148 First Americans to remain a subject people Babylon proved more recalcitrant by the early seventh century b.c.e., revolting three times in 15 years, before Great King Sennacherib completely destroyed it in 689 b.c.e Though Esarhaddon ordered the city rebuilt and repopulated, Assyria never fully controlled its neighbor to the south, and late Babylon retrieved the upper hand at long last near the end of the seventh century b.c.e., establishing a smaller Mesopotamian empire that endured for about 70 years, before the Fertile Crescent was unified again under the rule of Cyrus II of Persia See also Aramaeans; Babylon, early period; Babylon, later periods; Hyksos; Medes, Persians, and Elamites Further reading: Casson, Lionel The Ancient Mariners Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991; Pollock, Susan, and Rita P Wright Ancient Mesopotamia Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; Shaw, Ian The Oxford Illustrated History of Ancient Egypt Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002 Matt J Schumann First Americans There is considerable controversy and little consensus on the questions of when, where, and how human beings first arrived in and peopled the Americas For much of the 20th century (c 1920s–80s) the views of Aleš Hrdlicka (1869–1943) of the United States National Museum dominated the discipline of physical anthropology in the Americas Hrdlicka and his followers maintained that all indigenous peoples of the Americas originated in north Asia from Mongoloid stock His theory dovetailed with the so-called Clovis-First hypothesis, a pre-1990s consensus among North American archaeologists and physical anthropologists that the ancestors of all peoples who inhabited the Americas prior to the European encounter in 1492 had migrated across a land bridge at the Bering Strait (called Beringia) and south through an ice-free corridor near the end of the most recent (or Wisconsin) glaciation, around 10,000 b.c.e These early Paleo-Indians then dispersed across the Americas Their immediate descendants, the Clovis culture, employed a characteristic lithic chipping technique (first discovered near Clovis, New Mexico, in the 1930s), which then became widespread across North America In this Clovis-First hypothesis, the Clovis culture was followed by the Folsom culture and subsequent late Paleo-Indian cultures Numerous pre-Clovis sites excavated from the 1990s conclusively demonstrate human habitation of the Americas well before the Clovis horizon New subdisciplines (including paleobotany, paleoparasitology, paleoclimatology, paleoecology, and mitochondrial DNA [mtDNA] analysis) and new dating technologies (especially more refined radiocarbon dating procedures and optically stimulated luminescence [OSL]) have pushed back the date of human habitation in the Americas to at least 16,000 BP (before present) Paralleling the torturous history of paleoanthropology in Africa and Asia, however, credible schools of thought regarding the peopling of the Americas are varied, multiple, contradictory, and a matter of fierce debate In North America, and despite these disagreements, one consensus to emerge by the early 2000s was that the U.S South and the Mid-Atlantic region south of the Wisconsin glaciation were major sites of human habitation in the pre-Clovis era Numerous sites there predating the Clovis culture have been carefully excavated since the 1980s These include the Meadowcroft Rockshelter in southwestern Pennsylvania, a project directed by James M Adovasio of the Mercyhurst Archaeological Institute, which has yielded firm dates of 16,000 BP; Cactus Hill, Virginia, led (in separate projects) by Joseph McAvoy of the Nottaway River Survey and Michael Johnson of the Archaeological Society of Virginia, whose human artifacts were also dated to around 16,000 BP; Saltville, Virginia, dated to 14,000 BP; and the Topper site in South Carolina, dated to at least 16,000 BP Another important project from the 1990s has been the Gault site excavation in central Texas, supervised by Mike Collins under the auspices of the Texas Archaeological Research Laboratory, which has unearthed more than half a million Clovis artifacts and shed new light on this mysterious culture In South America sites antecedent to Clovis include the Monte Verde project in Chile, undertaken by U.S archaeologist T D Dillehay in the 1980s and 1990s; the Taima Taima project in Venezuela, led by Canadian archaeologists Alan Bryan and Ruth Gruhn from the 1970s; and the Pedra Furada project in northeastern Brazil, directed by Brazilian anthropologist Niède Guidon of the Fundaỗóo Museu Homem Americano (FUMDHAM) since the 1980s Dillehay’s findings at Monte Verde demonstrate that humans inhabited the southernmost parts of South America at least 12,500 years ago and suggest dates as far back as 33,000 BP The findings of Guidon and colleagues at Pedra Furada appear to push the date of hu-