How long had the Indians inhabited North America prior to the coming of Columbus? In the late 1850's, European researchers had determined that human antiquity reached back to the Pleistocene era. The hypothesis was then advanced that humans had, through parallel development, also inhabited North America through the same time span. Evidence was gathered in the 1880's to support this hypothesis. Yet in 1890, this theory came under withering attack. The dispute which continued until 1927 dissolved into a complex, wide-ranging and frequently bitter argument that far eclipsed the archaeological issues at hand and profoundly affected the participants and the emerging discipline of archaeology. Today, this dispute is little understood because the quarrel itself was never fully public. Under this grant, Dr. Meltzer will analyze the rich unpublished archives of disputants whose roles up to now have been largely unexamined. By examining these archives and combining the information gleaned from these sources with his own previous archival research and ongoing analysis of published documents, Dr. Meltzer will produce the first comprehensive record of the controversy. It will then be possible to understand how and why this controversy was created, sustained, and ultimately resolved--questions which are now unanswerable for want of adequate documentation. In turn, this will allow an evaluation of the internal "scientific" and external "social" accounts for this episode, and whether the two sorts of accounts are separable. This was a pivotal episode in North American archaeology, but the significance of its study even goes beyond the history of the field. American archaeology is again embroiled in controversy over human antiquity. Looking back will help pout in historical perspective the obstacles that still bedevil the subject, and thereby close the gap between the near and deeper past and between science and the history of science.
