First Peoples in a New World: Colonizing Ice Age America

by David J. Meltzer

More than 12,000 years ago, in one of the greatest triumphs of prehistory, humans colonized North America, a continent that was then truly a new world. Just when and how they did so has been one of the most perplexing and controversial questions in archaeology. This dazzling, cutting-edge synthesis, written for a wide audience by an archaeologist who has long been at the center of these debates, tells the scientific story of the first where they came from, when they arrived, and how they met the challenges of moving across the vast, unknown landscapes of Ice Age North America. David J. Meltzer pulls together the latest ideas from archaeology, geology, linguistics, skeletal biology, genetics, and other fields to trace the breakthroughs that have revolutionized our understanding in recent years. Among many other topics, he explores disputes over the hemisphere's oldest and most controversial sites and considers how the first Americans coped with changing global climates. He also confronts some radical that the Americas were colonized from Europe or that a crashing comet obliterated the Pleistocene megafauna. Full of entertaining descriptions of on-site encounters, personalities, and controversies, this is a compelling behind-the-scenes account of how science is illuminating our past.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Anthropology, Science, Archaeology, Prehistory, Ancient History

464 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Iset · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got a distinct sense of déjà vu reading this straight after Adovasio’s The First Americans, and indeed, Meltzer’s First Peoples hits up many of the same points. The early chapters explain archaeological methodology and the history of American archaeology to the layperson, concluding with the establishment of the Clovis First model. The middle chapters address the breaking of that model, including sites such as Meadowcroft and Monte Verde, the controversy over Kennewick man, and all the heated disputes therein. Concluding chapters examine evidence from other fields such as linguistics and genetics, examine hypothetical models for the dispersal of the first arrivals throughout the Americas, and finish with a brief examination of more recent history. The only difference that I noticed was that Adovasio’s book spends a lot more time examining his own site of Meadowcroft, whilst Meltzer deconstructs and debunks poor pre-Clovis hypotheses a bit more clearly and thoroughly. I think overall I would recommend Meltzer, for his objective viewpoint and simply the accessibility of his book to novices.

8 out of 10

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the most thorough archaeological histories I have ever come across. Assiduously goes through a variety of theories, dismissing most of them and admitting when the jury is still out on others. The author is not shy of his professional opinion but always gives you the full context for them. Even me, who disagreed with one or two assertions in here given my long time (albeit amateur) following of Siberia->Americas prehistory, found the summaries of debates and controversies largely fair.

[Chrisl · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/17/sc...
Article from NYTimes about Paisley poop. Oregon anthropology. What route from the coast to the high desert of today would those first folk have followed?
***
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paisley...
"Paisley is home to an annual Mosquito Festival"
***
From my home to the tiny town of Paisley, about 150 miles scenic miles, sited below the south edge of Central Oregon, mostly passes through sage and juniper and pine covered land with vistas of Oregon's Cascade mountains to the west.
It's in Lake County, ancient lake country with a climate now much different than 14,000 years ago when the glaciers were still creating the Missoula Floods. In those days, with the Columbia River an ongoing series of disasters, the pluvial lake region would have been safer than Oregon's Big River and Willamette Valley.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Co...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7...
***
In her most informative book about Oregon, Bishop starts "Chapter 12 Pleistocene - 'High Cascade Volcanoes versus Glaciers'" The chapter ends "End of the Ice Age - 'Floods scour the Landscape.'"
Wish I could fly my time-drone then.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...

[York · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is certainly extremely thorough with regards to the evidence surrounding theories of the first migrations to the Americas, which is also its downfall. I think if Meltzer was pursuing one solid theory, like proving that humans came pre-Clovis, or trying to track ideas of when people must have arrived based on various schools of science- genetics, linguistics, dentistry, etc. Instead a massive wall of technical information is thrown at the reader's head, compelling or not, and it's easy to get lost.

[William S · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Origin of Native Americans

This is an excellent read combining archaeology, anthropology, and science to tell the story of the peopling of Pleistocene America. It flows smoothly and a person with little knowledge of those fields can easily understand it. It shows both sides of some debates like overkill vs. extinction due to climate change. If you’ve ever wanted more information or are just curious about the human journey from Pleistocene to Historical America then this book is for you. Kudos to the authors for a well researched and written book!

[Patty · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very thorough presentation of what we know so far about how, when and possibly why human beings first came across from Siberia to North America thousands of years ago, and what kind of landscape they ventured into.

[Garth · Rating 3 out of 5]

At times a fascinating read, at others it was an unholy martini made from a 50mg Valium dropped into a glass of NyQuil...

[Hugh Centerville · Rating 4 out of 5]

Told in a manner readable to non-scientists, it’s the saga of the First Americans. It’s what we know about those hardy souls who crossed the Bering Strait from Asia to North America more than ten-thousand years ago. Their journey, with a significance for posterity unrecognizable to them, was made possible by the northern glaciers locking up enough water so the sea levels dropped and a six-hundred mile-wide landmass stretched from northeast Asia to northwest America. This was Beringia and with the game animals getting out there, the hunters went too.

North America, when they got here, was partially covered in ice and was awash in megafauna. Animals similar to what we have today only bigger, way bigger. Cats and wolves, even camels, and the best remembered today, the wooly mammoth. This wasn’t sixty million years ago, as it was with the dinosaurs. This was a time close enough to our own so Tom Jefferson thought (hoped) there might still be a few mammoths around in his time.

My favorite is ol’ Buffalo Antiquus. Two thousand pounds heavier than today’s buffalo and two feet taller at the hump, we can only marvel at those brave souls who hunted them with stone points fastened onto the ends of sticks.

At the other end of the story are the men and women who, today, apply science and deduction to interpret from the scant materials dug up or washed out of the ground, the story of our first Americans.

[Remy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm really pleased with how much this book taught me about the peopling of the Americas. I can now say that I have just as many questions as before I read it, but they are much better informed. As a layperson to prehistory and archaeology, I feel like this book taught me a great deal about how we know what we know, and also equally important, why we don't yet know what we don't.

I knocked off a star because, as much as I appreciate the field of archaeology and how much it has done for our understanding of the world, I underestimated how much of a slog an archaeology-focused book could be. While the book was always pretty dense, (which I think the author could have done a little bit more to offset,) it was rarely boring, which is an impressive feat.

[Mark Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ground work of anthropologist Meltzer who pulls together extensive research and studies seeking to identify when and who settle the Americas. Seems more certain that the early nomads from northeast Asia areas came through Bering and along the coast. And most surprisingly that current Native American groups link back to these early arrivals. And, of course, it is farther back than anyone had ever ventured, some 15,000 to 20,000 years before the present time. We have so much to learn and to unlearn. Western settlers did not find anything; what they did do is assume and ignore. The story is being corrected as we speak.

[Alyssa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Could not get through this. Conceptually, very interesting. There was just a whole lot of dry explanation interspersed for every single subtopic. It felt like many of the lengthy descriptions (such as describing changing weather patterns) would’ve been better explained by graphics, and the existing graphics didn’t need so much follow up explanation.

[John Mount · Rating 1 out of 5]

A load of blather

I hate giving this even 1 star. Highly technical and uninformative codswallop. The whole lot could be summarised in one sentence - nobody knows!
Don't waste your time and money on this verbiage.

[Colin Freebury · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a well-written, comprehensive history of the human settlement of the Americas. It is also a well-told story of the science and the scientists that revealed and continue to reveal this history. Bravo!

[Paul R. Fleischman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is both an excellent and a memorable book. It is excellent because of David Meltzer’s authoritative knowledge built upon a lifetime of focus on American early archeology. It is a memorable book because the author’s style of writing fully exposes us to the rigor of a scholarly mind at its best. When I closed this book, I was left in wonder about the origin of human settlement in the Western Hemisphere.
Although this book can be read by an educated college graduate, it seems to be more oriented to the classroom. The 344 pages of text are followed by more than 100 pages of readings, references, index, etc. Not everyone who is curious about the first people in America will want a book as careful, precise, and non-conclusive as David Meltzer has given us. But for readers who want to know the scientific facts behind the theories, this book is outstanding.
This book is clearly organized around a number of scholarly problems in the history of human colonization of North America. For example, what was the climate like when the first Americans arrived and what evidence do we use to answer that question? Were there humans in North America 11,000 years ago, 12,000 years ago, or much earlier? If human beings arrived in North America as early as some scholars think, then how did those early arrivals cross Beringia before the ice barriers opened? Is it possible that the earliest known site of Asians crossing into North America over Beringia could end up being in Chile? Why are there no sites north of Chile? Are early human settlements located on the eastern side of Brazil, and do they pre-date the crossing from Asia, and do they imply an Atlantic crossing? How did the first culture in North America, which archeologists call “Clovis culture,” which produced a uniformly recognizably set of tools, spread so rapidly and so widely? Was human hunting responsible for the extinction of North American megafauna like the mammoth, mastodon, and other large species?
David Meltzer reviews each of these topics with uncompromising rigor. The reader can watch the author’s scholarly mind, analyze evidence and reject rapid or faulty conclusions. Fortunately or unfortunately, this also means that the reader must be able to suspend credulity and remain in expectant uncertainty regarding many of the most important questions about the origin of North American people.
David Meltzer is not only a scholarly writer, but also a good one, and he reminds the reader to look at pre-history through broad principles, that depend upon a swarm of factors, large and small, specific to historical circumstances that result in the unique contingencies that formed the early history of North America. He reminds us to look for “a long and singularly unpredictable string of choices” that shape history. Meltzer is also aggressive in arguing against other writers such as Vine Deloria, who Meltzer criticizes as a writer of pre-historical doctrine rather than facts; or Paul Martin’s theory of megafauna overkill, which Meltzer attacks as non-credible.
The greatest strength of this book is the way it hammers the reader’s mind into a tool for rigorous analysis of data. The greatest weakness of this book is its textbook like ponderousness. For me, this book swung open a door of wonder into North America 11,000 and 12,000 years ago when bands of roving hunters entered an uninhabited region of planet Earth filled with masterful creations of nature like the mammoth, lion and bison.
By Paul R. Fleischman, author of Wonder: When and Why the World Appears Radiant

[Shane · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a work of scholarship and not a narrative story - so be aware. The author provides a thorough review of the extant scholarship on this topic. Meltzer covers relevant scholarship from archaeology, linguistics, ecology, genetics, and other disciplines. He puts these works and authors in conversation with each other and paints a detailed picture of what we know and do not know about the peopling of North America. I don't study these topics myself, but I'm fascinated by the subject and found this book to be an excellent primer. If you are interested, I also highly recommend Dan Flores' book "American Serengeti" - which is more digestible and briefly covers the mega fauna (big animals) of North America that survived late Pleistocene extinctions.

[Bruce · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent if a bit ponderous and dull on every page. Amazing complete thinking if consistently telegraphed and anti-climatic. Why are anthropologists so much better at writing public consumption than other scientists? Or are they still scientists?

[Terry · Rating 3 out of 5]

A plethora of data. Well presented with a nice easy style. It bogged down in places regarding the controversies endemic to the field but I enjoyed it overall.

[Mary · Rating 1 out of 5]

Too opinionated! Facts qualified with begrudging adjectives! He has a mission and it is to nay say everybody!