American archaeology is a discipline in constant flux. Over the last half-century, conventional attitudes about the arrival of humans in North America have undergone repeated shifts, with estimates of the earliest human activity continually pushed back to more distant times.
However, discoveries stemming from one controversial archaeological site in the American Southeast, if confirmed, could extend present timelines for human arrival in the New World by several tens of thousands of years, adding to a growing number of findings in recent years that are reshaping our understanding of the early Americas.
The First Americans
For many decades, the long-established chronological marker for America’s first arrivals centered on discoveries made near Clovis, New Mexico, including expertly crafted “fluted” spear points and other artifacts, which served as the type site for America’s earliest definitive cultural manifestation. The resulting “Clovis First” theory reigned for most of the 20th century, arguing that America’s first inhabitants made their way across an ice-free Beringian land corridor somewhere around 13,000 years ago.
However, by the 1970s, a new phenomenon in American archaeology had begun to emerge: sites suggesting that even earlier arrivals may have occurred. With time, locations like Meadowcroft Rock Shelter in Washington County, Pennsylvania, the Monte Verde site in Chile, and several others in North and South America would carry the idea of a “pre-Clovis” presence in the Americas from being an anachronistic gadfly for archaeologists, to eventually becoming an accepted reality.
Today, more recent discoveries, including ancient human fossil footprints at sites like White Sands in New Mexico, have extended the now well-accepted earlier-than-Clovis timeline even further back, with confirmed dates revealing a human presence there by as early as 21,000 to 23,000 years ago. This, along with growing genetic evidence, new models of possible coastal migration routes, and other data, continues to help archaeologists assemble a broader picture of America’s first inhabitants and a far deeper timeline for their arrival than most would have ever expected.
Yet while discoveries like those at White Sands unequivocally demonstrate a human presence in the Americas by around 23,000 years ago, there are still other sites that challenge even those remarkably early dates for human arrivals in the New World—dates which, if ever confirmed, would introduce even greater challenges to our existing knowledge of the ancient Americas.
The Topper Site
Few other proposed pre-Clovis archaeological sites have aroused as much controversy as the Topper Site in Allendale County, South Carolina.
An ancient chert quarry, the site was initially identified by Albert Goodyear, Ph.D., now a semi-retired professor of archaeology at the University of South Carolina, more than four decades ago. During the late Pleistocene American Paleoindian period, some of America’s earliest inhabitants relied on the abundant Allendale Coastal Plain chert rock nodules at the location for crafting ancient stone tools, which included the distinctive fluted projectiles now associated with the Clovis cultural manifestation.
Initial excavations at the site began in 1986, and while evidence of Archaic-period chert harvesting was found, an extensive Clovis presence was established by the 1990s, revealing thousands of artifacts uncovered by Goodyear and the teams of university students and volunteers who assisted in excavations at Topper throughout several seasons.
“We had done a couple of digs here, and when I went down about a meter, or about three feet, the artifacts just stopped,” Goodyear told the author in a 2018 interview.
Although some rubble was apparent at this level, Goodyear said that due to the site’s proximity to a geological chert outcrop, there had never been anything obvious that prompted him to dig any deeper. Still, the confirmation of Paleoindian-period artifacts at Topper was noteworthy enough at the time, since the discoveries made it one of just a handful of Clovis sites in the southeast, revealing significant activity. As time would reveal, however, recognition of the Clovis-era presence at the site was only the beginning of the discoveries—and the controversies—that it would yield.
Earlier Than Clovis
Initially, Goodyear said he had not been inclined to dig beneath the Clovis boundary at Topper, mainly because he didn’t expect to find anything of archaeological significance.
“Back then, I wasn’t particularly interested in, or even believed that there probably was any serious pre-Clovis in North America,” Goodyear said in 2018. “You don’t look for what you don’t believe in, so I sort of stopped there. I wasn’t finding any artifacts, so to me that was the end of the dig.”
However, Goodyear found himself fascinated by the discoveries at Monte Verde in Chile, where archaeologist Tom Dillehay, Ph.D., uncovered artifacts dating back at least 14,500 years, although some evidence from the site suggests a human occupation extending as far back as 18,000-25,000 years.
“I was really impressed with Monte Verde down in Chile, and I began to think about [Topper] and its place on the landscape—that is, with the natural chert sources that were used for thousands of years by Clovis people and later. There’s the Savannah River, and so it seems like you would have all the good ingredients for possibly an earlier site.”
“They would have come up the Savanah River. They would have found this chert, no doubt,” Goodyear guessed about any prospective earlier-than-Clovis visitors. Ultimately, such possibilities prompted him to resume digging below the Clovis horizon at Topper.
Almost immediately, his intuition paid off.
“The first square we dug, we found stuff. We found chipped stone artifacts,” Goodyear said in 2018, noting that the early discoveries, consisting mostly of stone scrapers and other relatively simple lithic tools, garnered significant attention.
“The media was very interested at that time in paradigm changes,” Goodyear said, “and North American archaeology was certainly going through one.”
While no radiocarbon-datable material was found in this level, optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating of these artifacts yielded dates of approximately 15,200 years before present, based on studies conducted in the 1990s by Texas A & M University Professor Michael Waters. Although undeniably earlier than Clovis, such dates still fall within similar age estimates for confirmed pre-Clovis sites such as the Page-Ladson site in Florida, where artifacts dating to approximately 14,550 years ago were discovered by archaeologists Jesse Halligan and colleagues, and at Meadowcroft Rock Shelter, where J. M. Adovasio and colleagues found evidence suggesting a human presence as early as 16,000 years ago.
Pushing the Boundaries on “Pre-Clovis”
However, establishing the exact timeline of the apparent earlier-than-Clovis presence at Topper becomes more complicated when considering the lithic artifacts Goodyear uncovered in some of the site’s deepest strata, which he has argued could date back as far as 50,000 years.
Among these purported artifacts is a large chunk of Allendale chert, which Goodyear affectionately refers to as “Big Red.” To the untrained eye, this stone may appear to be of no greater value than as an excellent example of the ancient quarry’s formidable lithic material. For Goodyear, however, Big Red could offer evidence of an extraordinary possibility: that humans could have visited Topper as early as 50,000 years ago.
“When it came out of the ground, it was very moist,” Goodyear said in 2018 while displaying the chert sample in question, describing its condition at the time of its discovery that gave rise to its unique name.
“This was by itself, wasn’t sitting there with a pile of other rubble; it was isolated by itself. And it has multiple prior detachments off this piece,” Goodyear explained. Such conditions, along with its placement in proximity to the nearby Savannah River, seemingly rule out the idea that the stone’s surface could have been chipped away by some natural process, such as rolling or tumbling down a hill. Significantly, this implies that someone must have been present to carry out the work required to misshape the rock, exposing the smooth, useful chert on its interior.
“There are three places—three distinct places—on this core where somebody has struck it multiple times, resulting in battery,” Goodyear said. Such observations are common at quarry sites where a known Clovis presence existed; however, the fact that such obvious evidence of a human presence might be found in association with 50,000-year-old strata at a site along the South Carolina coast is unprecedented.
Naturally, the earliest purported artifacts from Topper have attracted their share of critics over the years, with challengers such as Texas A&M University researcher Michael Waters arguing that, while specimens like Big Red superficially bear all the hallmarks of human activity, such features could be explained by other natural processes. Additionally, if this were indeed evidence of 50,000-year-old human activity in the Americas, it couldn’t exist in isolation—there would have to be similar evidence of such an early human presence.
However, a growing number of archaeological discoveries, such as those at White Sands in recent years and the Gault Site in Texas, have continued to provide unambiguous evidence of a human presence in the New World far earlier than once expected. Notably, such discoveries had not yet been made at the time Goodyear first retrieved “Big Red” from the ancient Pleistocene sands of Topper’s lower strata.
While academic opinions on the discoveries at Topper remain mixed, some archaeologists argue for the validity of the dates Goodyear associates with artifacts such as Big Red. One example is a 2015 doctoral dissertation by archaeologist Douglas Sain, whose research on artifacts retrieved from Topper (where Sain himself participated in excavations during his university years) was discussed by J.M. Adovasio and David Pedler in their 2016 book, Strangers in a New Land: What Archaeology Reveals About the First Americans.
Regarding Sain’s dissertation, Adovasio writes:
Sain has concluded that the pre-Clovis Topper Assemblage artifacts are indeed genuine, and that a small sample of the tools show microscopic evidence of human use in the form of edge polish (the smoothing of sharp edges via repetitive action), striadons (fracture lines resulting from contact with another object), residue (plant or animal material adhering to the artifact), and edge damage (chipping of the artifact’s edge through use). His research has also concluded that the Topper Assemblage artifacts are indeed in situ, and hence did not migrate downward into the deposit from overlying archaeological levels. It remains to be seen what the professional archaeological community will make of Sain’s findings, but if the Topper Assemblage finds widespread acceptance a radical reworking of our understanding of pre-Clovis stone technology will be in order.
For Albert Goodyear, the significance of artifacts like Big Red is self-evident.
“They’re exactly what happens when modern-day flint knappers are working flint, and they can’t get something to break off,” Goodyear says.
Fundamentally, while many questions remain about the Topper Site and its offerings, Goodyear and a growing number of his colleagues believe the discoveries that past excavations have yielded there, along with corroboration from more recent discoveries at other locations, point to one undeniable reality.
“This is, in a word, a pre-Last Glacial Maximum pre-Clovis site,” Goodyear said. “That’s a pretty stunning claim, but it’s all based on the evidence we see.”
After decades of archaeological fieldwork at Topper, Goodyear knows all too well that potentially paradigm-shifting ideas don’t take root overnight. However, if confirmed, he believes the discoveries he and others have made at the site may offer important clues to the next generation of archaeologists about North America’s past.
“I’m trying to prove something’s here, and that’s important,” Goodyear says. “If I can get that done, I will have done my job.”
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.