Language and the Afterlives of Empire

Extract

As I sit down to write these words in late October 2014, my Latin American news digest has just informed me that archaeologists in Peru have confirmed that toolmaking human beings lived in settlements 14,700 feet above sea level in the Andes over twelve thousand years ago, a thousand years earlier than anyone was known to have lived at such altitudes (Ritter). The goalposts marking the longue durée in the Americas have been receding continuously in recent years. Until the 1990s, received wisdom had it that human beings arrived in the Americas no earlier than thirteen or fourteen thousand years ago, across the Bering Strait land bridge, which disappeared underwater a couple of thousand years later. But in the late twentieth century archaeologists began finding human remains over fourteen thousand years old, like those in the 14,800-year-old settlement at Monte Verde, far south on the coast of what is now Chile. There had to have been migrations well before the fourteen-thousand-year mark. Since the discovery in Chile, human remains more than twenty and even thirty thousand years old have repeatedly been found. Aggressively defended by archaeologists, the accepted story held up longer than it should have, but accumulating evidence has finally dislodged it. How and when the Americas were populated by human beings remains a terrain of lively controversy.