that while there were several bands of humans throughout the region, they were independent and for the most part unconnected, not an actual culture as the Clovis groups were with regular contact and trade between them. When the later culture arose, it totally displaced the less sophisticated groups, and probably did so in short order. At least on the archeological timescale.
