The Peopling of North America at the End of the Last Ice Age

This event will also be livestreamed on . No registration required for the livestream.

Archaeologist Michael Waters delves into evidence about the timing and process of the late Pleistocene peopling of North America to reconstruct how, and when, people first entered the Americas and spread across the landscape. Archaeology provides physical evidence (e.g., artifacts and butchered bones) of their presence and movement across North America in time and space. Genetics provides the ancestral population history of the First Americans defining their place of origin, population splits as they migrated, and estimates of when they arrived south of the ice sheets. Geology provides information on when barriers and opportunities were created that would prevent or allow human migration from Aisa to North America and then into the unglaciated portions of the continent south of the Canadian ice sheets. Together, these lines of evidence invite us into a decades-long debate: When did people first arrive in the Americas, and could they have been here thousands of years earlier than the strongest evidence currently supports?

Opening SAR’s Ice Age New Mexico series, Waters sets the stage for the conversations that follow by placing New Mexico within a much larger story of human movement, adaptation, and survival at the end of the Ice Age.

Michael Waters is a University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A&M University. He received his PhD in Geosciences from the University of Arizona in 1983. He joined the Texas A&M University faculty in 1986. Waters is internationally known for his work in First Americans archaeology and geoarchaeology. The has conducted geoarchaeological studies and archaeological excavations at numerous archaeological sites over the last forty years in Russia, North America, and Mexico. In North America, he has investigated both Clovis and Pre-Clovis archaeological sites. Waters received the 2003 Kirk Bryan Award and the 2004 Rip Rapp Archaeological Geology Award given by the Geological Society of America. He was elected a Fellow of the Geological Society of America in 2004 and the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2022.

Tom D. Dillehay is the Rebecca Webb Wilson University Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Religion, and Culture and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Latin American Studies in the Department of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University, Professor Extraordinaire and Honorary Doctorate at the Universidad Austral de Chile, International Professor in the Programa de Estudios Andinos in the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Peru, Lima, and adjunct faculty at the Universidad Catolica de Temuco, Universidad de Tarapaca, Universidad San Sebastian in Chile and the Universidad Nacional de Trujillo in Peru.

Edward A. Jolie (Lakota/Muscogee) is an anthropological archaeologist interested broadly in the Indigenous archaeology and ethnology of the Americas. His research focuses on the study of organic material culture such as textiles, baskets, footwear, and related crafts to address a wide range of anthropological questions. His applied scholarship focuses on hands-on work with fiber plant collection, processing, and weaving as part of an effort to find solutions to problems posed by landscape change and raw material inaccessibility among contemporary Indigenous makers and scholars.