Content area
Full Text
The Settlement of the Americas: A New Prehistory. Tom D. Dillehay. New York: Basic Books, 2000. 371 pp.
In spite of its name, The Settlement of the Americas: A New Prehistory is really about the archaeology of South America. The book represents one of the most detailed treatments of basic archaeological data available in English. Paleoenvironmental and archaeological data are well reviewed and integrated into a coherent view of the peopling of the continent. However, there are some empirical mistakes in the presentation of raw data from certain areas. For example, Fell's Cave and Palli Aike are not located in Tierra del Fuego (p. 36) but in Continental Patagonia, and no human skeletal evidence was found at site La Moderna (p. 229).
An important issue that Tom Dillehay emphasizes is that "The first South Americans were clearly very different from their North American counterparts" (p. 2). This simple and well substantiated statement has several dimensions. In the first place, it means that in this book, the record of South America is examined by itself, and not in relation with the Clovis culture in North America. Moreover, crucial differences between both continents, such as the relative lack...