Bones, Spears and Hohokam

By Laurence I. Barreff

THE FIRST AMERICAN: A STORY OF NORTH AMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGY by C.W. Ceram. 357 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $9.95.

More than a decade ago, C.W. Ceram, celebrated popular explicator of archaeology (Gods, Graves and Scholars), decided to abandon his "hobby." He would, he said, return to other subjects and write once more under his real name, Kurt W. Marek. Happily, the German-born journalist and critic, after allowing Marek a couple of bylines, could not vanquish Ceram entirely. In The First American, Ceram/Marek is back in his old haunts, providing once more a loving, readable, penetrating excavation of antiquity, this time in the New World, where he has settled. The Old World's overlay of monuments and documents often makes archaeology a function of history; in North America it is more closely related to anthropology. Still, as Ceram delves into early man's development here, he cannot resist a good human-interest story.

Girl from Laguna. The oldest human remains discovered in North America so far were found by chance. Howard Wilson, 17, amateur collector of arrowheads, was scratching around near his Laguna Beach home in 1933 when he uncovered a skull. His mother suggested the garbage pail as a suitable receptacle; Howard stoutly held out for a shoe box and eventually gave his find to a museum. Many years and expert examinations later, it was established that the "girl from Laguna" had lived between 15,000 and 18,000 years ago.

This was the approximate time of Ceram's First American, or at least the earliest inhabitant that archaeologists and paleontologists can tell us much about. Miss Laguna herself yielded little information. The subsequent discovery in the Southwest of the flint weapons left behind by the Folsom man and the Sandia man provide more. No bones of these ancients have turned up, but the speared skeletons of their prey from 10,000 or more years ago convey messages. The fact that the tailbones of the giant bison were missing, for instance, suggests that the entire hides were taken, along with the meat. If so, the hunters must have had tools for skinning.

From such fragmentary evidence, a picture of the Early Hunters emerges. They were immigrants; the scientific consensus is that they came from Asia via Siberia, then dispersed east and south. When they arrived is uncertain. However, it is clear that they maintained a nomadic existence. And they were probably of Mongoloid stock, not currently extinct types like the Neanderthals.

Those Who Vanished. Closer to the historical era, comparisons can be made between early Americans and their Old World contemporaries. Ceram tells of the work of Emil Walter Haury, a young field archaeologist in the 1930s who explored a site at Snaketown, Ariz. The Pima Indians said that it once belonged to the "Hohokam" ("those who have vanished"). Haury confirmed that the artistic Hohokam seem to have invented etching around A.D. 1000, hundreds of years before it appeared in Europe. Instead of using metal, they worked with seashells. They cremated their dead, methodically smashing whatever artifacts they had possessed in life, but they left behind irrigation systems whose traces can clearly be seen today.

Throughout the explorations in North America, a frustration and a challenge confront the archaeologist. Unlike their counterparts in Europe and Asia, diggers in America have no early writings to match with physical remains. One of many enigmas never fully elucidated concerns the Mound Builders, who, starting before the birth of Christ, festooned the U.S. Midwest and other regions with great piles of earth, up to hundreds of feet in diameter. Some of the mounds are shaped like animals, so vast in circumference that their forms could not have been fully perceived at ground level by their creators. Mound building had ceased by the time the first Europeans probed inland in the 16th century. But traces of the practice persisted in the burial rites of such tribes as the Creeks and the Natchez.

Ceram moves from one age to another, pointing out links and gaps. He does not pretend that he is reporting new findings. His mission, rather, is to collect and explain what the scientists have produced. He brings to it an excitement born of the knowledge that new discoveries can be made at any moment that will tell much about the previous tenants of the continent.

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