This course is a broad overview of current state of First Americans archaeology, which studies the first humans to enter the Western Hemisphere. It addresses questions concerning the origins of founding populations, how humans arrived in North and South America, when people first arrived in the New World, and what materials were left behind to inform us about how these folks lived. This course will provide a summary review of each of these topics, address different theoretical perspectives, and identify challenges that archaeologists are working to overcome. Class size limit: 150.
Suggest Reading:
"Redefining the Age of Clovis: Implications for the Peopling of the Americas"; Waters and Stafford 2007
"The Late Pleistocene Dispersal of Modern Humans in the Americas"; Goebel, Waters, and O'Rourke 2008
"Pre-Clovis occupation 14,550 years ago at the Page-Ladson site, Florida, and the peopling of the Americas"; Halligan et al. 2016
"The genome of a Late Pleistocene human from a Clovis burial site in western Montana"; Rasmussen et al. 2014
"Earliest Human Presence in North America Dates to the Last Glacial Maximum: New Radiocarbon Dates from Bluefish Caves, Canada"; Bourgeon, Burke, and Higham 2017