Topper

The site of Topper

The site of Topper is located on a terrace close to the Savannah river, to 137 km in the south-west of Columbia, in South Carolina.
In 1998, the archeologist Albert Goodyear carried out excavations under the Clovis level and found artefacts, of which flint blades and gravers. (Contrary to other pre-Clovis sites in North America, Albert Goodyear however did not find any trace of the technology of the double-side ones.)

No organic matter being preserved in the acid ground, it was impossible to carry out a dating by radiocarbon 14. Another method of dating called optical thermoluminescence however made it possible to determine that the elements located just below the pre-Clovis level went back to approximately 20.000 years. This means that this site goes back to good before the Clovis period 13.000 years.

In 2004, Albert enquiring Goodyear archeologist of Institut of archeology and anthropology of the university of South Carolina, announced that new datings with radiocarbon 14 of pieces of charcoal found recently in the site of Topper would be roughly 50.000 years, that is to say roughly 37.000 years before the period known as of the Site of Clovis.
Albert Goodyear, which started to excavate the site in the Eighties, thinks that the worked objects are stone tools. During the publication of its first reports/ratios, archeologists disputed these conclusions, suggesting that the artefacts can be of natural origin. Other archeologists rejected the radiocarbon dates. Albert Goodyear discovered the artefacts in question, by digging 4 meters in lower part of the level dated from the Site Clovis. Until now, it was not very common for archeologists to dig deeper than the layer of the culture of Clovis, because no object worked by the human one could be older than those of the Clovis site.

Tom Stafford, géo-archeologist of the university of Wisconsin, collected three carbonized wood samples of a deep layer to the site where, according to Albert Goodyear, of the tools and the tools out of stone of human manufacture were also found. Two of these samples were gone back to approximately 50.000 years.

Theodore Schurr, professor of anthropology at the university of Pennsylvania and conservative of the museum of the university, declare that if the 50.000 years date of the samples is confirmed, that will have a significant impact on the knowledge of displacements of populations around the sphere and of the settlement of the New world.

Sites

http://www.archaeology.org/online/news/topper.html
http://www.sc.edu/usctimes/articles/2004-11/topper_discovery.html
http://www.centerfirstamericans.org/photos/index.php

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