National Geographic Society/Waitt Grants
Helping qualified and experienced individuals launch the most difficult stage of a project—the search.
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About the Project
Archaeologist Amy Gusick and her team are going underwater in the Sea of Cortez to search for evidence of the New World’s earliest inhabitants.
Traditional theory has been that Clovis culture hunters on the trail of mammoth and bison arrived in North America from Asia across a corridor between retreating ice sheets.
Gusick’s team supports the emerging theory that the earliest new world immigrants arrived via the Pacific coast, which would have been ice-free and available for migration beginning about 14,500 years ago.
Santa Cruz Island represents a key piece of this research. The first humans migrating into the Americas could have utilized Santa Cruz Island for its environmental conditions (marine productivity and freshwater sources), morphological features (rock shelters and accessibility to marine resources), or accessibility by watercraft and close proximity to the mainland.
Hundreds of cultural deposits have been identified on Santa Cruz Island; however, none of them are from the Pleistocene epoch (1.8 million to 11,550 years ago), placing them out of the possibility of being related to a Pleistocene coastal migration.
To date, archaeological research into the Pacific coastal migration theory has been largely focused on terrestrial areas along the eastern Pacific coast. However, Gusick’s team believes the proof is located underwater. In an earlier phase of the project, Gusick created a model of part of a drowned landscape off Isla Espiritu Santo in the Sea of Cortez. This allowed the team to identify areas that would be optimal for mobile hunter-gatherers.
Now, armed with the model, Gusick's team is ready to go below and search for the elusive evidence of North America's first inhabitants.
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