Dogma and the Peopling of the Americas
with D. Clark Wernecke
Executive Director
The Gault School of Archaeological Research
In 1590, a Jesuit priest took one look at the New World and decided that, since the people seemed pretty primitive to him, they must have walked from Central Asia where Noah and what remained of the human race began anew. The data available at the time seemed to fit as did later attempts to figure out how people got to the Americas. Archaeology did not become a professional discipline until the early 20th century and, even in these earliest days, there was data that did not seem to fit this model of the peopling of the Americas. Bit by bit the model was changed to incorporate new information but still clinging to the central tenet that people must have walked to the Western Hemisphere. Beginning in the 1970s a trickle and later a torrent of new archaeology clearly showed that not only did the first people in the Americas not walk here but they were here much earlier than we had previously suspected.
Dr. D. Clark Wernecke
Clark Wernecke is the Project Director for the Prehistory Research Project at the University of Texas at Austin and Executive Director of the Gault School of Archaeological Research, a nonprofit dedicated to research and education regarding the earliest peoples in the Americas. Dr. Wernecke started his academic career with a degree in history from SMU followed by an MBA from Northwestern University, an M.A. in
Anthropology from Florida Atlantic, and finally his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. He came back to archaeology after a career in business and has worked in the Middle East, Mesoamerica, the American Southeast and Southwest, and Texas. Dr. Wernecke’s primary specialty is that of archaeological project management but he has also written extensively on architecture and paleoindian art.