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It’s very hard to be a lone voice in the wilderness. It’s difficult to feel, know, and speak your truth and be greeted by either the dull thud of indifference or the resounding bellow of opposition and even anger.
The way you respond says a lot about your character. Do you fold up, shut down, or otherwise retreat from speaking your truth? Do you fight back until you wear yourself out? Do you try to prove that what you are saying is right, and that what everyone else is saying is wrong?
Consider this situation. If you ever wondered about who the first people to arrive in America were, you probably learned that Columbus discovered America in 1492. When you grew up, you most likely realized that there were native people on American soil when the Europeans arrived. If you asked questions, you eventually found out about Clovis culture—named that way because the discovery of sophisticated, fluted hunting weapons chiseled from stone happened near Clovis, New Mexico. Around 13,000 years ago, thanks to the last major Ice Age, robust, spear-bearing hunters from Siberia walked across a land bridge to what is today Canada, and then rapidly populated a large land corridor that extended into Mexico and South America. This explanation, known as Clovis First, settled this issue of who came first.
Or did it? Here and there, from northeastern United States to the tip of Chile, archeologists started finding flakes, blades, butchered animal bones, and other artifacts that hinted at much earlier occupation. When they announced their finds—wham. They were shut out of the discourse. The Clovis First archeologists greeted their announcements with ridicule, scorn, and sometimes vitriolic attacks. They excluded their iconoclastic colleagues from the club of Those Who Know the Truth.
So how did the upstarts react? Well, they just kept digging and analyzing. They kept carbon dating and re-checking their results. They made sure they were using state-of-the-art stratigraphic techniques for excavating. They logged and recorded everything. They published their findings. They braced against the storm of opposition, attack, and boycott. And then they dug some more.
For forty years, this situation persisted. Sometimes the Clovis First voices were quieter, and sometimes, like when an archeologist published findings about much earlier dates or pre- Clovis technology, they built to a crescendo. The demands for proof from their upstart colleagues grew more and more strident and almost impossible to satisfy. But the pre-Clovis proponents met the demands, dodged the attacks, and kept on digging.
This week, there was a huge Paleo American Odyssey convention in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Archeologists, paleontologists, avocational archeologists, history and pre-history buffs gathered for talks, abstracts, informational posters, presentations, and a once-in-a-decade meeting of the top thinkers, researchers, and diggers in the field. On the last day, the pre-Clovis archeologists presented papers to their peers. They were to-the-point, backed up by intense research, facts, findings, dating, photos, and met the most rigorous standards set by the Clovis First proponents.
And guess what? It is now generally accepted that the Americas were populated thousands of years before Clovis. Furthermore, we really do not yet now who the first Americans were, where they came from, how they got here, or when they arrived. They clearly came in different waves and at different times. They had different technologies. They hunted small and medium size game as well as megafauna. In fact, they may have hunted the megafauna to extinction. They came by foot and by boat. Some may have hailed from, as one archeologist explained it, Iberia rather than Siberia. They may have crossed the Atlantic. Others may have originated in what is now Japan. Perhaps they share a common origin with Polynesians. There is some evidence that they hailed from subSaharan Africa. They could have come to South America first, and then headed north. They may have walked from Beringia, and then walked back there. It was all one continent. They could have arrived 23,000 years ago, or perhaps much earlier. There may be remnants of their cultures in paleontological sites that have never been examined for human habitation because of the Clovis First rule.
The most stringent techniques from a variety of fields are being applied to the latest finds and the discoveries that are yet to come.
The archeologists who wriggled out of the Clovis First stranglehold are having their day in the sun—in some cases, with the sun blazing at 110 degrees. They held to their truth, and now colleagues are listening and applauding.
The Clovis First proponents are still criticizing their colleagues. There is still argument and in-fighting in the field.
But one thing is clear: the upstart archeologists have proved to be right, and the others were wrong.
May this be an inspiration to you in your life.
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Photo by Paul Ross
Judith Fein is the author of LIFE IS A TRIP: The Transformative Magic of Travel and the soon-to-be-published THE SPOON FROM MINKOWITZ: A Bittersweet Roots Journey to Ancestral Lands.
