Qualla: Pedra Furada

Pedra Furada: Introduction

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Willame carvalho e silva, CC BY-SA 3.0. "Americans should excavate more and write less." Niede Guidon did not soften her opinions, and by the time she said that, she had been defending the same rock shelter for the better part of thirty years. The shelter is called Boqueirao da Pedra Furada — pierced rock — a sandstone overhang in southeastern Piaui with a sheer wall above it and, buried beneath its floor, a sequence of charcoal lenses and broken quartzite that either rewrites the peopling of the Americas or does nothing of the kind. The dispute has outlasted most of the people who started it. It is not resolved.

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Image: Willame carvalho e silva | CC BY-SA 3.0

Pedra Furada: What Came Out of the Floor

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ptasilva, CC BY-SA 4.0. A joint Brazilian and French team began digging in 1973 in what is now the southeastern portion of Serra da Capivara National Park. Guidon reported the results in 1986, and the numbers were startling: radiocarbon dates on charcoal running from about 48,000 to 32,000 years before ...

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Image: Ptasilva | CC BY-SA 4.0

Pedra Furada: The Case Against

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Diego Rego Monteiro, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1994 Tom Dillehay — no defender of Clovis-first orthodoxy, having excavated Monte Verde in Chile himself — argued that the charcoal at Pedra Furada could have come from natural fires rather than human hearths. Others went further. James Adovasio of Florida Atlantic University ...

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Image: Diego Rego Monteiro | CC BY-SA 4.0

Pedra Furada: The Case For

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vitor 1234, CC BY-SA 3.0. Guidon's answer was that the geology does not do what the critics need it to do. "The carbon is not from a natural fire," she said. "It is only found inside the sites. You don't get natural fires inside the shelters." The French palaeolithic specialist Jacques Pelegrin has taken ...

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Image: Vitor 1234 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Pedra Furada: Why It Refuses to Settle

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fábia de Mello Pereira, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Clovis-first model, dominant since the 1930s, held that the Americas were empty until roughly 11,500 BP. That model has already been dismantled by sites nobody seriously contests — Monte Verde in Chile at about 14,800 BP, Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania at around 16,0...

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Image: Fábia de Mello Pereira | CC BY-SA 4.0