Anyone with just a passing appreciation of American archaeology has heard of a Clovis point or stone tool. That’s an ancient spear point dating from a people and an era that for generations has been considered “The First Americans,” arriving 12-13,000 years ago.
The first Clovis points were found near the town of that name in New Mexico in the 1932. The so-called “Clovis First” doctrine has been archaeological orthodoxy for decades, and challenges to it have invited heated debates that only recently have bent towards acceptance that humans migrated to North America earlier, perhaps much earlier than that.
“The Stones Are Speaking” is a documentary about work on one site in Texas that seemed to settle the argument once and for all, and about the heroic archeologist who sweet-talked the owners of the Gault Site, an hour north of Austin, and who fought to save the site from “collectors,” looters and owners looking to cash in on an historic treasure trove.
We meet and hear how Dr. Michael B. Collins got interested in archeology, his years of experience in academia and in the field, working on sites around the world. But the work that would put him in the history books involved his rediscovering a long-known and roughly handled “pay to dig” portion of a farm where collectors could be sure of finding ancient artifacts.
Collins, an expert in evaluating “the scraps people left behind,” identified that this Gault farm on Buttermilk Creek site was not just filled with Clovis-era artifacts, but that it showed evidence of habitation and stonework — including primitive art — going back thousands of years earlier.
“The Stones Are Speaking” features interviews with assorted experts and local volunteers, and with Dr. Tom Dillehay, an archaeologist who was one of the first to put a dent in the “Clovis first” dogma via digs in South America that revealed that the accepted Ice Age Bering Strait migration from Asia wasn’t the first arrival of humans in the Western Hemisphere.
But the heart of “Stones” is Collins himself, celebrated for his dogged work, his mentorship and for getting access to this site from a “cantankerous” cash business operating owner and the later relatives who got hold of the land with similar ideas about how to profit from it.
Collins spent years talking to the last owners — Doris and Howard Lindsey — negotiating a price, trying to raise funds and find someone or some entity to buy this land for a park.
“We got knocked down a lot,” one of Collins’ fellow researchers marveled at this effort to buy land for science and to preserve history in conservative Texas. “But Mike kept getting back up.”
Despite first-time feature filmmaker Olive Talley’s many pains to paint the Lindseys as “regular folks” and reasonable people, the film can’t avoid portraying them as backhoe-happy opportunists, the villains of the story.
In terms of cinematic sophstication, Talley’s simply crafted documentary sits a lot closer to PBS than the cut-and-paste hackery of The History Channel (no “Ancient Aliens,” alas) on the historical doc spectrum, but closer to what a well-funded local PBS affiliate would produce than a slicker national PBS production in terms of polish.
But her film manages the important things well enough — updating viewers on the status of the “Clovis First/Bering Strait” debate and the hard facts that have caused that theory to evolve, bringing more attention to this site and the scientists (including one figure in particular) who insisted it needed saving, and reminding one and all the uphill battle science faces in a state and a country where baiting and bashing science has become political sport.
Cast: Dr. Michael B. Collins, Tom Dillehay, Kenneth Garrett, Karen Collins, Jon Lohse, Jill Patton, Doris and Howard Lindsey.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Olive Talley. A Gault Film release on Amazon.
Running time: 1:25
