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Editorial: More on Palaeolithic America

In an earlier editorial [‘‘Palaeolithic America’’ 37 (2): 83285], Consulting Editor Norman Hammond and I urged that the question of early humans in the New World should be re-opened now that the Clovis First hypothesis has been all but abandoned by the majority of the scholarly community. We urged our colleagues to reconsider earlier claims for a human presence in the Pleistocene record of North America and to initiate new research projects that would target regions and deposits of Middle and Upper Pleistocene age with interdisciplinary teams that would be able to evaluate both the context of finds as well as recognize assemblages that would be substantially different from those associated with later Clovis and Holocene period cultures. While reading the older literature as preparation for writing that editorial, it struck me that the work done by George Carter, late Distinguished Professor of Geography at Texas A & M University, in the region around San Diego would be a good place to begin. Carter’s work was carried out in the mid-20th century in part while he was curator of the Museum of Man and has been largely ignored since the 1970s in light of the gelling of opinion in favor of the Clovis First hypothesis. I found Carter’s geological/geomorphological research on the Middle and Upper Pleistocene deposits and his paleoenvironmental reconstructions (e.g., Carter 1957) to be convincing, especially as they accord with the contextual approaches to the study of Palaeolithic sites that are commonplace today in Old World Palaeolithic research. From what I can gather, it seems that the principal objection to Carter’s work has been that while Carter may have been inspecting Pleistocene contexts, the lithics he reported finding in them were nothing more than natural stones, sometimes derisively referred to as ‘‘Carterfacts.’’ It is certainly the case that the inadequate presentation of the lithics in his publications (e.g., Carter 1980) has done little to dispel such views. There are few drawings (and those not according to modern conventions or standards) and even fewer photos, and as far as I am aware there have been no detailed typological or metrical studies of his assemblages. Being unable to evaluate the nature of his lithic finds based on the information available in his publications, I was led to think that it would be helpful for someone like me, an Old World Palaeolithic specialist with long experience studying diverse assemblages of lithic artifacts, to take a look at the ‘‘Carterfacts’’ to see whether they were artifacts or not. Finding myself in San Diego in January 2013, I used the opportunity to inspect the materials from Carter’s excavations at the Texas Street Site (W-1306) and Buchanan Canyon (W-1305) which are stored in the Museum of Man in Balboa Park (and I would like to thank Karen Lacy, Collections Manager, for her assistance in making this possible). I elected to study these materials because Carter believed that these sites had produced definitive evidence for the presence of humans in the San Diego area as early as the last interglacial, perhaps in the late Middle Pleistocene (Carter 1980: 1732206). Carter reached this conclusion based on the discovery of in situ lithic artifacts in the course of the excavations in Pleistocene deposits along the San Diego River. I examined two boxes of materials, a total of about 100 objects, and found that the majority were indeed artifacts of undoubted human workmanship. Especially convincing was a piece given special attention by Carter (Carter 1980: 190, fig. 37). He emphasized that this quartzite tool was in situ in the undisturbed Pleistocene gravels. The published photograph shows the record label ‘‘Texas Street D 2,’’ and the same artifact appears to be rendered in an outline drawing, although otherwise unidentified (Carter 1980: 195, fig. 42, 7). An artifact labeled ‘‘D 2, 11 W, 13 N, depth of 30’’ SDM 1979-40-37, in the Texas Street Site matches the photograph and drawing in Carter’s publication. The indication ‘‘depth of 30’’ suggests that this object was found at some depth within the part of the fan that was excavated. It is a large quartzite flake ca. 16 cm in length with a bifacially retouched edge. The bulb of percussion on the ventral surface has been partially removed by inverse retouch. The retouch is invasive and scalar. This piece, which might be described as a protoor atypical biface or chopping tool would not be out of place in an Old World Palaeolithic assemblage, and the same could be said for the rest of the materials from Texas Street and Buchanan Canyon. What does this mean? My brief inspection is not enough. Although I am convinced that George Carter and his colleagues found artifacts, it is necessary to