One early evening during the Lupine season when in 1983 David Keenlyside was opening his extensive dig at the Jones Site at Greenwich in Saint Peter’s Bay, I visited my friend Trevor who was a student excavator. We walked along the beach and while he shared the excitement of digging his first trench with me, we looked down at the shingle beach and there, sparkling with a reddish glow, was this point. It was my first prehistoric find ever!!! I was ravished!!!! At that moment my aesthetic life was very significantly changed in a lasting way. That evening has never faded from my mind and the moment of revelation is…

Residents of the Island since the French Regime must have, from time to time, come across prehistoric artefacts in ploughed fields or at the shoreline, eroding out of the bank or strewn about the beach by the action of the water. From the Fewkes article listed below we have the names of two late Victorian collectors, John Hunter Duvar and the hotel keeper, John Newson. The naturalist Francis Bain was also interested in the subject. This woodcut, from Abbott (1881) shows this pastime which spread from Europe to America. Shell middens appear to have been a primary focus of attention to early antiquarians because of their size and likelihood of…

In my previous post on the peopling of the Americas I described the evolution of the current state of thinking on how this was accomplished. It can best be summarised by maps like this one produced by North American archaeologists. Assuming that there was only one corridor of entry into the Americas, from Siberia through the Beringia land bridge formed over 40,000 years ago as the last glaciation retreated to the north, the proto-Amerindians were all perceived as coming from various areas in Eastern Asia. Since the 1930s after discoveries of very technically advanced stone tools and weapons were made in New Mexico, this “flowering” of technological brilliance was seen…