Dennis J. Stanford

Who were the first humans to inhabit North America? According to the now familiar story, mammal hunters entered the continent some 12,000 years ago via a land bridge that spanned the Bering Sea. Distinctive stone tools belonging to the Clovis culture established the presence of these early New World people. But are the Clovis tools Asian in origin? Drawing from original archaeological analysis, paleoclimatic research, and genetic studies, noted archaeologists Dennis J. Stanford and Bruce A. Bradley challenge the old narrative and, in the process, counter traditional - and often subjective - approaches to archaeological testing for historical relatedness. The authors apply rigorous scholarship to a hypothesis that places the technological antecedents of Clovis in Europe and posits that the first Americans crossed the Atlantic by boat and arrived earlier than previously thought. Supplying archaeological and oceanographic evidence to support this assertion, the book dismantles the old paradigm while persuasively linking Clovis technology with the culture of the Solutrean people who occupied France and Spain more than 20,000 years ago.

The Arch Lake human burial site, discovered in 1967 in eastern New Mexico, contains the third-oldest known remains in North America. Since its original excavation and removal to Eastern New Mexico University’s Blackwater Draw Museum, the 10,000 radiocarbon-year-old burial has been known only locally. In February 2000 an interdisciplinary team led by Douglas W. Owsley reexamined the osteology, geology, archaeology, and radiocarbon dating of the burial. In this first volume in Peopling of the Americas Publications—released by Texas A&M University Press for the Center for the Study of the First Americans—Arch Lake Woman presents the results of this recent analysis of the skeleton and site. In addition to color and black-and-white illustrations, Arch Lake Woman includes extensive tables describing the team’s discoveries and comparing their results with those of other ancient burials.

George Frison and Dennis Stanford's Agate Basin monograph is not only a classic of Plains paleoindian archaeology, but also of multidisciplinary research, geoarchaeology, zooarchaeology, and experimental archaeology. Lucid presentation of meticulously excavated and analyzed sediments, bones and artifacts convey an unmatched sense of the sights, sounds and smells of Paleoindian life on the High Plains—from brutal winters and blistering summers, to killing and butchering bison, and to making lethal weaponry. As Matthew Hill writes in his new prologue, 'Not merely an important volume of the Frison canon, Agate Basin stands as a foundational document in modern Americanist archaeology and a major accomplishment in American science.' Originally published by Academic Press in 1982