Letters THE ROLE OF ROCK ART
SEEING THE BEST OF
american archaeology
The Relevance Of Rock Art
•
THE SOUTHWEST
•
UNDERWATER ARCH AEOLOGY SPRING 2011
Thank you for Linda Marsa’s article on rock art (“Revealing The Role Of Rock Art,” Spring 2011). Marsa’s piece is not only entertaining, it is important,because it points out the relationship between the rock art and the everyday, ancient Native Americans. The article challenges the idea that rock writings were ew restricted to shaman and mysiscoveries tics, had religious purpose only, or that rock writing research is ear ahokia somehow voodoo science. It is nice to see modern researchers getting some positive attention regarding rock art. Congratulations to Marsa and a heart felt thanks to you for advancing the research of rock writings one step closer to the truth. Sam Hunter, Yermo, California a quarterly public
ation of The Archa eolog
ical Conservanc
y
Vol. 15 No. 1
$3.95
N D N c
AA Spring 2011
mag new.indd
1
2/23/11 8:40:37 PM
A Love Affair With The Southwest The wonderful photos in your “The Best of the Southwest” article (Spring 2011) looked fondly familiar, as we have similar images in our photo album from a previous Conservancy tour.We are grateful to the Conservancy for enhancing our love affair with the Southwest. We would be remiss, however, if we did not point out that the battle of Picacho Pass (located halfway between Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona) in April of 1862 actually marked the westernmost front of the Civil War.Your article stated that distinction belonged to Glorieta Pass near Santa Fe, New Mexico. Despite this forgivable error, American Archaeology and the Conservancy rate A-plus with us. Rob and Nancy Phipps Sutton, Massachusetts
Sending Letters to American Archaeology American Archaeology welcomes your letters. Write to us at 5301 Central Avenue NE, Suite 902, Albuquerque, NM 87108-1517, or send us e-mail at tacmag@nm.net. We reserve the right to edit and publish letters in the magazine’s Letters department as space permits. Please include your name, address, and telephone number with all correspondence, including e-mail messages. american archaeology
Editor’s Corner Who were the first people to settle the New World? That is one of American archaeology’s great questions. And that question begs another: how did they arrive? For some time many first American scholars thought the Clovis First model offered a plausible answer. The Clovis people, some 13,000 years ago, migrated from what is now Siberia across the Bering land bridge into Alaska and then, via an ice-free corridor, into Canada. From there they spread out across the Americas. Over the last several decades, archaeologists have discovered numerous sites that they say are older, in some cases much older, than the Clovis period. These sites, which are found from Alaska to the southern tip of Chile, were occupied by a pre-Clovis people, and archaeologists surmise they may have traveled by sea as well as land. So scientists searching for answers to these questions took note when a team of archaeologists working on the Channel Islands off the coast of Southern California recently discovered numerous 12,000–year–old artifacts of a type not previously seen. (See “First American Seafarers?,” page 26.) These artifacts, which consist of numerous barbed points and crescents, appear to have been designed for coastal living. Though these artifacts are too young to directly address the Clovis-pre-Clovis debate, their technological sophistication is such that it could have been many years in the making. So many years, that some archaeologists wonder if this discovery suggests the possibility of older seafarers, perhaps of Clovis or even pre-Clovis age, making their way down the Pacific coast. The Channel Islands find doesn’t answer the great questions, but perhaps it offers clues.
3
