Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [150]
Carter replied in a letter to the editor, dated February 2, 1960: “I must assume now that you had no idea of the intensity of feeling that reigns in the field. It is nearly hopeless to try to convey some idea of the status of the field of Early Man in America at the moment. But just for fun: I have a correspondent whose name I cannot use, for though he thinks that I am right, he could lose his job for saying so. I have another anonymous correspondent who as a graduate student found evidence that would tend to prove me right. He and his fellow student buried the evidence. They were certain that to bring it in would cost them their chance for their Ph.D’s. At a meeting, a young professional approached me to say, ‘I hope you really pour it on them. I would say it if I dared, but it would cost me my job.’ At another meeting, a young man sidled up to say, ‘In dig x they found core tools like yours at the bottom but just didn’t publish them’” ( T. E. Lee 1977, p. 4).
The inhibiting effect of negative propaganda on the evaluation of Carter’s discoveries is suggested in the following statement by archeologist Brian Reeves: “Were actual artifacts uncovered at Texas Street, and is the site really Last Interglacial in age? . . . Because of the weight of critical ‘evidence’ presented by established archaeologists, the senior author [Reeves], like most other archaeologists, accepted the position of the skeptics uncritically, dismissing the sites and the objects as natural phenomena” (Reeves et al. 1986, p. 66).
But when he took the trouble to look at the evidence himself, Reeves changed his mind. He wrote: “While visiting San Diego in 1976 the senior author had the opportunity to view some of George Carter’s . . . collections from Texas Street . . . in Mission Valley. Among the fractured quartzite cobbles were many objects that appeared to Reeves and R. S. MacNeish to be culturally produced, modified, and utilized quartzite cobble artifacts” (Reeves et al. 1986, p. 66). Ten years later Reeves conducted several onsite investigations near Texas Street.
Many of the specimens he studied, although made from quartzite rather than flint, appear to be Eolithic: “In summary, the Mission Ridge quartzite cobble complex includes naturally produced sharp-pointed and edged bipolar cores, blocky quartzite pieces and irregular-shaped sharp-edged flakes. These fragments were not only utilized by man, but also modified into more formed flakes and tools (the horseshoe chopper, for example) as well as culturally manufactured, unifacially retouched and utilized flakes” (Reeves et al. 1986, p. 78).
Reeves concluded: “The bulk of the fractured quartzites recovered from Mission Ridge were, in our opinion, naturally broken but collected elsewhere and brought to the site by man for use primarily as ready-made expediency tools” (Reeves et al. 1986, p. 78). In light of Reeves’s change of heart about Carter’s tools, one wonders what would result from an openminded review of the European eoliths.
Reeves then made the following commentary on the unfair treatment professional scientists gave to the San Diego implements: “The fractured quartzite complex, as first claimed by Carter, is part of a Late to Middle Pleistocene quartzite cobble core/unifacial flake tradition of Pacific coastal-adapted people. . . . Had Carter’s claims been taken seriously enough by professional archaeologists to undertake detailed field studies instead of simply dismissing them, we would have had a major body of data on Late Pleistocene North American coastal settlement” (Reeves et al. 1986, pp. 78–79). Reeves believed some of Carter’s implements to be 120,000 years old.
Over several decades, many ancient human occupation sites were investigated around San Diego, and Carter (1957, pp. 370–371) constructed a tentative history of stone tool usage in this region over the last 90,000 years. After the Texas Street phase,