In Chile, Climate Clues to an Ancient People
By Guy Gugliotta
The hunters arrived on the high plains of northern Chile about 13,000
years ago, settling in caves, rock shelters and encampments along the shores
of brackish lakes
fed by the melting glaciers of the high Andes.
Despite heart-thumping altitudes -- frequently approaching 14,000 feet
above sea level -- the living was relatively easy: "There were grass, shrubs,
humidity," said
Swiss climate scientist Martin Grosjean, of Bern University. "There
were wild animals" such as vicuñas and guanacos -- cousins of the
domestic llama -- or the
ostrichlike, flightless bird called the ñandú.
Things are different now. Today northern Chile's high plains are part
of the Atacama Desert, a hostile, arid wilderness of cloudless horizons,
brown dirt hills,
dwindling salt lakes and naked drifts of Andean scree.
It was the high desert's very austerity that attracted Grosjean to the
Atacama in 1990, and 12 years later what started as an exploration of paleoecology
in the arid
tropics has become a model for how climate science can help archaeologists
find evidence of human habitation in environments so hostile that many
researchers
would not even know how to look.
Last week in the journal Science, Grosjean and Chilean archaeologist
Lautaro Nuñez reported the discovery of 39 lakeshore campsites in
the Atacama dating from
about 13,000 years ago to 9,000 years ago.
"We found no human remains, but there were plenty of [stone] points
and arrowheads and a large number of other functional tools and knives,"
Grosjean said. The
sites were radiocarbon-dated from the charcoal found in subsurface
fire pits.
The discoveries and the climatic research that accompanied them have
added a new perspective on the migrations of the earliest Americans and
shed light on the
Silencio Arqueológico -- the period from about 9,500 years ago
to 4,500 years ago, when humans disappeared from the region.
The arrival time of humans in the Western Hemisphere has been a matter
of bitter dispute between archaeologists who espouse the traditional view
that the famous
13,000-year-old site in Clovis, N.M., represents the first in-migration
from Asia, and those who have found evidence of earlier human habitation.
One of the lightning rods in this debate is the lowland site of Monte
Verde, in southern Chile, which a team of archaeologists finally agreed
was at least 14,000 years
old or several hundred years older, as lead excavator Tom D. Dillehay
has contended.
Dillehay, of the University of Kentucky, commented on the Atacama research
in an accompanying Science paper, noting that the Grosjean team had found
a direct
correlation between climate and human habitation in the Atacama.
The climate had been hostile before 13,000 years ago, and became hostile
again during the Silencio, he noted. Around 4,500 years ago, humans returned
to a more
hospitable Atacama before virtually abandoning it forever.
Human habitation of the Atacama "could not have been a blitzkrieg movement,"
he wrote, "but a stutter-step." What occurs, Dillehay said in an interview,
"is that
people hover, then move in and move out depending on the conditions."
Grosjean said the Atacama project began as an effort to document climate
change at the end of the tropical ice age around 12,000 years ago. The
Atacama, spread
across a vast region of northern Chile and parts of southern Bolivia
and northwestern Argentina, was a natural choice.
"If you look at humidity changes, you better look in dry places," Grosjean
said. "All the fingerprints of past humidity changes are very apparent
in the landscape. It's
stable under current dry conditions."
Finding undisturbed terrain is a critical and difficult problem for
archaeologists studying early human habitation in the Americas, for "if
a site goes back to the last
glacial maximum, the soils have been scoured out or blown away," said
Joseph M. McAvoy, the archaeologist who oversees the excavation of Cactus
Hill in
southeastern Virginia, another controversial pre-Clovis site.
Grosjean teamed up with Nuñez, and together they were able to
pinpoint caves, rock shelters and campgrounds where ancient Americans came
to hunt and live.
Most of the sites were high above the natural tree line, but the region
was reasonably water-rich because of seasonal monsoons, and there were
fish in the lakes.
When there was no rain, the hunters moved downhill.
All this Grosjean could read by examining the outlines of the old lake
shores. Prospecting along these ancient high water marks, the team looked
for flakes of
obsidian -- black, amorphous volcanic glass used extensively by prehistoric
humans for tools ranging from spear points to needles.
"Imagine an area the size of Switzerland, and you have no clue where
to find early Holocene and late glacial sites," Grosjean said. "They are
just below the surface.
By reconstructing lake levels, we were able to make a detailed subsurface
survey."
Then it was a matter of hard work. Once obsidian was found, the team
dug tiny test pits, "hundreds of them," Grosjean said. And in several,
there was charcoal --
carbon deposits that yielded much more rigorous dates than any artifacts
or animal remains could provide.
By testing sites at different elevations, the team was able to document
the movement of people in and out of the region -- higher elevations in
the warm season, lower
elevations in the colder season, abandonment of the highest sites when
drought came. During the best times around 11,000 years ago, shorelines
were more than
200 feet above today's salt lakes, Grosjean said.
The artifacts at the sites were instructive for what they included and
did not include. Points and tools of obsidian and local stone were interspersed
with a variety of
animal bones, which besides the llama-like species, also included rodents,
deer and an ice age horse. Once the lakeside sites were abandoned, however,
they were
never reoccupied, for there is no evidence of ceramics or tools from
a later time.
It is impossible to know the origin of the Atacama colonists, whether
it be from central Chile, the eastern slope of the Andes or from the northern
reaches of the
Andes themselves.
"Often if there is absence of a human record, we interpret it as an
absence of humans," Dillehay said. "But maybe they were living somewhere
else, and we just don't
know about it. My sense is they were pretty much everywhere early."