The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas Volume I, II, and III

Earliest South American Lifeways 237
also a small adze {herminette), typically Archaic and later, which Gruhn
fails to mention. 54
The interior of Bahia has seen brief claims of modified bones of extinct
animals, sometimes accompanied by quartz or quartzite flake "tools," at
Toca de Mundinho, Toca dos Buzios, and Toca de Manoel Latao.
However, the Mundinho sites are secondary redepositions, now destroyed,
while the two sites dug by Bryan and Gruhn lack any kind of
diagnostic artifact and are disturbingly similar to the neighboring Pilao
shelter, dated by radiocarbon to 9,390 ± 90 years and 9,450 ± 90 years
ago. With Schmitz, I see nothing certain in the caatinga of Piaui before
Guidon's numerous sites containing good Archaic industries of the Itaparica
tradition, beginning about 10,000 years ago. The great Amazonian
lowlands remain practically unexplored for Paleoindian sites, so one can
only speculate about early settlement patterns there, depending on notions
of Glacial-age climate and vegetation change. 55
In South America, the Paleoindian adaptation lacks a clear-cut chronological
horizon comparable to the Clovis and Folsom periods of North
America. This is due not so much to lack of radiocarbon dates, or even
disputes over the supposed Glacial-age sites, as it is to lack of definition
of the Paleoindian culture or adaptation. In South America there are
many nations, many approaches to archaeology, and few tendencies toward
terminological consistency. South American archaeology has not
been characterized by analytic consistency or neatly defined concepts,
such as would provide a simple, continent-wide separation of Paleoindians
from other, more broadly adapted peoples.
Also, although the savannahs, thorn forests, pampas, punas, and pdramos
were good habitats in which to hunt the Pleistocene megafauna, they
were also mostly smaller, disjunctive, and less well stocked than their
North American equivalents. There were no mammoths, bison, or true
camels (camelops), although the fauna included other smaller camelids
(such as Palaeolama and Protauchenia), mastodons, three genera of
horses, very large megatherid and mylodont sloths, as well as various
glyptodons, toxodons, and the giant capybara. All are extinct, and all but
54 Lynch, "Glacial-age man," 20; A. Prous, "L'Archeologie au Bresil," LAnthropologie 90 (1986),
257-306, 287-289, 294; Schmitz, "Prehistoric hunters," 60—63; Ruth Gruhn, "Stratified radiocarbon-dated
archaeological sites of Clovis age and older in Brazil," in Clovis Origins and Adaptation,
R. Bonnichsen and K. Turnmire, eds. (Orono, 1991), 283-286.
55 Schmitz, "Prehistoric hunters," 60—73; Wesley Hurt in Ronald L. Weber, "The Amazon, Eastern
Brazil, and the Orinoco (current research)," American Antiquity 54 (1989), 185-187, 185.
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