Customer Reviews

MONTE VERDE V2

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Don't plan to take this book to bed with you because it is not light reading (1071 pp). It does represent, however, the best report on a New World archaeological site to come out in a long time. The site provides the best evidence for pre-Clovis occupation and also has the earliest habitation structures in the New World. The 22 chapters and 16 appendices cover everything from microscopic studies of stone tool edge-wear to analysis of seaweed remains. If you are into early man (excuse the gender bias) studies, find a way to buy this book. The publisher only printed 700 copies, so most of them are going to be purchased by libraries

Tom Dillehay's dating of the Monte Verde site in Chile to 12,800 years
ago -- hundreds of years before the Mackenzie corridor opened the
remote possibility of Beringia (dry Bering Sea) migration -- seems to
have driven a stake into the theory that man first migrated by land to
the Americas. Even most of the establishment achaeologists have now
come to admit that their doubts about Monte Verde's authenticity were
misguided. Even Brian Fagan, who championed Beringia migration in the
THE GREAT JOURNEY, has visited the site and called Dillehay's dates
"unassailable." In QUEST FOR THE ORIGINS OF THE FIRST
AMERICANS E. James Dixon, once the chief archeologist at the
University of Alaska, states that, while his mission was to prove
older dates for Clovis man in the north, he found progressively
younger dates there, suggesting that American cultures came from the
south. In September of 1999 paleontologist Walter Neves revealed that
an 11,500-year-old skull from central Brazil, "Luzia", has
the round eyes, large nose and pronounced chin characteristic of
Australian aborigines and native Africans. If they came before land
bridge migration was possible how did these people get to the
Americas? Inter-oceanic travel in antiquity was dismissed as
impossible by academics. Adventurer Thor Heyerdahl's voyages
documented in KON-TIKI and RA II proved that raft voyaging on steady
ocean currents was not only possible but was far easier than walking
over thousands of miles of ice-sheets. The academics have continued to
mock Heyerdahl, calling him a "lucky adventurer." However,
evidence of inter-oceanic travel thousands of years before the
proposed founding of civilization in the Near East is building
steadily.