NPS Archeology Program: The Earliest Americans


			by John Sprinkle, NPS National Historic Landmarks Survey I distinctly remember my first visit to the Thunderbird Archeological District, designated a National Historic Landmark in 1977 for its association with the Paleoindians of central Virginia. Like every other undergraduate anthropology student at the University of Delaware in the late 1970s, I’d heard lectures on the base camp at “T-bird,” the hunting camp at the “Fifty Site,” and the quarry across the Shenandoah River where Paleoindians crafted their distinctive fluted projectile points and other tools. To us, the Paleoindians inhabited a foreign country, one whose material culture was being teased from the floodplain by “piece-plotting” artifacts as they were found in the stratified soil. next >> Under the stars that night, I think many of us came to understand just how distant, rare, and ineffable the era was, and how essential experiencing the site in context—with its river and floodplain and terraces—was to our comprehension. Today, we archeologists have continued our fascination with the Paleoindians, pushing back North America’s earliest suspected habitations by thousands of years. Yet, the oldest sites remain extremely rare. During Thunderbird’s heyday, there were probably only about a thousand people in Virginia. next >> In the 1980s, T-bird was saved from suburbia because of its significance to American history, a fact recognized by the landmark designation. Across the country, other Paleoindian sites deserve the honor. The landmarks study underpinning this web feature joins a tradition of recognizing our shared heritage of migration, of which the story of Paleoindian settlement is only the first chapter. The National Historic Landmarks Survey looks forward to documenting the experience of the earliest Americans by designating more sites through this study. << back