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C. 19,000 BCE

The Pre-Clovis

Known to the local Inuit as Injaliq, the Alaskan village of Little Diomede sits on a small island in the midst of the Bering Strait, population 115 (and shrinking). Injaliq is located only 2.5 miles to the west of the town of Imaqliq, which is the most eastern Russian settlement. According to most anthropologists, it is here that the ancestors of America’s indigenous population traversed into this hemisphere, when it remained cold enough for much of the world’s water to be locked into Arctic glaciers, but temperate enough that Beringia offered ground on which to walk, some 11,000 years ago.

This Paleo-Indian people that migrated from Siberia are known as the Clovis culture, after the town in New Mexico where some of their oldest artifacts are to be found. Despite its distance from New Mexico, it’s assumed that this fifty-mile-wide nautical swath separating Alaska from Russia was where the final goodbye kiss between Asia and America happened. Anthropologist Dennis J. Stanford writes in Across Atlantic Ice: The Origin of America’s Clovis Culture that though many scholars “have long held that the peopling of the Americas was a more complicated issue,” the Bering Strait traversal remains a “highly logical hypothesis” that was “quickly adopted by the archeological profession and locked investigators into … [a] nearly unshakable notion.” But as history is an ever-fickle thing, we’re simultaneously haunted and enticed by the exceptions that imply reality is more complicated.

Tracing paleolithic migration is inexact; evidence is transient since buckskin decomposes and stone tools are eroded by creeks and streams. Travel writer Craig Childs reminds us that the “land bridge remains a hypothesis. Though early people are found on both sides, no physical artifacts or sites have been discovered to prove that they crossed through here.” The date of arrival is pushed back, challenged by any number of data points. Not least of which is that even though Pittsburgh is 3,682 miles from Little Diomede, it’s only twenty-seven miles from Avella, where a farmer named Albert Miller discovered artifacts in a rock shelter that would eventually be dated to 19,000 years ago, anticipating the Clovis people by eight millennia. Not only is the Meadowcroft archeological site the oldest provable inhabitation in North America, it’s the oldest continuously occupied settlement as well.

Miller’s artifacts were discovered while excavating a groundhog hole in 1955, but he wouldn’t generate any scholarly interest until 1973, when archeologist James Adovasio agreed to survey the land as part of a project for the University of Pittsburgh. Adovasio surmised that the artifacts were of a different design than those associated with the Clovis, and in the ensuing decades, those arrowheads were joined by the aftermath of firepits, weapons, pottery, and the remains of around 150 plant and animal species, including the staples of corn, squash, and beans. From a cave that served as a seasonal habitation for indigenous hunting parties, Adovasio would find millions of artifacts.

As he recounts in The First Americans: In Pursuit of Archaeology’s Greatest Mystery, the “people who made these tools were no novices … they imported high-quality materials: Kanawa chert from West Virginia, Flint Ridge material from Ohio, Pennsylvania jasper, and Onondaga chart from New York.” In the rocks outside of Pittsburgh, Adovasio and Miller found evidence of an advanced, widespread, and forgotten world. Radiocarbon dating allowed Adovasio to conclude just how ancient Meadowcroft was; conclusions that, if they were controversial in the 1970s, have quickly become scholarly consensus. As archeologist David J. Meltzer assures readers in First Peoples in a New World: Colonizing Ice Age America, “by all accounts—including those of the site’s harshest critics—the work was superb.”

Whether those who called Meadowcroft home came from the east or the west and how exactly they’re related to subsequent Indian populations is an issue of controversy, however. It is possible that the ancestors of both the Meadowcroft and Clovis peoples came across the Bering Strait over millennia. Or perhaps, as adherents of the contested Solutrean hypothesis hold, the former may have arrived from the east on small rafts and boats linking southern Europe to the Arctic and then to the Western Hemisphere. Another position, Stanford explains, is that of many of the Natives themselves. “Many [Indians] oppose the theory that their ancestors came across a land bridge from Asia—or from anywhere else,” Stanford writes. “Their ancestors, they argue, were created in their traditional American homelands; they didn’t migrate from another continent,” and it’s crucial to remember and respect that perspective—when flint and stone chip fail us, there is a wisdom in that.

Despite the ineffability of origins, there is something intimate and personal in climbing down into the rock shelter. Adovasio recalls how at the closest strata, his undergraduates found beer bottles and drug paraphernalia left by bored teenagers. Then they found the trash of the European settlers in this area, the Scots-Irish who arrived in the eighteenth century (and from whom Miller descended). Beneath that, they unearthed the discarded refuse of the Monongahela Indians who made this region their home in what would have been the Middle Ages, and then earlier and earlier groups back to those original people for whom we don’t even have a name. But as different as those ages may have been, Adovasio detected an important human unity as well, explaining that “We had come across some twenty levels of prehistoric fireplaces, showing that at this spot for literally thousands of years people had been taking it easy, sitting around the fire, munching.” Here, underneath a few meters of collapsed granite and sandstone, humanity had unfolded over the millennia.

The lives of those original, unnamed people who sought shelter at Meadowcroft were inevitably filled with love and fear, sadness and rage, frustration and joy, as surely as anyone else who’s occupied this place. The original Pittsburghers, these first Americans, were people after all, and like most of us they lived lives that were to be buried and forgotten.