USC Professor Discovers 50,000 Year-Old Artifacts in S.C.

It was the summer of 1998, and University of South Carolina archaeologist Al Goodyear had a problem on his hands. Fourteen years of digging at an ancient chert quarry outside Allendale had begun to bear fruit: At a site called Big Pine Tree, Goodyear was well on his way to establishing that a substantial Clovis population lived here. If you’ll recall your history lessons from high school, the Clovis people — named such because the first evidence of them was found at a site near Clovis, N.M. — were believed to be the first Americans who came into the North American continent across the Bering Sea land bridge from Asia some 13,000 years ago.