First Peoples in a New World by Meltzer David J

First Peoples in a New World by Meltzer David J

Author:Meltzer, David J.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press


WHAT FEEDS AND WHAT CURES, WHAT HURTS AND WHAT KILLS

Having made it this far, the first Americans had already figured out fire, shelter, and clothing. Once here, they needed to find the materials (stone, wood, bone) suitable to make or maintain those items, as well as meet their daily requirements of food and water. Learning where, what, and how to locate those critical resources could be relatively fast and easy, or not.

Outcrops of stone suitable for tool manufacture, for example, don't move, and once found become known and predictable points on an emerging map of a landscape (Figure 42). And those can be relatively easy to find: the famous Alibates agatized dolomite outcrop near Amarillo, Texas, prized for its high-quality stone by hunter-gatherers since Clovis times, is bisected by the Canadian River, which carries cobbles of the stone as much as 600 kilometers downstream of the outcrop. Anyone seeing those cobbles in the river gravels would know it was merely a matter of following the stone trail back to the outcrop source. It's no surprise Clovis-age sites often occur near where major rivers and streams (which we presume were Pleistocene travel corridors) intersect geological outcrops of high-quality stone.35

Locating water can be relatively easy as well, even in dry environments: there, one follows game trails or the flights of birds. Finding it in the same spot again is hardly guaranteed, however, at least not in semi-arid and arid lands where water is neither permanent nor reliable, or during drought when springs and lakes disappear from the surface, and stream flow diminishes. Still, where water might be found beneath the surface or will return after heavy rains generally does not move, and that can be predicted, too. Surely the first Americans possessed the knowledge of geology and hydrology to enable them to find water—there's even tantalizing but unconfirmed evidence of well digging in Clovis times (Chapter 8).

Neither water nor stone were resources that required new knowledge to be exploited. Once found, stone could be flaked into useable tools, and water collected in skin pouches and transported. There wasn't much to learn.



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