Cactus Hill
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Cactus Hill is an archaeological site in southeastern
Virginia Virginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern regions of the United States, between the Atlantic Coast and the Appalachian Mountains. The geography and climate of the Commonwealth ar ...
,
United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...
, located on sand dunes above the
Nottoway River The Nottoway River is a river in the U.S. state, U.S. State of Virginia and northeastern North Carolina that is 155 miles (249 kilometers) in length. The river begins in Prince Edward County, Virginia, Prince Edward County and merges with the Bla ...
about 45 miles south of
Richmond Richmond most often refers to: * Richmond, Virginia, the capital of Virginia, United States * Richmond, London, a part of London * Richmond, North Yorkshire, a town in England * Richmond, British Columbia, a city in Canada * Richmond, California, ...
. The site receives its name from the prickly pear
cacti A cactus (, or less commonly, cactus) is a member of the plant family Cactaceae, a family comprising about 127 genera with some 1750 known species of the order Caryophyllales. The word ''cactus'' derives, through Latin, from the Ancient Greek ...
that can be found growing abundantly on-site in the sandy soil. Cactus Hill may be one of the oldest archaeological sites in the Americas. If proven to have been inhabited 16,000 to 20,000 years ago, it would provide supporting evidence for pre-Clovis occupation of the Americas. The site has yielded multiple levels of prehistoric inhabitance with two discrete levels of early Paleoindian activity.


Significance

According to some archaeologists, including
Dennis Stanford Dennis J. Stanford (13 May 1943 in Cherokee, Iowa,- 24 April 2019) was an archaeologist and Director of the Paleoindian/Paleoecology Program at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution. Along with Professor Bruce B ...
and Joseph and Lynn McAvoy, the Cactus Hill site furnishes evidence of a pre- Clovis population in North America. They consider Cactus Hill significant because it challenges established models of Paleoindian migration. The
Clovis first The Clovis culture is a prehistoric Paleoamerican culture, named for distinct stone and bone tools found in close association with Pleistocene fauna, particularly two mammoths, at Blackwater Locality No. 1 near Clovis, New Mexico, in 1936 a ...
hypothesis which most anthropologists now reject, is the argument that the people associated with the Clovis culture were the first widespread inhabitants of the Americas. In 1933, this view was supported by the discovery of a flint spearhead found at
Clovis, New Mexico Clovis is a city in and the county seat of Curry County, New Mexico, Curry County, New Mexico. The city had a population of 37,775 as of the 2010 United States Census, 2010 census, and a 2019 estimated population of 38,319. Clovis is located in th ...
. A mammoth skeleton that was laid next to the spearhead was dated as being from 11,500 BP. At the time, this was one of the earliest indications of human activity in the Americas. The evidence suggested that the introduction of the Clovis point coincided with the extinction of the
megafauna In terrestrial zoology, the megafauna (from Greek μέγας ''megas'' "large" and New Latin ''fauna'' "animal life") comprises the large or giant animals of an area, habitat, or geological period, extinct and/or extant. The most common threshold ...
on the continent; furthermore, it was believed that these people came to the Americas from Siberia through the
Bering land bridge Beringia is defined today as the land and maritime area bounded on the west by the Lena River in Russia; on the east by the Mackenzie River in Canada; on the north by 72 degrees north latitude in the Chukchi Sea; and on the south by the tip of ...
– a stretch of land that resulted from low sea levels during the
Wisconsin glaciation The Wisconsin Glacial Episode, also called the Wisconsin glaciation, was the most recent glacial period of the North American ice sheet complex. This advance included the Cordilleran Ice Sheet, which nucleated in the northern North American Cor ...
. It is hypothesized that this allowed for migration between 14,500 and 14,000 BP. In February 2014, as published in ''
Nature Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physics, physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomenon, phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. ...
'', researchers reported on the results of DNA analysis of
Anzick boy Anzick-1 is a Paleo-Indian male infant whose remains were found in south central Montana, United States, in 1968, and date to 13,000–12,850 years BP. The child was found with more than 115 tools made of stone and antlers and dusted with red o ...
, a 2018-era skeleton, supported this theory in two directions: his DNA showed a connection to an estimated 80 percent of the Native Americans in both the Americas, as well as being connected to ancestral peoples in Siberia or northeast Asia.Ker Than, "Oldest Burial Yields DNA Evidence of First Americans"
''National Geographic'', 12 February 2014, accessed 20 January 2015
The entire theory concerning the first inhabitants being the Clovis culture was reevaluated following the discoveries at Cactus Hill in the mid-1990s. With the emergence of new evidence, the hypothesis for a pre-Clovis human occupation began to surface. A 2008 DNA study suggested "a complex model for the peopling of the Americas, in which the initial differentiation from Asian populations ended with a moderate bottleneck in Beringia during the last glacial maximum (LGM), around approximately 23,000 to approximately 19,000 years ago. Toward the end of the LGM, a strong population expansion started approximately 18,000 and finished approximately 15,000 years ago. These results support a pre-Clovis occupation of the New World, suggesting a rapid settlement of the continent along a Pacific coastal route."Fagundes, Nelson J.R. ''et al.'' (2008) "Mitochondrial Population Genomics Supports a Single Pre-Clovis Origin with a Coastal Route for the Peopling of the Americas," ''The American Journal of Human Genetics'' 82(March): pp. 1–10, Another Pre-Clovis site, Page-Ladson, has since been discovered in
Florida Florida is a state located in the Southeastern region of the United States. Florida is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the northwest by Alabama, to the north by Georgia, to the east by the Bahamas and Atlantic Ocean, and to ...
and many scientists now believe that first Americans probably arrived by boat, long before the Bering land bridge became ice free.


Discoveries

Several inches of sand lie between the Clovis-era deposit and a lower level. This lower level, attributed to a pre-Clovis time period, includes: *Two Clovis points. Microwear on the points indicates that
hafting Hafting is a process by which an artifact, often bone, stone, or metal A metal (from Greek μέταλλον ''métallon'', "mine, quarry, metal") is a material that, when freshly prepared, polished, or fractured, shows a lustrous appeara ...
was used. Fractures on the tips have been interpreted as meaning that they were projectiles that broke on impact. *Blades. Microwear indicates that they were hafted and used for butchering and hide processing. *Elevated phosphate levels, an indication of human occupation *An ample amount of
phytolith Phytoliths (from Greek, "plant stone") are rigid, microscopic structures made of silica, found in some plant tissues and persisting after the decay of the plant. These plants take up silica from the soil, whereupon it is deposited within different ...
s, which were further analyzed and determined to come from carbonized hickory wood *20 specimens of faunal remains, of those identifiable include: ten turtle shell fragments, two whitetail deer toe bone fragments, and five fossil shark's teeth


Site integrity

Other researchers have questioned the site due to its settlement on a sand hill. The sandy foundation has the potential to yield inconsistent stratigraphy. James C. Baker of
Virginia Tech Virginia Tech (formally the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and informally VT, or VPI) is a Public university, public Land-grant college, land-grant research university with its main campus in Blacksburg, Virginia. It also ...
conducted soil analysis that indicated that the formation of the site consisted of wind-blown sand deposits. Further research by James Feathers of the University of Washington confirmed that the buried sand levels had been undisturbed by later deposits. Along with this, paleoethnobotanist Lucinda McWeeney of Yale University identified charred plant remains. From this, she was able to identify a correlation between the stone artifacts and plant use at the site. The correlation indicates that the human occupation levels at the site have not been mixed. Dr. Carol Mandryk of Harvard University performed tests for the area that produced the 15,000-year-old date that showed relative stratigraphic integrity. Her tests at another area of the site failed to show proof that the sediments had not been disturbed. Research done by Richard I. Macphail of the Institute of Archaeology in London and Joseph M. McAvoy of The Nottoway River Survey contributed to the integrity discussion using a micromorphological analysis of the stratigraphy of the site. Their micromorphological observations, along with previous analyses, confirmed a series of conclusions on the integrity of Cactus Hill. They found that the formation of dunes may have been interspersed with the brief formation of a fine, phytolith-rich topsoil. As humans lived on these brief topsoil layers, they deposited artifacts and charcoal. Similarly, animals were present, which added to the dispersal and mixing of fine soil into sand dunes through their burrowing practices. The stratified sequence that can be seen today is the result of sedimentation that was interrupted by erosional processes like deflation. That sequence, based on the small-scale animal disturbance in a thin section of the strata, was most likely stable for millions of years. According to Macphail and McAvoy's analysis, it appears that the site is intact with only a few minor disturbances that could affect the long-term integrity of the site's stratigraphy.


Controversy

Many hypotheses began to arise as a result of this pre-Clovis evidence. One such hypothesis is advocated by Dennis Stanford. In what is known as the
Solutrean hypothesis The Solutrean hypothesis on the peopling of the Americas claims that the earliest human migration to the Americas took place from Europe, with Solutreans traveling along pack ice in the Atlantic Ocean. This hypothesis contrasts with the mainstre ...
, he suggests that European Solutreans migrated to the Americas across the Atlantic Ocean. The supporting evidence for this hypothesis includes the discovery of artifacts at Cactus Hill dated to the time period between the Clovis and Solutrean and, perhaps just as strongly, evidence of the same technology used between the two cultures. According to Dr. Bruce Bradley, "the Cactus Hill flint was a technological midpoint between the French Solutrean style and the Clovis points dating five millennia later." The major criticism to this hypothesis is that there is simply not enough evidence to support it. In their journal article, Lawrence Guy Straus, David J. Meltzer, and Ted Goebel claim, "We believe that the many differences between Solutrean and Clovis are far more significant than the few similarities, the latter being readily explained by the well-known phenomenon of technological convergence or parallelism." The Solutrean hypothesis is generally disregarded by mainstream archeologists.


References


External links


THE CACTUS HILL SITE
www.lithiccastinglab.com {{coord, 36.9880, N, 77.3210, W, source:wikidata, display=title Clovis sites Native American history of Virginia Archaic period in North America
Archaeological sites in Virginia This is a listing of sites of archaeological interest in the state of Virginia, in the United States. {{Commons cat, Archaeological sites in Virginia Virginia Virginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a state in the Mid-Atlant ...
Pre-Columbian archaeological sites Geography of Sussex County, Virginia Pre-Clovis archaeological sites in the Americas