Response to Review of “Late Upper Paleolithic occupation at Cooper’s Ferry, Idaho, USA, ∼16,000 years ago” by Fiedel et al.

ABSTRACT

In an essay published in PaleoAmerica (2020, Vol. 6, No. 4), Fiedel and coauthors present a review of “Late Upper Paleolithic occupation at Cooper’s Ferry, Idaho, USA, ∼16,000 years ago”, by Davis and coauthors in Science (2019, Vol. 365, pp. 891–897). Fiedel and coauthors’ review presents significant misunderstandings about fundamental aspects of site stratigraphy and radiocarbon chronology and also advances alternative speculations about reported archaeological phenomena generated solely by their imaginations. Worse, Fiedel and coauthors attribute to us things we did not say, then use those false attributions to discredit our work. Our response provides an opportunity to clarify issues of stratigraphy, site formation, chronology, feature interpretation, and paleogenetics. We reinforce our original report that people bearing late Upper Paleolithic lithic technology initially occupied the Cooper’s Ferry site ∼16,000 calendar years ago and later returned over and over to live at the site during Clovis times and afterwards.

KEYWORDS:

• Cooper’s Ferry site
• Idaho
• Upper Paleolithic
• Pleistocene
• archaeology
• geoarchaeology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Loren G. Davis is a Professor of Anthropology at Oregon State University and is the Executive Director of the Keystone Archaeological Research Fund. His research focuses on the Pleistocene archaeology and geoarchaeology of western North America and generally on the topic of the early peopling of the Americas.

David B. Madsen is semi-retired but holds adjunct positions at the Department of Anthropology – University of Nevada Reno, Department of Anthropology – Texas A&M University, and the Key Laboratory of Western China’s Environmental Systems – Lanzhou University, China. His research work has been directed primarily towards understanding human adaptation to climate change in arid western North America and central Asia, but more recently has focused on the early peopling of the Tibetan Plateau and the Western Hemisphere.

David A. Sisson is the Bureau of Land Management Coeur d’Alene District Archeologist in north-central Idaho. He has over 40 years of experience in this region working with several indigenous groups and a wide range of archaeological sites.

Masami Izuho is an Associate Professor of Archaeology in the Department of History and Archaeology, Tokyo Metropolitan University. His research focuses on geoarchaeological problems related to the appearance of modern humans in Northeast Asia, and the initial peopling of the Americas.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by U.S. Bureau of Land Management: Grant Number L09AC15147; Grant Number 1422-D-065-A-96-0007; Grant Number L14AC00232.