The Search for America’s Atlantis
Illustrations by Studio Hosego
Editor’s note: This article is part of a new series called “Who Owns America’s Wilderness?”
Like apparitions, California’s Channel Islands sometimes vanish in the morning fog. Even on mist-free days, when their golden cliffs can be glimpsed from the mainland, few people seem to take much note of them. Despite their proximity, the islands are seldom visited by Californians, who mostly know them for the way their silhouettes interrupt the horizon of a Santa Barbara sunset.
Last August, I traveled to one of the largest of the Channel Islands, Santa Rosa. I joined an expedition led by the archaeologist Todd Braje, who has spent 15 of his 45 years doing fieldwork in the islands, during which he has acquired a feel for their primeval landscapes. On our first morning hike, in Arlington Canyon, an Ice Age watershed on the island’s northwestern edge, Braje walked the canyon’s lip, looking for the gentlest slope before bounding downhill. I followed close behind, wading through pale-turquoise sage and Day-Glo-yellow poppies, dodging cacti that looked like spiked Ping-Pong paddles.
When we reached the canyon’s lower terrace, Braje stopped and pointed to a length of twine strung vertically against a cliffside. Another length of twine was strung horizontally a few feet away. Stepping back, I could see others. All were remnants of a grid that archaeologists had pressed into the cliff’s sedimentary layers, so that anything lodged within them could be dated. Braje asked me not to reveal the grid’s precise location. All I’ll say is that we were close enough to the coast to smell the sea, but too far away to hear the waves.
[From the April 2017 issue: Welcome to Pleistocene Park]
Santa Rosa is an archaeologist’s dream. Its landscapes have suffered few injuries from commercial development. And now that it’s part of Channel Islands National Park, the island is uninhabited but for a small campsite, the ranger’s headquarters, and Park Service housing, where we were staying. Better still, Braje explained, its sedimentary layers have never been scrambled by gophers, because no burrowing rodents have made it across the channel. The island is a well-preserved time capsule, and the archaeologists unsealing it are already stumbling upon extraordinary finds, especially in Arlington Canyon.
Braje scraped away part of the cliff’s face, revealing bands of ancient soil, cleanly differentiated by color. He ran a finger along the darkest one, a coffee-colored signature of a distinct geological moment roughly 12,000 years ago, when a global flash freeze briefly returned the Earth to Ice Age conditions. In the older soils beneath was a small depression, unremarkable in appearance, but epochal in its significance for Paleoindian archaeology. It was from this cavity that archaeologists pulled the oldest human bone ever excavated in California, and perhaps the oldest in the entire Western Hemisphere. The 13,100-year-old human femur fragment belonged to “Arlington Man,” whose presence here may help resolve one of the final mysteries of the human origin story: the identity of the first Americans.
havemade epic overland left Africa for Eurasia more than 1.7 million years ago. But as early as 50,000 years ago, the ancestors of Oceania’s Aboriginal peoples became the first hominids to ever make an open-water migration. Off Indonesia, a few of them slipped into simple watercraft and braved at least 90 kilometers of waves to reach Sahul, the landmass that has since split into New Guinea and Australia. Still-greater seafaring adventures lay ahead. New research suggests that the Māori made it to Antarctica 14 centuries ago. The Lapita people island-hopped from Taiwan to Samoa and Tonga by watching subtle colors on the underside of Polynesian clouds. A growing number of archaeologists now suspect that the first Americans also came by sea.