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TOPPER SITE - Pre-Clovis In South Carolina

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Bianca
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« Reply #15 on: July 14, 2009, 08:36:44 pm »





               

               A classical Clovis tool from the Topper site
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« Reply #16 on: July 14, 2009, 08:38:58 pm »




               


               Topper pre-Clovis Tools

               A whole assembly of pre-Clovis tools as unearthed by the archaeologists
 

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« Reply #17 on: July 14, 2009, 08:41:26 pm »




             

              Pre-Clovis bend-break tools.
 

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« Reply #18 on: July 14, 2009, 08:44:10 pm »





             

              Pre-Covis microliths.
 



                                         

                                          A pre-Clovis scraper
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« Reply #19 on: July 14, 2009, 08:48:33 pm »




           









                                             An entirely new Aspect of prehistoric tools?






Alan Day lives in the town of Cambridge, Ohio, USA.

He has put together an amazing collection of evidence on a truly off-beat subject. He argues that some seemingly random forms and dents on ancient stone tools are not as random as they look.

When I first saw the following two pictures, I had to laugh out loud. But...


... once I started to investigate Mr. Day's claims by looking for tell-tale scratches and dents in European samples available to me, by golly, they were everywhere! But I am still not sure if this is a visual/psychological effect (like children seeing castles and animals in clouds) or whether this is real.

If you see faces in a few palaeolithic tools, you may have a medical problem or an over-active imagination.

On the other hand, if you spot scratches and dents in the right places on large numbers of ancient stone tools, then you must admit that Mr. Day not only could be but probably is right. I certainly have found dents and scratches (though many too faint to be entirely sure) in stone tools in all the right places and in large numbers.
 
I appeal to anyone in a position to do so, to quietly have a look at Alan Day's sites and then to go to their stone tool collections. I will say only so much: from my inadequate initial observations, the phenomenon is not limited to north Americam stone tools, it is global.

See Mr. Day's site(s) at - http://www.daysknob.com/Topper_A.htm and at - http://www.daysknob.com/RndmBrd.htm






Mr. Day has the following to say on the subject::



"It is interesting to speculate on the origin of the Bird Spirit image.

Cave paintings by humans of the Paleolithic, with their magnificent depictions of animals of all sorts, often include people only as stick figures if at all.

It has been conjectured that humans of that time considered themselves to be separate from the natural world, having come from above. One of this author's possibly bizarre hypotheses is that this Bird Spirit figure is the manifestation of a sort of "collective unconscious".

Many or perhaps most of us have had vivid flying dreams, particularly in childhood. It seems reasonable to think that if we do it, people hundreds of thousands of years ago did it also, and took it much more seriously and literally. And early humans poking around on the ground must have regarded birds with more than a little wonder. When people first began to think of themselves as transcending their earthbound condition, birds must have quickly come to mind, and a "morphing" of human and bird in their physically rendered imagery seems a logical extension of this."
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« Reply #20 on: July 14, 2009, 08:55:39 pm »




             

              To close this (for our web site) most unusual subject,
              we reproduce a bird's image from Mr. Day on which
              there is no doubt what it does represent.

 

http://www.andaman.org/BOOK/chapter54/text-Topper/text-Topper.htm

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------





Among web-sites with further information are:



- http://archaeology.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?zi=1/XJ&sdn=archaeology&zu=http%3A%2F%2Fpeople.delphiforums.com%2FMCCONAUGHY%2Farchaeology%2FTopperSite.htm



- http://www.centerfirstamericans.org/photos/thumbnails.php?album=21
« Last Edit: July 14, 2009, 08:59:30 pm by Bianca » Report Spam   Logged

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« Reply #21 on: July 14, 2009, 09:05:18 pm »




             

              Archaeologist Al Goodyear believes people were at
              Sourth Carolina's Topper site 50,000 years ago









                                                      Impossibly Old America? 




Archaeology Magazine
Volume 59
Number 3,
May/June 2006 
by Mike Toner 

New sites and controversial theories fuel the debate over the origins of America's first people.

Al Goodyear's renowned barbecued pig is roasting on the grill a mile away, but the 200 professional and amateur archaeologists peering into the steep-walled pit where he's standing have other things on their minds.

Goodyear, director of the University of South Carolina's Allendale Paleoindian Expedition, is explaining why he thinks people were here--on the banks of the Savannah River--50,000 years ago. For most of his audience, this sounds almost 40,000 years off, and the notion of a human presence in the New World before the end of the last Ice Age, much less here in South Carolina, is heresy that flies in the face of a half century of American archaeology. Lunch will wait.

"We now have hundreds of artifacts dated between 14,000 and 18,000 years ago," Goodyear says, standing deep in the pit from which he and an army of volunteers have been excavating them over the past several field seasons.

Then he points to a chert boulder and a streak of charcoal embedded in dun-colored clay six feet below him. Fragments were broken off the basketball-size boulder, he says, and used to make crude stone tools. The charcoal stain is, perhaps, an ancient hearth.

"Based on the radiocarbon dates of the charcoal, I think we have evidence of human activity here in the interior of America 40,000 to 50,000 years ago," he says. "It looks like people came here periodically to get chert for their tools. Where they came from and when, I still have no clue."
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« Reply #22 on: July 14, 2009, 09:13:17 pm »




               

               These stone flakes from the Topper site could be tools,
               though skeptics insist they are natural.

               (Darryl P. Miller,
               USC Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology) 










Could modern humans have made it to the New World at about the same time they were first moving into Europe?

Goodyear concedes that such an outlandish claim is "a little like saying we've found life in outer space."

After 30 years as a professional archaeologist, he knows it will take more than chert flakes and a band of charcoal to overturn the prevailing view of how the Americas were first settled.

Like most other archaeologists, he grew up steeped in the conviction that Ice Age hunters entered Alaska from Siberia around 14,000 years ago, followed an ice-free corridor between the great ice sheets down through Canada, and quickly dispersed to every corner of North America.

Alternate theories provided plenty of fuel for spirited debate late last year as hundreds of nationally recognized archaeologists gathered in Columbia, S.C., for "Clovis in the Southeast," a conference sponsored by the Center for the Study of the First Americans, the Smithsonian Institution, the University of South Carolina, and others.

Even as archaeologists wrangle over who was first, fresh evidence emerging from several digs--notably the Gault site in central Texas--is posing new questions about the Clovis culture itself. Increasingly, the peopling of the Americas is looking like a more complex process than previously thought.

Regardless of which version of the peopling of the Americas one subscribes to, there is growing agreement--amid the debate over when, how, and from where--that the story is still unfolding. University of Tennessee archaeologist Anderson, in an effort to stake out a skeptical inquirer's middle ground, says the flurry of new questions is a healthy sign.

"We've got to start investigating the peopling of the Americas as a process and not an event," says University of Tennessee archaeologist David Anderson. "The more we know, the more we realize how complex the situation is. The fact is we don't have a simple story to tell. That's what makes this an exciting time in archaeology."





Mike Toner is a science writer for the Atlanta Journal and Constitution and writes frequently about archaeological issues in the Southeast.



© 2006 by the Archaeological Institute of America
www.archaeology.org/0605/abstracts/america.html
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« Reply #23 on: July 14, 2009, 09:32:43 pm »










                                                Topper (archaeological site)






Topper is an archaeological site located along the Savannah River in Allendale County, South Carolina in the United States. It is noted as the location of controversial artifacts believed by some archaeologists to indicate human habitation of the New World as far back as 50,000 years ago.

Since the 1930s, the prevailing theory concerning the peopling of the New World is that the first human inhabitants were the Clovis people, who are thought to have appeared approximately 13,500 years ago. Artifacts of the Clovis people are found throughout most of the United States and as far south as Panama. The standard theory has been challenged in recent decades with the emergence of pre-Clovis sites such as Monte Verde and other possible pre-Clovis candidates such as Cactus Hill. To date, no consistent pre-Clovis cultural patterns have been established and the accuracy of these claims have been found controversial and unverified.

In 2004, Albert Goodyear of the University of South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology announced that radiocarbon dating of a bit of charcoal found in the Topper Site dated to approximately 50,000 years ago, or approximately 37,000 years before the Clovis people. Goodyear, who began excavating the Topper site in the 1980s, believes that the artifacts are stone tools, although other archaeologists dispute this conclusion, suggesting that the artifacts may be natural and not human-made.

Other archaeologists have challenged the radiocarbon dating procedure of the Topper artifacts. Goodyear discovered the artifacts by digging 4 m deeper than the Clovis artifacts. Before discovering the oldest artifacts, he had discovered other artifacts that he claimed were tools dating around 16,000 years old, or about 3,000 years before Clovis.

Until the recent challenges to the Clovis theory, it was unusual for archaeologists to dig deeper than the layer of the Clovis culture, on the grounds that no human artifacts would be found older than Clovis.
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« Reply #24 on: July 14, 2009, 09:34:56 pm »










External links



Topper Site layers photo Stratigraphic layers photo of the Topper Site and the Pre-Clovis layers.

Topper Site: Beyond Clovis at Allendale
South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology

Another Perspective on the Topper pre-Clovis Material

CNN: Man In Americas Earlier Than Thought
The University of South Carolina announces radiocarbon tests that dated the first human settlement in North America to 50,000 years ago



RETRIEVED FROM:

wikipedia.org
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« Reply #25 on: July 15, 2009, 08:54:32 pm »

Alexander
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     Archaeologist's find could shake up science
« on: January 27, 2007, 10:55:05 am » Quote 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Archaeologist's find could shake up science
By HEATHER URQUIDES
Published January 7, 2007


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Archaeologist Albert Goodyear is working on the find of his life.

Based on radiocarbon tests and artifacts he's found along the Savannah River in South Carolina, Goodyear believes that humans existed in North America as many as 50,000 years ago, shattering the long-held notion that the earliest settlers arrived here about 13,000 years ago in Alaska via a lost land bridge.

Not everyone is convinced, but Goodyear believes further excavation and testing at the South Carolina location, known as the Topper site, will confirm his findings.

He's taking a break next week to come to St. Petersburg for a talk at the Science Center about Florida's first inhabitants. It's a coming home for him. After all, it was here that his interest in all things old first began.

You're from St. Petersburg?

I was born in St. Petersburg. I went to Boca Ciega High School, graduated in 1964.

What drew to you archeology?

I think it was in second grade, at Mount Vernon Elementary, we had a unit on Florida heritage. You study the state tree and the bird and all that, and we studied the Seminole Indians. I was really captivated. I thought, 'Hmm, that's the way to live.' I think that sort of predisposed me. When I was 8, my grandmother pulled out an old family trunk with an Indian arrowhead. That really fired up my imagination.

Your work at the Topper site in South Carolina showed that humans existed in North America far earlier than previously thought. Why does that matter?

People, just regular people, are extremely interested. ... I think it taps into a deep curiosity that humans have about their origins. I don't care whether you're in France or South Africa or South Carolina.

Do you think the Topper site will be your greatest discovery or is that yet to come?

I hope it is. Not just for our site, but for the sake of the program. The profession is slowly moving along to accept that there really were people here before the Clovis (roughly 13,000 years ago). The Topper site is unique ... it looks to me like it's the oldest radiocarbon site in North America. That's a huge statement. We're still working on it. Just to have literally found a site of that antiquity, the implications are just enormous. It does say, if it's that old, that people were getting into the United States the same time they were getting into Australia. That's part of that very old migration story. Literally, if it all works out, and I'm convinced that it will, obviously it will be the find of my lifetime.

What's it like to now be the one that people come to listen to?

It comes with the notoriety of the Topper site. ... People are curious about it and want to know what it is, and is it true? I try to cover that when I give these presentations. For me it's fun. It's pretty gratifying because I've always liked working with the public - especially amateur archeologists, since I started out as one.

Heather Urquides can be reached at hurquides@sptimes.com or 892-2253.

If you go

What: Albert Goodyear talks about "Florida's First Peoples"

When: 1 p.m. Saturday

Where: Science Center, 7701 22nd Ave. N

Details: Tickets are $6. For more information, go to www. sciencecenterofpinellas.com or call 384-0027.

[Last modified January 7, 2007, 01:37:07]

http://www.sptimes.com/2007/01/07/Neighborhoodtimes/Archaeologist_s_find_.shtml
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« Reply #26 on: July 15, 2009, 08:56:13 pm »



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     Re: Archaeologist's find could shake up science
« Reply #1 on: February 24, 2007, 02:01:14 pm » Quote 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Topper Site-Were Humans in America Over 50,000 Years Ago?

________________________________________


In November 2004, Archaeologist Albert Goodyear of the University of South Carolina surprised scholars throughout the world with the claim that at the Topper site on the Savannah River, a layer containing stone artifacts and carbonized plant remains yielded radiocarbon dates from at least 50,000 years BP. This dating is far earlier than any other known Paleoindian sites in North or South America, with the exception of Pedra Furada, a group of rock shelters in eastern Brazil whose lowest levels are controversially dated at 48,000 years BP or greater (AR 3,2). If the dating at Topper is confirmed, this would be the earliest evidence of human presence on the North American continent, and the history of the original spread of Homo sapiens to the Americas would have to be largely rewritten.


The Topper site, located near Allendale, South Carolina, (fig.1). was first studied by Goodyear in 1981 when a local resident named John Topper led him there during a survey of chert sources. Excavations since 1984 gradually revealed several features containing pre-Clovis artifacts such as chert microtools, small flakes, and pebbles, in layers radiocarbon dated to 16,000 BP. In 2004, Goodyear uncovered chert artifacts and carbonized plant remains in an earlier deposit some 13 feet below this pre-Clovis level. Radiocarbon dating of two charcoal samples yielded a surprisingly early result of over 50,000 years ago, similar to dates obtained on the soil.
         
If the research is borne out, the implications are staggering. The dating extends back to an era when anatomically modern Homo sapiens were still spreading from Africa, reaching Asia and Australia not earlier than 70-50,000 years ago. The Topper site dates would mean that the peopling of the Americas came surprisingly early; or, alternatively, that the currently accepted dates for the peopling of Asia by modern humans may not be early enough.
[Fig.1: Location of the Topper site amid outcrops of flint or chert used for prehistoric tools, on the Savannah River in South Carolina].
         
Based on similarities of mitochondrial DNA between East Asians and Native Americans, some geneticists support the arrival of the latter on the North American continent by around 35,000 BP (see AR 3,2). Some anthropologists, however, such as the Brazilian Walter Neves, note morphological similarities between the skulls of the earliest human remains in the Americas and those of early African or Australian populations.
         
Between the 1930s and 80s, the dominant "Clovis first" model had held that America was first settled by highly specialized big game hunters of the Clovis culture not earlier than 11,500-10,800 BP (the final period of the last, Wisconsin glaciation). A series of pre-Clovis sites, however, were discovered in the 1970s-90s. These include Meadowcroft Rockshelter (ca. 19,600-11,300 BP); Cactus Hill in Virginia (16,000-10,900 BP); Monte Verde in Chile (ca. 33,000-12,500 BP); Pedra Pintada on the Amazon (ca. 12,500 BP); and Pedra Furada in eastern Brazil (ca. 48,000-6,000 BP). All support the idea that the peopling of the Americas began no later than during the second maximum of the last glacial period (ca. 20,000-18,000 BP; see AR 3,2)
         
A crossing of the Beringia land bridge ca. 50,000 years ago might have been feasible as well, since it was temporarily passable during the first maximum of the Wisconsin glaciation. In this connection, recent finds from the region north of the Russian Urals at Mamontovaya Krurya, dated to 36,000 BP (AR 3,2), and the Siberian site Yana RHS, dated to 27,000 BP (Pitulko et al 2004) show that northern regions with extreme cold climate had been reached and inhabited by hunters much earlier than previously thought.

An international conference in October 2005 on early migrations to the Americas, included the presentation of the Topper site to the scientific community.


[Archaeology, 17 Nov., 2004; Pitulko, V.V. et al 2004. "The Yana RHS site: Humans in the Arctic before the last glacial maximum." Science 303: 52-56; Athena Review 3:2, 2002; "Early Brazilians Unveil African Look." Science News 159:212 2001; "Pre-Clovis Surprise." Archaeology 52:18; Powell, J.F. , & W.A. Neves. 1999. "Craniofacial morphology of the first Americans" Amer. J. of Phys. Anthro. 110 (S29):153-188; Dillehay, T. 1997. Monte Verde: A Late Pleistocene Settlement in Chile. Smithson. Series in Arch. Inq. Washington, DC; Roosevelt, A., et al 1996. "Paleoindian cave dwellers in the Amazon." Science 272:373-384; Guidon, N., and G. Delibrias, 1986. "Carbon-14 dates point to Man in the Americas 32,000 years ago." Nature 321:796-771; Adovasio, J., et al 1978. "Meadowcroft Rockshelter, 1977: An overview." American Antiquity 43:632-651]


http://www.athenapub.com/topper.htm
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