Older Than We Think

A Personal View: Older Than We Think
Editor's Note: Publicity about the Coastal Entry hypothesis and pre-Clovis-age sites like Monte Verde prompted geographer George F. Carter to remind us that he and other investgators have long argued that humans have been in the Americas for at least 100,000 years. His book, Earlier Than You Think: A Personal View of Man in America (Texas A & M University Press, 1980) describes his research and perspectives. The following article focuses on a few California sites and artifacts, notably the metate, that Dr. Carter believes deserve further attention.

George F. Carter, formerly full professor and department head of the Johns Hopkins University Department of Geography, thinks evidence in California points to people having been in North America for at least 100,000 years--perhaps twice as long. His interest in archaeology dates back to his undergraduate degree in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley and his four-year stint as Curator of Anthropology at the San Diego Museum of Man in the 1930's. From 1967 until his retirement in 1977, he was Distinguished Professor of Geography at Texas A&M University.

In a recent interview, Dr. Carter told the Mammoth Trumpet that he thinks researchers would do well to take another look at some of the California sites and artifacts that have been studied in the past. Carter's study of plant geography has led to his special interest in the America's early people, whom he classifies as "broad-spectrum hunters and gathers, meaning they ate anything that they could catch or gather." His specialty in plants caused Carter to pay special attention to the metate--a stone block with a concave surface people used to grind corn and other grains with a milling stone called a mano. Manos and metates have been used for thousands of years by various hunter-gatherer peoples in California and throughout the world. Carter says metate users were preceded by a "very long time when less-equipped people existed in America." Following is a summary of some of Carter's observations about metates and places they have--and have not been--found.

At San Diego, metates are found in alluvial layers that were built upon the exposed continental shelf when sea level lowered as the glaciers grew in size. In interglacial times as the sea rose these alluvial layers were cut back by the attack of the surf. Long cross sections were exposed above water in what can be referred to as flights of terraces. These terraces have been geologically dated from late Pleistocene to Pliocene. The metates are found in the younger terraces, below the 300-foot level, and are younger than 100,000 years, probably dating to the early part of the last major glaciation, said Carter. To put it in perspective, the upper terraces, from 300 feet on up, are considered middle to early Pleistocene, and Carter says that metates are never found associated with them. Terraces below 300 feet date from the last lowered sea level that exposed the coastal shelf.

Manos and metates were found directly on top of the shell beds that underlie Crown Point at Mission Bay in San Diego. A huge granite mano was found cemented right to the top of the highly eroded surface of the older shell bed, said Carter. There is evidence of a high sea level followed by a low sea level with the shell bed eroded. He believes that people moved in to live close to the sea when the sea level rose again. This period, he says, was followed by another high sea level and the filling of Mission Bay with sandy silts, then erosion due to a lowered sea level. Two metates were found right on top of the shell bed, again, he believes, providing a record of people moving back to the seashore. Then still another episode of erosion occurred and finally, with the rising sea levels in the current interglacial period, the bay is again being filled by the San Diego River.

The Texas Street site is on the south side of Mission Valley, about five miles from the sea and three miles from Mission Bay. This site is now virtually in downtown San Diego. There are no metates in the deep levels at the Texas Street site, which he believes dates back 100,000 years.

At Santa Barbara, D.B. Rogers noted the presence of very early metate users who made much use of sea and land resources, says Carter. (Three men named Rogers have been involved in Southern Californian prehistory: Malcom Rogers at the San Diego Museum of Man, Spencer Rogers at the University of San Diego, and D.B. Rogers at Santa Barbara.) According to Carter, the record of early coastal people using the metate survives on knolls today covered with oak groves. D.B. Rogers called these people the Oak Grove people, and the metate was their defining implement. The soil at the Oak Grove sites is extremely hard and cemented. The manos and metates found there are well-rotted and indicate great antiquity, says Carter.

The final period noted by Rogers was the Canalino Period. These people were skilled fishers who went to sea for sea mammals. The soil at these sites is loose and fluffy. Carter says that UCLA archaeologist Clement Meighan once sent him a soil sample from a Canalino site at Little Harbor on Catalina Island that dated to 3,880 years ago plus or minus 200 years. Carter describes this soil as black, loose, fluffy, and with no discernible soil horizons. It is as fresh as the modern sites in the San Diego area, he says. According to Carter, 4,000 years is not enough to even start the soil processes that lead to the formation of the young, brown soils of the Hunting Period or the much older soils of the Oak Grove Period.

Carter says that at times Rogers found superimposed sites with Canalino at the surface and the soil fluffy, black and loose. Under that lay the Hunting Period with stiff brown soils, and under that the remains of the Oak Grove culture with weathering now gone on to virtually stony conditions.

At Tecolote Canyon, 11 miles west of Santa Barbara, Rogers found a site with evidence of manos and metates resting right on a beach formation that was deeply buried by about 50 feet of alluvium. A deep highway cut had been made through an older terrace and a landslide had blocked the highway. The road crew told Rogers that artifacts had been seen at this site so he took a closer look. He found a fragment of a metate in the slide material, but discounted it as not in place.

According to Carter, Rogers studied the strata that rose about 50 feet above the road level and noted that the original front of the formation was 50 feet back from the face of the present cut. He studied the strata in the face and described it in detail. A shale formation was overlain by a beach material and above that was evidence of a brief violent episode of heavy bolder deposit and then finer material to the surface. He found a well-worn mano in place immediately above the beach material. On subsequent visits he found a fragment of a metate and another mano in the same stratification position. All showed advanced weathering. He termed their condition as fragile and the metate fragment in the slide debris as the same.

Carter later visited this site and reviewed Rogers's stratigraphy, which he thinks is generally correct, though perhaps closer to 35 feet in elevation rather than 50 feet. Carter says that Rogers did not note that the overlying strata seem mildly folded, nor did he note the presence of a Hunting Period midden on the surface that was probably not exposed in his day. Carter says the Hunting Period site was not likely to have contaminated the site because manos and metates had been replaced by the mortar at Santa Barbara by that period. At San Diego, Carter says that the metate remained in use into the historic period alongside the late-arriving mortars.

Carter says he asked Phil Orr (late curator of anthropology at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History) to show him the Crown Point site, and he found D.B. Rogers's description was quite accurate. "It is unimportant whether the high terrace is the result of uplift of land or the falling of sea level due to an oncoming glacial," says Carter, who says that soil at the site guarantees an early date, "certainly far beyond 10,000 years ago." Unfortunately, today the Crown Point site is mostly obscured by development.

On Santa Rosa Island off Santa Barbara, says Carter, thick alluvial strata overlie interglacial beaches, and evidence of humans is found throughout these alluvial covers. He says the long sequence of cultures is much like what D.B. Rogers reports for Santa Barbara. Carter says that he pointed out to Phil Orr that the dwarf mammoths Orr found on the island were resting inside fireplaces. Orr later found slaughtered mammoth bones that date to about 27,000 years ago. Carter says that a UCLA geochronology specialist also found the foreleg of a mammoth in a fireplace along with stone tools, but he does not know if the geochronologist ever published that finding.

California's Channel Islands were never linked with the mainland, even at lowest Pleistocene sea levels, and could only be reached with watercraft. In 1930, Carter says he and a San Diego Museum of Man party spent five weeks on San Nicolas Island, which is considerably farther from the California mainland than Santa Rosa Island. The expedition, Carter says, found no evidence for the Oak Grove people on San Nicolas, but did find evidence for the Hunting People on the highlands of the island. So Carter believes it is clear that humans were living not only along the California coast, but even getting out to sea at quite an early time.

Small stone bowls, the bases of basket-hoppered mortars, occur in several submarine sites along the Southern California coast, says Carter. To create a basket-hoppered mortar the maker cuts the bottom out of the basket, then cements the top part of the basket with tar to a small shallow base of stone. The stone bowl is typically about eight inches in diameter and four to six inches thick.

At Santa Barbara Rogers found bases in onshore sites with the remains of the tar still present that had held the basket hopper in place. Typically, says Carter, these are found offshore in Southern California in concentrations of hundreds and suggestive of dense occupation. Near San Diego such a site was examined in detail by the divers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. These finds record the occupation of the continental edge at a time of lowered sea level. Ten thousand years ago the sea level was still 100 feet below that of today and the continental shelf at San Diego was well exposed. The stone bowls, says Carter, record people of D.B. Rogers' Hunting Period living on the exposed coastal shelf. Carter has never found these little bowls at San Diego in the late on-shore sites.

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Carol Ann Lysek