Description:
Only a few years after the discovery in Europe in the late 1850s that humanity had roots predating history and the Biblical chronicles, and reaching deep into the Pleistocene, came the suggestion that North American prehistory might be just as old. And why not? There seemed to be an "exact synchronism [of geological strata] between Europe and America," and so by extension there ought to be a "parallelism as to the antiquity of man." That triggered an eager search for traces of the people who may have occupied North America in the recesses of the Ice Age. "The Great Paleolithic War "is the history of the longstanding and bitter dispute in North America over whether people had arrived here in Ice Age times.
Brief description: David J. Meltzer is the Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory at Southern Methodist University, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is the author of Folsom and First Peoples in a New World. He lives in Dallas.
Review Quotes: "Scientific history is rarely both riveting and magisterial, but this book is an exception. With an engaging, indeed spellbinding prose style, Meltzer covers one of the greatest controversies in archaeology, the recognition and acceptance of Pleistocene human occupations in the Americas. He does so in encyclopedic but never boring detail . . . . As Churchill reputedly said, 'History shall be kind to me, for I intend to write it.' I suspect history will be similarly kind to Meltzer, for writing so prolifically and sharing his thoughts so openly, and in the process consciously setting research approaches and agendas about how the study of the early settlement of the Americas should proceed. We need more people in our field writing books like this on the history of American archaeology."-- "Journal of Anthropological Research"