Check your subscription status, update your details and more. The Monte Verde controversy is back: who first lived in the Americas? The Monte Verde sites in Chile have been the source of arguments among archaeologists for decades.
Columnist Michael Marshall finds the row is heating up again – and could change our understanding of the first peoples in the Americas _This is an extract from Our Human Story, our newsletter about the revolution in archaeology. ._ In every scientific field, there are totemic places. The CERN physics laboratory that houses the Large Hadron Collider; the Cavendish lab in Cambridge where James Watson and Francis Crick did their research on the structure of DNA; NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. In archaeology, one such place is a site in Chile called Monte Verde.
For half a century, Monte Verde has been central to our understanding of the peopling of the Americas. For two decades, the story that Monte Verde told was wildly controversial. It then became fairly settled, but, as of this year, it has become controversial again.
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