Early Man in the New World

by Kenneth Macgowan; Joseph A. Hester

The Milling Stone Appears

In the early thirties, archaeologists began to find a peculiar kind of artifact that broadened their conception of the activities of early man in the New World. Anthropologists had always thought of him as merely a hunter. He needed spear points, scrapers, knives, hammerstones to shape these things, and fire-drills to make it possible for him to cook his prey; but that was all. Then milling stones began to appear, and it became clear that early man—at least in some areas—had been a food gatherer and food grinder, as well as a hunter. These stones are very simple slabs with a hollow worn in the surface by round handstones used in grinding seeds and nuts. Such milling stones, or querns, are not seen in the Old World until we approach the Neolithic, or New Stone Age, and the people who developed agriculture and textiles. Milling stones have been found in a village farming site at Jarmo, Iraq, dating about 7,000 years ago.[50] Agriculture did not enter Europe until about 2500 B.C., and milling stones are not found in its caves until after the Magdalenians of the Old Stone Age. The reason for the precipitate outcropping of milling stones in the Americas is not that our early man practiced agriculture. He did not do that, and he did not make polished stone axes until much later. He was merely a food gatherer. Was he also a food grinder because he was an Australoid who brought the habit to America, just as he brought it to Australia? Or, if not, was he another sort of man, who happened to be smart enough to recognize that North America provided him with many tempting grains and seeds to grind, foods that were not so available in the Old World?[51] It seems more than a coincidence that the earliest American milling stones appear in the arid Southwest, where desert plants have more seeds and larger seeds than plants in moister areas.

The first site to provide milling stones was at Whitewater Creek, in Arizona. Byron Cummings had found artifacts and fossils there in 1926. When Gladwin heard of this at an anthropological meeting five years later, he again set Gila Pueblo in motion. Sayles and Emil W. Haury undertook excavation, and Antevs checked the geology of the various sites which they studied in the area of what is now called the Cochise culture.[52] The excavators found milling stones in the same stratum as the fossils of extinct animals. They found no spear points in this oldest level—a sign that food gathering was the dominant economy of the early Cochise.

COCHISE MILLING STONES

The lower comes from the oldest horizon, the Sulphur Spring, the upper fragment from a later one, probably the Chiricahua. (The Sulphur Spring stone, after Martin, Quimby, and Collier, 1947; the other, courtesy of the Southwest Museum.)

The artifacts and the fossils were lying in or under clays left by a lake that has now disappeared. If Lake Cochise was, like Lake Bonneville, one of the bodies of water created while the last great ice sheets were growing, then the Cochise culture must date from the last wet period of the final glaciation—perhaps as much as 35,000 years ago. Antevs thinks, however, that the water which laid down the clays belonged to a number of ponds, not to a single large lake, and that the ponds could have formed and disappeared, formed again and disappeared again, just before postglacial times brought a much drier climate. Any single pond may have appeared as late as 10,000 years ago to provide the Cochise clay. Radiocarbon dates for Cochise all seem too recent to fit the geology and paleontology of the site. Dates for the earliest stage, the Sulphur Spring, range from 6,210 to 7,000 years ago; the Chiricahua from 2,850 to 7,000; the last, the San Pedro, from 1,762 to 2,463.[53] Antevs, on the other hand, believes that the Sulphur Spring stage at Double Adobe—twenty-four miles east of the Lehner mammoth site where Clovis points were found—dates back more than 12,500 years.[54]

Finds of milling stones have also been made at Signal Butte, Nebraska, by W. D. Strong; at Pinto Basin by the Campbells[55]—the first site probably about as early as Gypsum, the other 10,000 years old—and under hardpan at that much disputed site near Frederick, Oklahoma, where some claim that artifacts and fossils of extinct animals appear together in an interglacial formation. Milling stones have also been found at sites of later cultures such as the Edwards Plateau in Texas and Santa Barbara in California. There are indications of an ancient horizon of milling stones, as well as Pinto and older points and scrapers, in Sonora and Lower California. The fact that they were found with the bones of elk and bison and along the shores of dry lakes in Mexico argues that this culture is as old as Cochise, perhaps older. Carl Sauer, who found the materials, believes that only during the last glaciation could the climate of these two desert areas have been moist enough to produce lakes and support so much animal life.[56]

At Borax Lake in California, in several years of work following 1938, Harrington found more milling stones. There were also quite a variety of points—fluted, Gypsum, Pinto, Mohave, and Silver Lake—scattered through an alluvial fan of dirt carried down by some early stream that flowed when the country was well watered and verdant, instead of arid like so much of California today.[57]

In 1948 Harrington and Willy Stahl found milling stones and a great wealth of Pinto, Mohave, and Silver Lake points in another part of California that is now desert. This is near Little Lake, which is fed by underground waters and small intermittent streams from the Sierra. Nearby, in glacial times, a small river cut a channel through a great lava flow, producing a falls that has now moved up half a mile from the edge of the lava. Here, where the blow sands of the Mohave Desert meet the lava, and under about ten feet of old, consolidated sand, Harrington and Stahl found milling stones and points in two feet of soil. This soil was dark with the remains of vegetation that must have been trees and bushes when the intermittent stream was still a steady torrent. Underneath the dark soil there was clay deposited by the stream at some period of great flow. Across about two-thirds of the camp site a similar coating of clay indicated that after the user of the milling stones and Pinto points had departed, the stream had overflowed again during a time of great rains. This time may have been the “Little Pluvial” of about 3,000 years ago, or the “Great Pluvial” that some say occurred 10,000 years ago when the glaciers had finally retreated, with the former the more likely date. In this camp site Harrington and Stahl found the post holes of some sort of hut or shelter, the oldest evidence of housebuilding in the New World.[58]

An animal head carved from part of the spine of a variety of llama, or camel, and reputedly found with fossils of other extinct mammals in the Valley of Mexico in 1870. About eight inches wide. (After Barcena, 1882.)