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complete with tent-like structures made from animal hides, lashed together by poles and twisted reeds—a culture that he said had existed centuries before Clovis, and that may have been more sophisticated. Skepticism was forceful, even rancorous; arguments lasted for years, with critics charging that Dillehay’s evidence was too low-quality to accept. “People refused to shake my hand at meetings,” Dillehay told me. “It was like I was killing their children.”

Tom Dillehay

In 1997 a dozen prominent researchers, Haynes among them, flew to Chile to examine the site and its artifacts. The hope was to settle the long-standing dispute by re-creating the graybeards’ visit to Folsom. After inspecting the site itself—a wet, peaty bank strikingly unlike the sere desert home of Folsom and Clovis—the archaeologists ended up at a dimly lighted cantina with the appropriate name of La Caverna. Over a round of beers an argument erupted, prompted, in part, by Haynes’s persistent skepticism. Dillehay told Haynes his experience with stone tools in Arizona was useless in evaluating wooden implements in Peru, and then stomped outside with a supporter. But despite the heated words, a fragile consensus emerged. The experts wrote an article making public their unanimous conclusion. “Monte Verde is real,” Alex W. Barker, now at the Milwaukee Public Museum, told the New York Times. “It’s a whole new ball game.”

Not everyone wanted to play. Two years later Stuart J. Fiedel, a consulting archaeologist in Alexandria, Virginia, charged that Dillehay’s just-published final Monte Verde report was so poorly executed—“bungled” and “loathsome” were among the descriptors he provided when we spoke—that verifying the original location “of virtually every ‘compelling,’ unambiguous artifact” on the site was impossible. Stone tools, which many archaeologists regard as the most important artifacts, have no organic carbon and therefore cannot be carbon-dated. Researchers must reckon their ages by ascertaining the age of the ground they are found in, which in turn requires meticulously documenting their provenance. Because Dillehay’s team had failed to identify properly the location of the stone tools in Monte Verde, Fiedel said, their antiquity was up to question; they could have been in a recent sediment layer. Haynes, who had authenticated Monte Verde in 1997, announced in 1999 that the site needed “further testing.”

The dispute over the Clovis model kept growing. In the 1990s geologists laid out data indicating that the ice sheets were bigger and longer lasting than had been thought, and that even when the ice-free corridor existed it was utterly inhospitable. Worse, archaeologists could find no traces of paleo-Indians (or the big mammals they supposedly hunted) in the corridor from the right time. Meanwhile, paleontologists learned that about two-thirds of the species that vanished did so a little before Clovis appears in the archaeological record. Finally, Clovis people may not have enjoyed hunting that much. Of the seventy-six U.S. paleo-Indian camps surveyed by Meltzer and Donald K. Grayson, an archaeologist at the University of Washington at Seattle, only fourteen showed evidence of big-game hunting, all of it just two species, mastodon and bison. “The overkill hypothesis lives on,” the two men sneered, “not because of [support from] archaeologists and paleontologists who are expert in the area, but because it keeps getting repeated by those who are not.”

Clovis defenders remained as adamant as their critics. Regarding Monte Verde, Haynes told me, “My comment is, where are the photographs of these ‘artifacts’ when they were in place? If you’re trying to prove that site to other archaeologists and you find an unequivocal stone artifact in situ in a site that’s twelve thousand years old, everyone should run over with a camera. It wasn’t until after we brought this up that they dug up some photographs. And they were fuzzy! I really became a doubter then.” Such putative pre-Clovis sites are “background radiation,” he said. “I’m convinced that a hundred