Native America

19th century scholars, some very famous ones, had come to the Monte Alegre area and some of the other areas, and they had observed the paintings and inferred that ancient hunter-gatherers, very ancient ones, had created them, who had interesting beliefs about the cosmos and a great interest in worship of the sun. They also found the projectile points and talked about them, although they didn't say much about the use of them. So, when I was first doing the human sequence of Amazonia, I saw in the museums amazing projectile points that did not fit in any later sites. Holocene after the end of the Pleistocene sites never had things like these beautiful projectile points. And then these earlier scholars talked about finding them in some of these painting areas, so I thought, well, it's very difficult to find very ancient sites because they're eroded off, they're deposited over with geologic processes, so how am I going to find and date Paleo-Indians if they were in the Amazon? So I thought I would go to some of these areas discussed by the early scientists and look for excavatable deposits. So I came here to Monte Alegre and local people took me to the hills and we went to all of the sites, major painting sites, and one of them was Caverna da Pedra Pintada. As I walked up toward the cave, I could see that it was full of a rich, stratified deposit with wonderful preservation of plant and animal remains and little chips from making stone tools and other kinds of materials. So I decided then and there that I would come back in a couple of years, and that was '91 and '92. And we would excavate very carefully one part of the cave, and that's how I came to Pedra Pintada. What we found there was a very deep deposit, two meters of deposit, rich in human cultural remains, going from... it was actually 13,000 years ago, up just about to the conquest. And in the very bottom of that deposit, at 13,000 years ago, was the initial Paleo-Indian occupation. So that site, basically, proved that there had been early hunter-gatherers, they had used these projectile points that I described, and it was a very long time ago. And they were broad-spectrum foragers from the remains that we found. That's what the research showed. So it showed Amazonia had unprecedented antiquity in terms of the assumptions about its history, and it showed another kind of first American adaptation, different from the expected kind.