Summer 2007 - SCANA Corporation

Archaeological
work at the Topper
site is slow and
painstaking,
although the tools of
the trade are simple.
For most of the 20th
century, archaeologists
believed that the first
people to inhabit North
America were huntergatherers
who migrated
over the frozen Bering
Strait bridge that
connected Siberia and
Alaska. These hunters
followed the big game
south and east.
They were known as
Clovis people following the
discovery in the 1930s of
complex spear points and
tools in an excavation near
Clovis, N.M. “For years
they have been the most
widely recognized human
culture for this continent,”
Goodyear said.
In 1998, Goodyear
led a group of amateur
archaeologists to a patch
of Allendale County
land owned by Clariant
Corporation, a Swissowned
chemical company.
He and the team had
intended to excavate what
he anticipated would be an
artifact-laden Clovis site.
Unfortunately, it had
been raining pretty heavily
and the soil the team
intended to unearth had
the consistency of peanut butter. It was impossible to
dig there. Still, Goodyear had a group of people who had
paid for the experience of excavating, so he picked an
alternate site on higher ground near the Savannah River,
known as Topper.
When he and his team had exhausted their finds at
the depth referred to as the Clovis level, they decided
to dig deeper. A few feet below Clovis — representing
thousands of years in time — the team began discovering
distinctly different artifacts.
Goodyear’s work at the Topper site has yielded
archaeological evidence that suggests that humans
may have been in the area as much as 50,000 years
earlier than previously thought. “It was not just that
the artifacts were older. They were much different than
what we would expect to find if we were just looking at
an older version of the same kind of tool.”
Clovis tools yielded blade-like slivers of flint, known
as prismatic blades. They were also long and often large.
The pre-Clovis scrapers and blades are shorter, lack
that distinctive appearance and tend toward beak-like
hooked points rather than arrowhead-shaped ends.
On the last day of the dig, the team found a charcoal
deposit that allowed for radiocarbon dating. The
Boulder, Colo. lab that tested samples from the deposit
dated it at 50,000 years old.
Working in open trenches under the hot summer
sun may not have dampened anyone’s enthusiasm or
22 INSIGHTS • SUMMER 2007