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Back when some of the first humans showed up in the Americas, far down in southern Chile near the coast, a small group of 20 or 30 built themselves a camp. It was in a warm and rich rainforest, in a valley along a little creek, a landscape in which the people already knew how to live: how to build shelters of maqui wood which flexes with the wind, for instance, and how to know which seafood, seaweed, and wild potatoes to eat. They stayed for at least a year, moved on, and never came back. Over the next millennia, the little creek shifted course and the old streambed filled up with peat, eventually covering evidence of the campsite with a peat bog that preserved it.
Then in 1976, a 27-year-old American anthropological archaeologist named Tom Dillehay uncovered the campsite, now called Monte Verde, and found that the small group had made it nearly to the bottom of South America 14,500 years ago. This was 1,500 years too early: established archaeologists thought people didn’t even arrive in North America, up in Alaska, until around 13,000 years ago. The discrepancy seriously undermined the leading theory, and moreover came from a young Dillehay who hadn’t yet finished his doctorate. What followed was decades of academic warfare, sometimes nasty, which made Dillehay famous and in which he turned out to be right.
Dillehay is still known mostly for Monte Verde and the war over the peopling of the Americas. But he has long since lost interest in both, and has continued working on what he’s loved about archaeology from the beginning: how foraging groups of people eventually changed into settled and increasingly complex societies. The changes were long and slow, and Dillehay wanted to find all possible evidence for them, and then to understand what people did to undertake them.
Dillehay’s archaeological and ethnographic evidence showed that the foraging society at Monte Verde had the necessary and intimate knowledge of the landscape through which they moved and on which they counted for survival. The transition from foragers to settlers Dillehay found at Huaca Prieta, a site over 5,000 kilometers northwest of Monte Verde, in northern Peru. People had lived there at about the same time Monte Verde was occupied, but over thousands of years, had stayed on to set up farms and collect into towns, developing the culture that allowed them to get along with each other. And in the present day, back in Chile around the Monte Verde site, Dillehay met a people called the Mapuche, who may be descendants of the original Monte Verdeans that perhaps left the campsite but not the area. Today, the Mapuche maintain an unusual cohesion by using the networks and ceremonies they’ve had since the 16th century.
Anthropological archaeologist Tom Dillehay began excavating at a site in Chile called Monte Verde in the 1970s. Pictured here with geologist Mario Pino, Dillehay relied on experts across a variety of fields to create a picture of how past peoples lived on the landscape. Photo courtesy of Tom Dillehay
Dillehay continues his work, which is part archaeology, part ethnography, and sometimes history. He’s excavated around 100 sites across the United States and in seven other countries. His scientific publications have the impressive range—from plant domestication to relations between fishing and farming communities—that is necessary for understanding the context of a culture. He’s written 32 books and monographs, had multiple academic appointments all over the world, founded three university departments, and fundamentally rewritten the story of the peopling of the Americas. But to pursue his abiding interest in societal changes, from the beginning of his career in 1970 and every year of the 54 years since, he’s returned to southern Chile and to northern Peru to figure out how these people who wandered into South America set up their own kinds of societies.
Tom Dalton Dillehay—just Tom, not Thomas, sometimes called Tomás—grew up all over the US southwest, and somewhere in the early 1960s, around age 13, took to walking in disrupted land like new-plowed fields, he says, “looking for things.” He found pottery, bison teeth, spear points, and bones. Later he invited his high school friends along but they only said, “Are you still picking up that shit?” Years later they said, “You made a career out of that?” He’d learned to “read the landscape,” he says, “which I saw as a friend.”
He went to the University of Texas at Austin for advanced degrees in anthropology. In 1972, he was in Peru working on his dissertation about the Inca Empire and was asked if he wanted to open an anthropology department in a branch of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile in Temuco; he did. In the next several years, while teaching, excavating, and writing his dissertation, he also set up another anthropology department, at Austral University of Chile in nearby Valdivia, where, in 1976, a student showed him what turned out to be a mammoth tooth that someone had found in a nearby forest called Monte Verde.
The camp at Monte Verde that Dillehay uncovered over the next years was a remarkably detailed site. The blanket of anaerobic wet peat—no oxygen, so no bacteria, fungi, or parasites—meant that anything organic didn’t degrade, a so-called wet site. The peoples’ shelters had firepits with charcoal from luma, a wood that burned a long time; tent poles were of flexible maqui, and knots of reeds tied together the tops of the tent poles; dirt floors had microscopic flecks of the hides that covered them. The people ate seaweed, tubers, seeds, nuts, berries—55 species of plants in all, some of which, like the seaweed Porphyra, were not only nutritious but soothed indigestion and healed wounds. They butchered mastodon and llama, whose bones were marked by knives used to cut off meat. They used stone, bone, and wood to make projectile points; spherical stones for throwing; cutting and scraping tools; and now and then a stone with no function whatsoever that Dillehay thinks the people kept because it was odd—a curiosity. In one patch of clay, they left their footprints. They left no human bones. They were there at least a year.
Monte Verde played a defining role in Dillehay’s career. Meticulous research has revealed much about the people who arrived there over 14,000 years ago. Scroll across the image to look around the site.
To understand the site, Dillehay needed to call in specialists: sedimentologists for the peat, volcanologists for ash from nearby volcanoes, paleontologists for the bones, experts in wood and in organic decay, radiocarbon experts for dates.
In 1982, the specialists dated the site to an improbable 14,500 years ago, an outrageous contradiction of the theory, established for 70 years, called Clovis First. The theory, based on US finds and few campsites, was that the first people in the Americas were big-game hunters who came through Alaska 13,000 years ago and migrated down an open corridor between the glacial ice fields, then went inland where they hunted megafauna with spears whose points, called Clovis points, were gracefully fluted. The evidence from Monte Verde was less romantic: the first people were scavengers and foragers who came through Alaska at least 18,000 years ago, and could have migrated along the coast, on foot or by boat, down into South America; their tools were practical but inelegant.
The argument between the Clovis First supporters and the Monte Verde defenders was partly reasonable. The wet site was the only early one then known in the Americas and accordingly hard to assess; other claims of pre-Clovis sites were seriously questioned; and disagreements over interpretations of evidence are likely in a field where evidence is possibly incomplete, contaminated, unusual, or missing. But for whatever reasons—perhaps Dillehay’s relative youth in challenging an accepted theory backed by archaeological powerhouses, or wide and persistent coverage of Monte Verde in newspapers, magazines, journals, and television documentaries—the argument went beyond professional. The ensuing war was, in the word of a Nature editorial, “brutal.” Some Clovis First proponents sent an anonymous letter to Dillehay’s university asking that he be fired, and one sent a letter to a Chilean newspaper alleging that Dillehay was a CIA plant. They refused to shake his hand at meetings, and froze some of his graduate students out of jobs.
Twenty-one years after his first finds at Monte Verde, Dillehay published two large, dense volumes of evidence that included data from 60 specialists, he says, “probably some of the most interdisciplinary in the history of archaeology.” Then he hosted a group of previously undecided archaeologists at Monte Verde, and the argument—though it continued for several more years after that—was settled. David J. Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, who’d organized the site visit, says, “No other site has been as thoroughly documented as Monte Verde.” He called it “analytical overkill.”
Pictured at Monte Verde, Dillehay regrets the time spent on academic warfare over the veracity of the site. Photo courtesy of Tom Dillehay
The overkill was Dillehay’s response to the Clovis war, he says, as though he was snapping at the critics, “You want data?” And now, years later, with Monte Verde almost completely unquestioned and his own reputation sterling, he says he’s satisfied that his work “made its mark.” But the harsh attacks must have been painful for a young scientist with a vulnerable career, and maybe that effect accounts for his complicated persona. He seems remote, like an engaged but unexpressive watcher, almost a little unfriendly; his side of a conversation is economical, his answers are brief. But he is also accommodating, patient with ignorance, and polite to the point of deference. One of his colleagues, José Iriarte of the University of Exeter in England, describes Dillehay with the saying “lo cortes no, quita lo valiente,” that is, “being polite doesn’t mean you’re not brave.” Another colleague, Steven Wernke, an archaeologist at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, says Dillehay has “a force of character, of will, that’s irreducible.” Dillehay certainly leaves the impression that sooner or later, one way or another, he’s going to do what he sets out to do. He regrets the time spent on the Monte Verde fight: “If I’d known then what I know now, I’d have walked away,” he says. “I was doing other things more intellectually interesting.”
The more interesting things were, in general, what he calls “the archaeology of complex societies,” that is, artifacts of the process of foragers like the Monte Verdeans who later settled into one place, producing food and tools, making communities, and eventually creating political states.
Dillehay was continuing to explore Monte Verde, but in 2007, he also began excavating Huaca Prieta, the black pyramid, in northern Peru. Huaca Prieta is a burial and ritual mound, black from ritual fires, built incrementally beginning around 7,800 years ago—though Dillehay found evidence in the mound’s lowest levels that people had lived in the area between 13,300 and 14,200 years ago. Huaca Prieta is on the coast and dry; dry sites sometimes preserve soft tissues as well as wet sites do. Dillehay worked with his usual large interdisciplinary team, this time adding botanists and geneticists.
The first people at Huaca Prieta were marine foragers. They fished and collected shellfish, and after storms and in tide pools, they scavenged sea lions and sharks using the unfancy, convenient tools—rocks that were easily picked up and flaked to create sharp edges—that the Monte Verdeans used. Then, around 4,000 years ago, their community spread out, some people moving from the salty, rocky coast to the fertile inland valley and growing crops like squash, avocado, and chili peppers. Meanwhile, over 7,500 years ago, they had begun building a burial mound on which, over the next millennia, they laid stone floors and added small rooms, until the mound was a stepped platform for burned offerings and funeral feasts. About 4,000 years ago, they capped the mound at 32 meters and added a ramp, making it, in effect, a vertical cemetery.
Huaca Prieta, a valley site in Peru, is stunning for the mounds constructed by people over thousands of years. Scroll across the image to look around the site.
They lived relatively well. Their valley, sandwiched between the Andes mountains and the coast, the whole zone only 16 kilometers across, had access to a variety of food. “The coast along the Andes is uniquely rich,” says Dillehay, in all kinds of seafood, and in the valley, they were also raising llamas and growing corn, potatoes, quinoa, and beans, 33 cultivars altogether. Some were full-fledged farmers. Some lived near the mound in a collection of houses that became villages; they painted their walls, Dillehay says; they decorated their ceramics; they wove baskets and textiles, some of which they dyed with blue from the indigo plant. They built other, smaller mounds; they still carried out rituals on the top of Huaca Prieta.
Dillehay’s view of Huaca Prieta as a community forming around a mound, said one review of his book on the subject, is “radically different from current views of mound building.” That is, Huaca Prieta wasn’t built and used by the elite as a monument to their status, wealth, and power. In any community, says Dillehay, “there comes a moment when it’s possible for one extended family to control things.” And then, to avoid social inequality, “the community creates a public space for dancing, ceremonies, feasting. You see it all over the world.” Huaca Prieta was public, and like plazas, parks, squares, churches, and coffeehouses everywhere, it was the seed of its community. Common ground sets the foundation for a common culture.
Dillehay’s work at Monte Verde showed humans moving and foraging in groups; his work at Huaca Prieta showed them solidifying their communities. To see the people acting like a united political entity—a protostate, a polity—Dillehay returned to the area around Monte Verde.
Back at the beginning of his career, Dillehay was teaching in the Monte Verde region at a university that is, he says, “in the middle of Mapuche land.” The Mapuche (mapu is “land,” che is “people”) are, he says, “a unique ethnic group.” Their tribe is the largest in southern South America, up to one million people, mostly rural and geographically spread out, but which has nevertheless maintained a coherent identity for centuries. The Mapuche are arguably the descendants of those first people at Monte Verde—though with no human remains at Monte Verde, no DNA linkage can be confirmed. The Mapuche themselves were unsurprised by Dillehay’s finds at Monte Verde—“We’ve always been here,” they say. Dillehay first became interested in the Mapuche not in connection to Monte Verde, but in 1975, after he first saw their ceremony called a nguillatun (pronounced nee-yah-tun), a multiday, all-purpose fertility ceremony with dancing, food, singing, prayers, offerings, and old stories. “I fell in love with it,” he says. “I was in the middle of it and young.”
He read the historical archives on the Mapuche’s history. Between 200 and 800 CE, the Mapuche were farmers living in small, scattered settlements; by the 1300s, they governed themselves with a loose confederacy of different lineages, each lineage independent and self-determining—a decentralized confederacy. They centralized only in times of war, notably in the 1500s, during the Spanish invasion in which the Spanish bogged down in rainforests with horses and armor to fight against the Mapuche, who were on foot and used hit-and-run tactics. The Spanish called them an “estado indomito,” never conquered them, and finally agreed to leave them and their land alone if they wouldn’t cross the Biobío River and attack. Dillehay wrote that the Spanish never understood how the Mapuche could put together political unity out of functional decentralization.
Dillehay’s advice for young academics is to think broadly, engage in multidisciplinary research, and read the scientific literature in other languages. Photo by Minesh Bacrania
It’s a good question and Dillehay thought it might be answered by the present Mapuche who kept ties with their past, making ceramics and textiles the way they always had, using some of the same plants as medicines, speaking the same language, holding the same ceremonies, like the nguillatun, in the same places. For the next 45 years, Dillehay asked the Mapuche questions about kinship and practices—not pure archaeology anymore, but ethnoarchaeology, that is, learning about a people not only from artifacts of their past but also by studying their living culture and by talking to them. He returned every year; María Catrileo, a linguist affiliated with Austral University of Chile and a Mapuche, says that Dillehay was good at talking to the sometimes stranger-averse Mapuche, not only as a researcher but also as a friend: “He just mixed up with the people and was so close to them,” she says. “He learned things other researchers could not get.”
In particular, he talked to the Mapuche’s machi—their shamans, who are a combination of healers, priests, cosmologists, and politicians—who are almost always women, and who know the family lineages. Since well before the Spanish invasion, the Mapuche have arranged themselves by lineage: they lived in communities called lof that are usually of a single lineage, and built small mounds called kuel nearby for the ancestors of the same lineage. The mounds, mostly a few meters high, are effectively living creatures. In 2002, a machi asked Dillehay if he’d like to excavate a nine-meter mound called TrenTrenkuel, the father mound central to all other outlying mounds, which are its sons and daughters. The machi had been inside TrenTrenkuel, but only “metaphysically,” and she wanted to see inside physically.
Dillehay worked out an agreement with the Mapuche: he’d use mostly Mapuche as diggers, and if he ran into a tomb, he would record what he’d found in the ground over it and not dig farther. First, the machi would do the “solacing” ceremonies that would prevent the excavation from upsetting TrenTrenkuel. “Oh brothers and sisters for always!” she told the mound. “[The archaeologists] have been brought to the place of supplication. They are silent and respectful in this place.”
Dillehay spent his childhood with his eyes focused on the landscape, a budding archaeologist. Photo by Minesh Bacrania
Dillehay’s 2002 dig found that TrenTrenkuel was pretty much what the Mapuche said it was. It was old, its layers ranging from 1,700 to 8,500 years ago. Like its surrounding mounds, it had been built incrementally, beginning as a low mound over the grave of a leader. But unlike the smaller mounds, it was built by people not of one lineage but of many; each lineage added a poncho-load of dirt with the distinct texture and color of their home. With each subsequent burial, TrenTrenkuel grew higher, the excavated layers holding evidence of the funeral rituals, including broken pottery and the jawbone of a sacrificed horse, and in the center, a layer of blue clay that would have covered an important person in the community as he lay buried there, allowing him to reach the upper blue world of his ancestors. In short, TrenTrenkuel was testimony of the common practices and beliefs that had kept and still keep the Mapuche one people.
These days, the Mapuche’s integrity as a confederation faces the Chilean government’s long-standing attempts to assimilate them—principally by not recognizing them as an Indigenous community with a language, cultural practices, and an ancient history—and the Christian evangelical mission’s efforts to replace their religion. The Mapuche continue to resist, as they resisted the Spanish, in part by taking their functional decentralization and creating unity. So every year, the Mapuche visit the mounds of their own lineages and the mounds of people with allied lineages. They still hold ceremonies like the nguillatun in dedicated fields that are attended by people of the many lineages. Along with the language, Mapudungun, mounds and ceremonies connect the Mapuche; they are the “essential things,” Dillehay wrote (with Francisco Rothhammer), that have “survived the worst that time could visit upon the Mapuche.” As the Mapuche had been in the past, they remain an “estado indomito,” an indomitable network of lineages. Dillehay says he could draw the network.
Dillehay is now semiretired, meaning he’s not teaching anymore but is still affiliated with Vanderbilt University, his last full-time appointment among a handful of other affiliations and two decades at the University of Kentucky. He’s still doing research for 30 to 35 hours a week—down from 60 hours or more—reading, interviewing the Mapuche, giving talks, writing, doing fieldwork every year. He has data that remains unpublished, and has grant funding for work in Chile and Peru to get even more data on many projects, including, for instance, the Mapuche’s definition of sacred landscapes and the Spanish gold mines that used Mapuche workers. “His amount of work over the years is depressing and a utopia,” says Iriarte. “No, he’s not usual.”
Dillehay’s colleagues and ex-students say, unasked, that he has a favorite phrase: don’t be parochial. Being parochial means restricting yourself to your own world: assuming you understand the person you’re interviewing; forgetting what information your readers need; thinking that an expert in say, parasitology, is automatically interested in archaeology; ignoring the archaeology of the non-English-speaking parts of the world; sticking to one kind of data, say, bones or stones, or to one aspect of a culture. “It’s a no-brainer,” says Kary Stackelbeck, the state archaeologist at the Oklahoma Archeological Survey. If you’re not parochial, she says, “the story you’re going to get is fuller and better.” Not being parochial amounts to a wholesale commitment to getting outside yourself and seeing sites, people, and cultures on their own terms, in their own frames of reference. And for that, Dillehay’s polite but remote watchfulness, though it makes him hard to read, would be the perfect prerequisite.
Technically retired, Dillehay has no intention of putting away his trowel. Photo by Minesh Bacrania
From early on, Dillehay looked at the landscape for what’s underneath it, to see what the people used it to do. These days, he lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and from his window looks at the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and wonders how many times people crossed over to the mountains, how often they stopped when they saw good campsites. He says he can’t look at any landscape without deciding where the good sites might be.
He says one of the ways he comes closest to understanding those past peoples is when he finds their skeletons. He doesn’t like excavating skeletons. When excavating old Mapuche sites, he says, he uncovers enough to see the age and sex, then stops digging. Some of the early Americans’ lives were brutal, he says: “The bones have TB pits, compressed vertebrae, broken bones, bad teeth,” and generally “by age 35 you’re gone.” He looks into their faces and eye sockets and thinks, Who were you? What did you do? He says, “I’m tired of removing people from their tombs.” He makes their tombs sound like their beds.
At his age and with his legacy, he doesn’t need to keep excavating and interviewing and writing. I ask him why he did it and still does it, what he likes about it. He gives several answers, all brief. “It’s what you love,” he says. “You keep doing it.” He says that when he was young and out on the land, he felt “a sense of incredible freedom related to the landscape, looking for its past, more exhilarating than anything else.” I ask him, since he likes landscapes that much, why he hadn’t become a geomorphologist. “But I like to study people,” he says.
He gets the same question at parties in Santa Fe: Why keep doing archaeology? He gives the askers a reason that might fit their reference frame in art-rich Santa Fe, that it’s the same reason that artists keep doing art. But then he thinks to himself, “They have no idea it’s your life, that you’ll go to your grave thinking and writing.” Make of this what you will—his avoidance of the parochial, his pleasure in seeing other reference frames and under the surfaces of landscapes—but you could take worse things to your grave.
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Then in 1976, a 27-year-old American anthropological archaeologist named Tom Dillehay uncovered the campsite, now called Monte Verde, and found that the small group had made it nearly to the bottom of South America 14,500 years ago. This was 1,500 years too early: established archaeologists thought people didn’t even arrive in North America, up in Alaska, until around 13,000 years ago. The discrepancy seriously undermined the leading theory, and moreover came from a young Dillehay who hadn’t yet finished his doctorate. What followed was decades of academic warfare, sometimes nasty, which made Dillehay famous and in which he turned out to be right.
Dillehay is still known mostly for Monte Verde and the war over the peopling of the Americas. But he has long since lost interest in both, and has continued working on what he’s loved about archaeology from the beginning: how foraging groups of people eventually changed into settled and increasingly complex societies. The changes were long and slow, and Dillehay wanted to find all possible evidence for them, and then to understand what people did to undertake them.
Dillehay’s archaeological and ethnographic evidence showed that the foraging society at Monte Verde had the necessary and intimate knowledge of the landscape through which they moved and on which they counted for survival. The transition from foragers to settlers Dillehay found at Huaca Prieta, a site over 5,000 kilometers northwest of Monte Verde, in northern Peru. People had lived there at about the same time Monte Verde was occupied, but over thousands of years, had stayed on to set up farms and collect into towns, developing the culture that allowed them to get along with each other. And in the present day, back in Chile around the Monte Verde site, Dillehay met a people called the Mapuche, who may be descendants of the original Monte Verdeans that perhaps left the campsite but not the area. Today, the Mapuche maintain an unusual cohesion by using the networks and ceremonies they’ve had since the 16th century.
Anthropological archaeologist Tom Dillehay began excavating at a site in Chile called Monte Verde in the 1970s. Pictured here with geologist Mario Pino, Dillehay relied on experts across a variety of fields to create a picture of how past peoples lived on the landscape. Photo courtesy of Tom Dillehay
Dillehay continues his work, which is part archaeology, part ethnography, and sometimes history. He’s excavated around 100 sites across the United States and in seven other countries. His scientific publications have the impressive range—from plant domestication to relations between fishing and farming communities—that is necessary for understanding the context of a culture. He’s written 32 books and monographs, had multiple academic appointments all over the world, founded three university departments, and fundamentally rewritten the story of the peopling of the Americas. But to pursue his abiding interest in societal changes, from the beginning of his career in 1970 and every year of the 54 years since, he’s returned to southern Chile and to northern Peru to figure out how these people who wandered into South America set up their own kinds of societies.
Tom Dalton Dillehay—just Tom, not Thomas, sometimes called Tomás—grew up all over the US southwest, and somewhere in the early 1960s, around age 13, took to walking in disrupted land like new-plowed fields, he says, “looking for things.” He found pottery, bison teeth, spear points, and bones. Later he invited his high school friends along but they only said, “Are you still picking up that shit?” Years later they said, “You made a career out of that?” He’d learned to “read the landscape,” he says, “which I saw as a friend.”
He went to the University of Texas at Austin for advanced degrees in anthropology. In 1972, he was in Peru working on his dissertation about the Inca Empire and was asked if he wanted to open an anthropology department in a branch of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile in Temuco; he did. In the next several years, while teaching, excavating, and writing his dissertation, he also set up another anthropology department, at Austral University of Chile in nearby Valdivia, where, in 1976, a student showed him what turned out to be a mammoth tooth that someone had found in a nearby forest called Monte Verde.
The camp at Monte Verde that Dillehay uncovered over the next years was a remarkably detailed site. The blanket of anaerobic wet peat—no oxygen, so no bacteria, fungi, or parasites—meant that anything organic didn’t degrade, a so-called wet site. The peoples’ shelters had firepits with charcoal from luma, a wood that burned a long time; tent poles were of flexible maqui, and knots of reeds tied together the tops of the tent poles; dirt floors had microscopic flecks of the hides that covered them. The people ate seaweed, tubers, seeds, nuts, berries—55 species of plants in all, some of which, like the seaweed Porphyra, were not only nutritious but soothed indigestion and healed wounds. They butchered mastodon and llama, whose bones were marked by knives used to cut off meat. They used stone, bone, and wood to make projectile points; spherical stones for throwing; cutting and scraping tools; and now and then a stone with no function whatsoever that Dillehay thinks the people kept because it was odd—a curiosity. In one patch of clay, they left their footprints. They left no human bones. They were there at least a year.
Monte Verde played a defining role in Dillehay’s career. Meticulous research has revealed much about the people who arrived there over 14,000 years ago. Scroll across the image to look around the site.
To understand the site, Dillehay needed to call in specialists: sedimentologists for the peat, volcanologists for ash from nearby volcanoes, paleontologists for the bones, experts in wood and in organic decay, radiocarbon experts for dates.
In 1982, the specialists dated the site to an improbable 14,500 years ago, an outrageous contradiction of the theory, established for 70 years, called Clovis First. The theory, based on US finds and few campsites, was that the first people in the Americas were big-game hunters who came through Alaska 13,000 years ago and migrated down an open corridor between the glacial ice fields, then went inland where they hunted megafauna with spears whose points, called Clovis points, were gracefully fluted. The evidence from Monte Verde was less romantic: the first people were scavengers and foragers who came through Alaska at least 18,000 years ago, and could have migrated along the coast, on foot or by boat, down into South America; their tools were practical but inelegant.
The argument between the Clovis First supporters and the Monte Verde defenders was partly reasonable. The wet site was the only early one then known in the Americas and accordingly hard to assess; other claims of pre-Clovis sites were seriously questioned; and disagreements over interpretations of evidence are likely in a field where evidence is possibly incomplete, contaminated, unusual, or missing. But for whatever reasons—perhaps Dillehay’s relative youth in challenging an accepted theory backed by archaeological powerhouses, or wide and persistent coverage of Monte Verde in newspapers, magazines, journals, and television documentaries—the argument went beyond professional. The ensuing war was, in the word of a Nature editorial, “brutal.” Some Clovis First proponents sent an anonymous letter to Dillehay’s university asking that he be fired, and one sent a letter to a Chilean newspaper alleging that Dillehay was a CIA plant. They refused to shake his hand at meetings, and froze some of his graduate students out of jobs.
Twenty-one years after his first finds at Monte Verde, Dillehay published two large, dense volumes of evidence that included data from 60 specialists, he says, “probably some of the most interdisciplinary in the history of archaeology.” Then he hosted a group of previously undecided archaeologists at Monte Verde, and the argument—though it continued for several more years after that—was settled. David J. Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, who’d organized the site visit, says, “No other site has been as thoroughly documented as Monte Verde.” He called it “analytical overkill.”
Pictured at Monte Verde, Dillehay regrets the time spent on academic warfare over the veracity of the site. Photo courtesy of Tom Dillehay
The overkill was Dillehay’s response to the Clovis war, he says, as though he was snapping at the critics, “You want data?” And now, years later, with Monte Verde almost completely unquestioned and his own reputation sterling, he says he’s satisfied that his work “made its mark.” But the harsh attacks must have been painful for a young scientist with a vulnerable career, and maybe that effect accounts for his complicated persona. He seems remote, like an engaged but unexpressive watcher, almost a little unfriendly; his side of a conversation is economical, his answers are brief. But he is also accommodating, patient with ignorance, and polite to the point of deference. One of his colleagues, José Iriarte of the University of Exeter in England, describes Dillehay with the saying “lo cortes no, quita lo valiente,” that is, “being polite doesn’t mean you’re not brave.” Another colleague, Steven Wernke, an archaeologist at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, says Dillehay has “a force of character, of will, that’s irreducible.” Dillehay certainly leaves the impression that sooner or later, one way or another, he’s going to do what he sets out to do. He regrets the time spent on the Monte Verde fight: “If I’d known then what I know now, I’d have walked away,” he says. “I was doing other things more intellectually interesting.”
The more interesting things were, in general, what he calls “the archaeology of complex societies,” that is, artifacts of the process of foragers like the Monte Verdeans who later settled into one place, producing food and tools, making communities, and eventually creating political states.
Dillehay was continuing to explore Monte Verde, but in 2007, he also began excavating Huaca Prieta, the black pyramid, in northern Peru. Huaca Prieta is a burial and ritual mound, black from ritual fires, built incrementally beginning around 7,800 years ago—though Dillehay found evidence in the mound’s lowest levels that people had lived in the area between 13,300 and 14,200 years ago. Huaca Prieta is on the coast and dry; dry sites sometimes preserve soft tissues as well as wet sites do. Dillehay worked with his usual large interdisciplinary team, this time adding botanists and geneticists.
The first people at Huaca Prieta were marine foragers. They fished and collected shellfish, and after storms and in tide pools, they scavenged sea lions and sharks using the unfancy, convenient tools—rocks that were easily picked up and flaked to create sharp edges—that the Monte Verdeans used. Then, around 4,000 years ago, their community spread out, some people moving from the salty, rocky coast to the fertile inland valley and growing crops like squash, avocado, and chili peppers. Meanwhile, over 7,500 years ago, they had begun building a burial mound on which, over the next millennia, they laid stone floors and added small rooms, until the mound was a stepped platform for burned offerings and funeral feasts. About 4,000 years ago, they capped the mound at 32 meters and added a ramp, making it, in effect, a vertical cemetery.
Huaca Prieta, a valley site in Peru, is stunning for the mounds constructed by people over thousands of years. Scroll across the image to look around the site.
They lived relatively well. Their valley, sandwiched between the Andes mountains and the coast, the whole zone only 16 kilometers across, had access to a variety of food. “The coast along the Andes is uniquely rich,” says Dillehay, in all kinds of seafood, and in the valley, they were also raising llamas and growing corn, potatoes, quinoa, and beans, 33 cultivars altogether. Some were full-fledged farmers. Some lived near the mound in a collection of houses that became villages; they painted their walls, Dillehay says; they decorated their ceramics; they wove baskets and textiles, some of which they dyed with blue from the indigo plant. They built other, smaller mounds; they still carried out rituals on the top of Huaca Prieta.
Dillehay’s view of Huaca Prieta as a community forming around a mound, said one review of his book on the subject, is “radically different from current views of mound building.” That is, Huaca Prieta wasn’t built and used by the elite as a monument to their status, wealth, and power. In any community, says Dillehay, “there comes a moment when it’s possible for one extended family to control things.” And then, to avoid social inequality, “the community creates a public space for dancing, ceremonies, feasting. You see it all over the world.” Huaca Prieta was public, and like plazas, parks, squares, churches, and coffeehouses everywhere, it was the seed of its community. Common ground sets the foundation for a common culture.
Dillehay’s work at Monte Verde showed humans moving and foraging in groups; his work at Huaca Prieta showed them solidifying their communities. To see the people acting like a united political entity—a protostate, a polity—Dillehay returned to the area around Monte Verde.
Back at the beginning of his career, Dillehay was teaching in the Monte Verde region at a university that is, he says, “in the middle of Mapuche land.” The Mapuche (mapu is “land,” che is “people”) are, he says, “a unique ethnic group.” Their tribe is the largest in southern South America, up to one million people, mostly rural and geographically spread out, but which has nevertheless maintained a coherent identity for centuries. The Mapuche are arguably the descendants of those first people at Monte Verde—though with no human remains at Monte Verde, no DNA linkage can be confirmed. The Mapuche themselves were unsurprised by Dillehay’s finds at Monte Verde—“We’ve always been here,” they say. Dillehay first became interested in the Mapuche not in connection to Monte Verde, but in 1975, after he first saw their ceremony called a nguillatun (pronounced nee-yah-tun), a multiday, all-purpose fertility ceremony with dancing, food, singing, prayers, offerings, and old stories. “I fell in love with it,” he says. “I was in the middle of it and young.”
He read the historical archives on the Mapuche’s history. Between 200 and 800 CE, the Mapuche were farmers living in small, scattered settlements; by the 1300s, they governed themselves with a loose confederacy of different lineages, each lineage independent and self-determining—a decentralized confederacy. They centralized only in times of war, notably in the 1500s, during the Spanish invasion in which the Spanish bogged down in rainforests with horses and armor to fight against the Mapuche, who were on foot and used hit-and-run tactics. The Spanish called them an “estado indomito,” never conquered them, and finally agreed to leave them and their land alone if they wouldn’t cross the Biobío River and attack. Dillehay wrote that the Spanish never understood how the Mapuche could put together political unity out of functional decentralization.
Dillehay’s advice for young academics is to think broadly, engage in multidisciplinary research, and read the scientific literature in other languages. Photo by Minesh Bacrania
It’s a good question and Dillehay thought it might be answered by the present Mapuche who kept ties with their past, making ceramics and textiles the way they always had, using some of the same plants as medicines, speaking the same language, holding the same ceremonies, like the nguillatun, in the same places. For the next 45 years, Dillehay asked the Mapuche questions about kinship and practices—not pure archaeology anymore, but ethnoarchaeology, that is, learning about a people not only from artifacts of their past but also by studying their living culture and by talking to them. He returned every year; María Catrileo, a linguist affiliated with Austral University of Chile and a Mapuche, says that Dillehay was good at talking to the sometimes stranger-averse Mapuche, not only as a researcher but also as a friend: “He just mixed up with the people and was so close to them,” she says. “He learned things other researchers could not get.”
In particular, he talked to the Mapuche’s machi—their shamans, who are a combination of healers, priests, cosmologists, and politicians—who are almost always women, and who know the family lineages. Since well before the Spanish invasion, the Mapuche have arranged themselves by lineage: they lived in communities called lof that are usually of a single lineage, and built small mounds called kuel nearby for the ancestors of the same lineage. The mounds, mostly a few meters high, are effectively living creatures. In 2002, a machi asked Dillehay if he’d like to excavate a nine-meter mound called TrenTrenkuel, the father mound central to all other outlying mounds, which are its sons and daughters. The machi had been inside TrenTrenkuel, but only “metaphysically,” and she wanted to see inside physically.
Dillehay worked out an agreement with the Mapuche: he’d use mostly Mapuche as diggers, and if he ran into a tomb, he would record what he’d found in the ground over it and not dig farther. First, the machi would do the “solacing” ceremonies that would prevent the excavation from upsetting TrenTrenkuel. “Oh brothers and sisters for always!” she told the mound. “[The archaeologists] have been brought to the place of supplication. They are silent and respectful in this place.”
Dillehay spent his childhood with his eyes focused on the landscape, a budding archaeologist. Photo by Minesh Bacrania
Dillehay’s 2002 dig found that TrenTrenkuel was pretty much what the Mapuche said it was. It was old, its layers ranging from 1,700 to 8,500 years ago. Like its surrounding mounds, it had been built incrementally, beginning as a low mound over the grave of a leader. But unlike the smaller mounds, it was built by people not of one lineage but of many; each lineage added a poncho-load of dirt with the distinct texture and color of their home. With each subsequent burial, TrenTrenkuel grew higher, the excavated layers holding evidence of the funeral rituals, including broken pottery and the jawbone of a sacrificed horse, and in the center, a layer of blue clay that would have covered an important person in the community as he lay buried there, allowing him to reach the upper blue world of his ancestors. In short, TrenTrenkuel was testimony of the common practices and beliefs that had kept and still keep the Mapuche one people.
These days, the Mapuche’s integrity as a confederation faces the Chilean government’s long-standing attempts to assimilate them—principally by not recognizing them as an Indigenous community with a language, cultural practices, and an ancient history—and the Christian evangelical mission’s efforts to replace their religion. The Mapuche continue to resist, as they resisted the Spanish, in part by taking their functional decentralization and creating unity. So every year, the Mapuche visit the mounds of their own lineages and the mounds of people with allied lineages. They still hold ceremonies like the nguillatun in dedicated fields that are attended by people of the many lineages. Along with the language, Mapudungun, mounds and ceremonies connect the Mapuche; they are the “essential things,” Dillehay wrote (with Francisco Rothhammer), that have “survived the worst that time could visit upon the Mapuche.” As the Mapuche had been in the past, they remain an “estado indomito,” an indomitable network of lineages. Dillehay says he could draw the network.
Dillehay is now semiretired, meaning he’s not teaching anymore but is still affiliated with Vanderbilt University, his last full-time appointment among a handful of other affiliations and two decades at the University of Kentucky. He’s still doing research for 30 to 35 hours a week—down from 60 hours or more—reading, interviewing the Mapuche, giving talks, writing, doing fieldwork every year. He has data that remains unpublished, and has grant funding for work in Chile and Peru to get even more data on many projects, including, for instance, the Mapuche’s definition of sacred landscapes and the Spanish gold mines that used Mapuche workers. “His amount of work over the years is depressing and a utopia,” says Iriarte. “No, he’s not usual.”
Dillehay’s colleagues and ex-students say, unasked, that he has a favorite phrase: don’t be parochial. Being parochial means restricting yourself to your own world: assuming you understand the person you’re interviewing; forgetting what information your readers need; thinking that an expert in say, parasitology, is automatically interested in archaeology; ignoring the archaeology of the non-English-speaking parts of the world; sticking to one kind of data, say, bones or stones, or to one aspect of a culture. “It’s a no-brainer,” says Kary Stackelbeck, the state archaeologist at the Oklahoma Archeological Survey. If you’re not parochial, she says, “the story you’re going to get is fuller and better.” Not being parochial amounts to a wholesale commitment to getting outside yourself and seeing sites, people, and cultures on their own terms, in their own frames of reference. And for that, Dillehay’s polite but remote watchfulness, though it makes him hard to read, would be the perfect prerequisite.
Technically retired, Dillehay has no intention of putting away his trowel. Photo by Minesh Bacrania
From early on, Dillehay looked at the landscape for what’s underneath it, to see what the people used it to do. These days, he lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and from his window looks at the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and wonders how many times people crossed over to the mountains, how often they stopped when they saw good campsites. He says he can’t look at any landscape without deciding where the good sites might be.
He says one of the ways he comes closest to understanding those past peoples is when he finds their skeletons. He doesn’t like excavating skeletons. When excavating old Mapuche sites, he says, he uncovers enough to see the age and sex, then stops digging. Some of the early Americans’ lives were brutal, he says: “The bones have TB pits, compressed vertebrae, broken bones, bad teeth,” and generally “by age 35 you’re gone.” He looks into their faces and eye sockets and thinks, Who were you? What did you do? He says, “I’m tired of removing people from their tombs.” He makes their tombs sound like their beds.
At his age and with his legacy, he doesn’t need to keep excavating and interviewing and writing. I ask him why he did it and still does it, what he likes about it. He gives several answers, all brief. “It’s what you love,” he says. “You keep doing it.” He says that when he was young and out on the land, he felt “a sense of incredible freedom related to the landscape, looking for its past, more exhilarating than anything else.” I ask him, since he likes landscapes that much, why he hadn’t become a geomorphologist. “But I like to study people,” he says.
He gets the same question at parties in Santa Fe: Why keep doing archaeology? He gives the askers a reason that might fit their reference frame in art-rich Santa Fe, that it’s the same reason that artists keep doing art. But then he thinks to himself, “They have no idea it’s your life, that you’ll go to your grave thinking and writing.” Make of this what you will—his avoidance of the parochial, his pleasure in seeing other reference frames and under the surfaces of landscapes—but you could take worse things to your grave.
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