Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (9 page)

From Newport I drive to Boston, where I check in to the Omni Parker House. Terrible as this is to confess, I’ve always avoided historic hotels. Aside from usually being out of my price range, they sometimes seemed to trade comfort for ambience. Descriptions like “old-fashioned elegance,” “quaint,” and “period architecture” were, I assumed, just code words for “no Wi-Fi,” “cramped rooms,” and “dodgy air-conditioning.”

The Parker House has prompted me to reevaluate my bias. Billing itself as the longest continuously operated hotel in America, it turns out to be sensational, and I’m especially fascinated by the cast of characters who’ve served on its staff. In the 1980s a budding opera singer named Denyce Graves studying at the nearby New England Conservatory of Music worked the night shift as a telephone operator. She is now one of the world’s foremost mezzo-sopranos. During the 1940s a young Malcolm Little bussed tables in the hotel’s restaurant before converting to Islam and changing his name to Malcolm X. And nearly a century ago, a Vietnamese man in his early twenties named Nguyen That Thanh traveled throughout the United States and worked as a pastry chef here. He later returned to his homeland, assumed the name Ho Chi Minh, and became the Communist revolutionary who ruled North Vietnam from the mid-1940s until his death in 1969.

After a few days finalizing last-minute reservations and assembling what’s turned into a phone-book-sized itinerary, I’m good to go. And with a clearer understanding of the reasons why so many historical sites remain unrecognized—they evoke shame, they’re inaccessible, the original structure is gone, there’s no funding to mark them, they’ve been overshadowed by other events, and so on—I’m ready to tackle the larger question of what makes them worth remembering at all.

THERE IS NO
WELCOME TO PAISLEY
sign gracing the outskirts of the 240-person town in southeast Oregon, just a long white banner strung over Main Street between two telephone poles that announces in big red and black letters:

Paisley Mosquito Festival
Last Full Weekend in July

Upon seeing this I’m torn between admiring their aplomb for celebrating a nuisance most communities would probably downplay, if not deny completely, and dreading what is evidently going to be twenty-four hours of nonstop slapping and scratching.

Presently I have more urgent matters to contend with. After leaving the Redmond airport, I accidentally clicked on the Mute button of my new GPS device, causing me to roll down Highway 97 about forty miles too far. By the time I noticed how uncharacteristically quiet the GPS had been and backtracked to the exit I missed, I’d wasted more than ninety minutes. Now I’m late to an early-evening meeting with my host, Dr. Dennis Jenkins, and to top it off I’ve misplaced his cell phone number. Without him I can’t get out to Five Mile Point Caves tomorrow morning, and touring that excavation site is the whole reason I’ve flown across the country and driven for the past four and a half hours.

While checking in to the Sage Rooms, I ask owner Michelle Huey if they have Wi-Fi. (Dr. Jenkins’s contact information is in an old e-mail.)

“We don’t have any way to connect to the Internet,” she tells me, “and there’s no wireless in town.”

“Is there anyplace with computers that are already hooked up?”

“Only the public library, and they’re closed.”

Everything about this trip has me anxious. Like Niihau, Paisley is a one-shot deal. This week Dr. Jenkins and his team pack up for the year, so tomorrow is my only chance to tag along. My apprehension goes beyond any logistical concerns, however. Originally I thought it would be “fun” to include an archaeological dig on my itinerary and watch the past be unearthed, literally, before my eyes. When I read in an obscure science monthly about what had been found at the Paisley Caves, a discovery so momentous I still believe it deserves paparazzi-like attention, I contacted Dr. Jenkins, and he approved my visit. That was months ago.

Awed as I was by the site’s significance, now that I’m actually focused on the larger story, I have no clue how to humanize the protagonists, who are—give or take a few centuries—14,500 years old.

Immersing myself in Prehistoric Archaeology 101 has only confused me more, since so much of the subject matter appears disputable and uncertain. There are obviously no letters, journals, documents, film clips, photographs, or sketches of any kind to offer reliable insight into what Pleistocene people thought or felt or looked like. What
is
put forth seems wildly speculative. Clay-molded “interpretations” of Stone Age faces are reconstructed using a single tooth or strand of hair, and entire metropolises are imagined based on nothing more than the discovery of two beads and a femur. And whenever a theory finally does gain wide acceptance in the scientific community, some groundbreaking new find sends it toppling. It becomes difficult, especially for a newcomer, to maintain firm footing on such shifting, unstable terrain.

For six decades the prevailing wisdom held that about 13,500 years ago,
Homo sapiens
trekked across an exposed land bridge from Siberia into what is now Alaska and then fanned out across the continent. Distinctive fluted spear points and other manmade objects dug up in 1926 at what turned out to be a bison-killing ground in Folsom, New Mexico, followed by similar items found in nearby Clovis, represented the first hard proof of these Paleo-Indian pioneers. (Still contested is who most deserves credit for the discoveries. An African American cowboy named George McJunkin tried bringing attention to the Folsom site in 1908, but no one listened. And in 1929, three years before Edgar Billings Howard excavated Clovis, a local teenager named Ridgely Whiteman mailed the Smithsonian Institution a “warhead” point he’d found in the area while hunting for artifacts and insisted there were more. He too was ignored.) “Clovis” became the defining adjective for anything related to the earliest people in either North or South America.

That is, until the late 1990s. After two decades of research, Universidad Austral de Chile professors Mario Pino and Tom Dillehay convinced a blue-ribbon panel of archaeologists in 1997 that a Monte Verde, Chile, settlement predated Clovis by one thousand years. Cordage, stone tools, and the remains of edible plants, potatoes, nuts,
berries, and even seaweed were uncovered, along with evidence of hearths and tents made of animal hides.

At about the same time, the Meadowcroft Rockshelter near Pittsburgh was earning recognition as another pre-Clovis settlement, dating back to 14,000
B.C.
Suddenly, pre-Clovis sites started popping up everywhere. Cactus Hill in Virginia, Lovewell in Kansas, La Sena in Nebraska, and South Carolina’s Topper dig, among others, all claimed to beat Clovis by upward of two, five, six, and possibly twenty
thousand
years, respectively. None of these places, however, have yielded human DNA. This isn’t absolutely necessary to date a site, but uncontaminated human DNA adds a degree of certainty that tools and weapons made of stone (which can’t be radiocarbon-dated), charred wood (which could be from a manmade hearth—or a natural forest fire), and other detritus and artifacts do not.

Then, in 2003, a University of Oregon archaeologist radiocarbon–dated the first pre-Clovis human DNA in North America. That archaeologist was Dr. Dennis Jenkins.

Who, praise the heavens, I’ve finally located at the university’s temporary dormitory a block off Main Street. “Join us,” he says, inviting me inside, where he’s reviewing with his students today’s haul from Paisley Caves. Dressed in jeans and a blue button-down shirt, Dr. Jenkins has the distinguished silver-haired mien of a tenured professor, but his ruddy complexion hints of a life spent in the great outdoors and he exudes a youthful vigor and warmth. Two students are splayed out on the living room sofa, exhausted, while others are either preparing dinner or tapping away on their computers. One young woman, rifling through the refrigerator, opens a container and wrinkles her nose. “Eww, is this cole slaw? It looks
really
old. I think there’s something growing on it.”

“Catalog it,” a tired voice from the sofa calls out.

Plastic sandwich bags are clustered everywhere, each one neatly labeled and filled with what appear to be little bones, dirt, and dark clumps I can’t identify but am assuming will be analyzed later. Discreetly, I take a closer peek to determine if they look anything like the
discovery that put Paisley Caves on the archaeological map: human coprolite.

Yes, when everything is said and done, it is 14,500-year-old poo that has brought me here and, more important, furthered our understanding of when the first primitive souls walked, hunted, ate, slept, and defecated in what is now the United States of America.

After Dr. Jenkins finishes speaking with his students, I apologize for being late and recount my series of technological mishaps. He waves it off and we step outside, where the scent of mosquito-killing DEET saturates the evening air.

We chat casually for a minute on the front stoop and then get to the matter at hand. “Your discovery,” I say, “makes Paisley a kind of prehistoric Jamestown or Plymouth where the
truly
first Americans set foot, and yet I doubt many people outside of the archaeological world have heard of it.”

While slicing small chunks of watermelon with his pocketknife, Dr. Jenkins gently corrects me. Another University of Oregon professor, named Luther Cressman, he says, was actually the first to excavate Paisley Caves back in 1938. (I’d heard that, too, but Dr. Jenkins is being modest; he—Dr. Jenkins—found the coprolites.)

Dr. Jenkins also cautions me on being fanciful (his word) about portraying the caves as some sort of way station for America’s earliest explorers. It’s possible, he explains, that the Paleo-Indians actually lived here and weren’t just passing through. Plus, we don’t know if they were indeed “truly first” on the continent or even in this area. He believes it’s only a matter of time before another archaeologist unearths older DNA.

“But even if someone else digs up an earlier specimen,” I ask, “Paisley Caves will forever be where the first pre-Clovis human DNA was found in North America, right?”

“I suppose that’s true,” he says.

“What I’m also trying to understand is what relevance these sites and stories have to us now. On the flight over, I read an article about a 35,000-year-old flute made from the bone of a vulture’s wing recently found in caves near Ulm, Germany. There’s something poignant about
this image of early humans sitting around a fire playing instruments to entertain each other. Is there anything similar you’ve found at Paisley, anything that ‘humanizes’ these people?”

“That sounds a bit fanciful to me. We have no idea how those flutes were used. They could have been for signaling. We have to stick with facts and be very careful about extrapolating certain theories based on our own feelings.”

“Is there
anything
we can know for certain about the people who lived here?” I ask.

“Quite a lot,” he says, and then proceeds to lay out a convincing summary of their dietary and living habits based on their feces. From threads found in their stool, we assume they could sew. From salt deposits, moss spores, and various chemical signatures, we can track their movements according to which rivers they drank from and what plants they ate—and even when they consumed them, based on their seasonal availability. (Dr. Jenkins segues a moment to emphasize how the winters here used to be –10 to –20 degrees Fahrenheit.) We know they used digging sticks to harvest a root vegetable known as Indian carrots.

“Have you ever tried them?” I ask.

Dr. Jenkins nods, grimacing. “They taste like turpentine.”

He goes on to say that we can also determine what parasites were in their system, and as DNA technology gets more advanced, we’ll be able to determine what illnesses they had.

“I hadn’t thought about the health problems they had to suffer through. I can’t imagine living in a world without Novocain,” I say, half kidding.

Dr. Jenkins responds seriously: “I’ve seen abscessed teeth, entire mandibles rotted away—not here, but from other sites. Think of living with that kind of pain every day. These were
tough
individuals, and I have enormous respect for them. We’ve grown a little soft in comparison.”

“Along with disease and harsh weather, what else—”

“And starvation periods.”

“And those, right. Along with all that, what other threats did they
face? I’m guessing there were any number of deadly animals they had to look out for.”

“Rattlesnakes, scorpions, black widows, and also your more warm and fuzzy predators, all of them extinct now, like American lions, cheetahs, short-faced bears, saber-toothed tigers—though it’s possible they weren’t around here then—and the dire wolf.”

“Those sound bad.”

“They were.”

The more we talk, the more questions I want to ask, but I know Dr. Jenkins has to get back to his students, and I clearly have homework to do.

“See you tomorrow, seven
A.M.
Six thirty if you want breakfast,” he says.

“Sounds like a long day.”

“It’ll go quicker than you think.”

That evening I pore through a stack of academic journals and articles I’ve brought detailing Native American history. Dr. Jenkins is among those who believe that contemporary tribes are direct descendants of Paleo-Indians, but there is, of course, raucous debate about this as well. On July 18, 1996, two spectators at a hydroplane race on the Columbia River in Kennewick, Washington, stumbled upon a nine-thousand-year-old skull, which scientists said appeared to be a “caucasoid” of European ancestry. (A gray-putty reconstruction of his face bears an uncanny resemblance to British actor Sir Patrick Stewart.) After the full skeleton was retrieved, local tribes demanded the remains so they could be buried immediately. Archaeologists insisted on examining them longer, and a series of lawsuits followed. As of now, “Kennewick Man” resides under lock and key at the Burke Museum in Washington, his fate still undetermined. Dr. Jenkins’s coprolite DNA corroborates an unbroken link between Paleo-Indians and Native Americans, but it’s also possible that there have been multiple migration routes.