The First Americans by James Adovasio

Author:James Adovasio [Adovasio, J. M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-56571-6
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 1980-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

MELEE OVER MEADOWCROFT

Now that I can look back on some forty years as a student and then professional archaeologist, I have become very much aware that a good deal of my career—far from being a smooth, well-planned trajectory, one thing leading logically to the next—might better be described as a series of ricochets, one of which led me to the Meadowcroft Rockshelter in southwestern Pennsylvania, where my career has been rattling around for three decades.

I can say that I always wanted to be an archaeologist. I made up my mind about that when I was four or five years old, growing up an early reader in Youngstown, Ohio. My mother, a single parent (my father died in World War II), kept me supplied with books of all sorts, my favorites being anything on archaeology and geology. I knew before I graduated from grade school that I wanted to go to the University of Arizona to pursue archaeology, and by the time I got there in 1962, I was also deeply into motorcycles. So I ended up riding around the desert a lot (which, among other things, forces you to learn to appreciate the subtle differences in landscapes), graduating after three years and spending a fourth year in graduate school. I then returned to Youngstown to teach for two years at what would become Youngstown State University.

In 1968, I headed off to the University of Utah, where I became a graduate student of a legendary archaeologist named Jesse D. Jennings. Jenningswas probably the finest field archaeologist of his part of the twentieth century—and also at times one of the rudest, most abrasive human beings I have ever met. Evidently he was even more so in his earlier days, but shortly before I arrived he had suffered a horrendous heart attack. The story went that when he was lying gray-faced on the gurney, a doctor approached and asked if he wanted someone to fetch a priest to administer last rites. Jennings reached out, grabbed the doctor by the collar, pulled him down, and snarled, “Do you seriously think I intend to fucking die here?” The story may be apocryphal, but it definitely is “him.”

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