Congratulations to TAMU Press authors and anthropology professors Michael Waters and Ted Goebel, who made the cover story of the February issue of Smithsonian Magazine, for discovering that humans first migrated to the Americas earlier than previously thought! As mentioned by TAMU President Dr. R. Bowen Loftin in a campus email, the whole article can be accessed here.Michael Waters, director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A&M University, has more than 30 years of experience in the field. He is also an author of Clovis Lithic Technology: Investigation of a Stratified Workshop at the Gault Site, Texas (TAMU Press, 2011). In a thorough synthesis of the evidence from this prehistoric “workshop,” Michael R. Waters and his coauthors provide the technical data needed to interpret and compare Excavation Area 8, or the Lindsey Pit, with other sites from the same period, illuminating the story of Clovis people in the Buttermilk Creek Valley.
Ted Goebel, associate director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans, is also the author of From the Yenisei to the Yukon: Interpreting Lithic Assemblage Variability in Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene Beringia (TAMU Press, 2011). Through a technological-organization approach, this volume permits investigation of the evolutionary process of adaptation as well as the historical processes of migration and cultural transmission. The result is a closer understanding of how humans adapted to the diverse and unique conditions of the late Pleistocene.
--Madeline Loving
