Hueyatlaco

Hueyatlaco is an archaeological site at Valsequillo, south of Puebla city, beside the reservoir of the same name. Juan Armenta Camacho made it public in 1960; that year the American archaeologist Cynthia Irwin-Williams visited, and in 1962 excavations began under the Valsequillo Project, with support from the US Geological Survey. The area was known for its wealth of animal fossils, and Irwin-Williams described Hueyatlaco as a place where game was hunted and butchered.

The digs turned up many stone tools, from simple implements to side scrapers and end scrapers, made of materials brought from elsewhere. The dates were the bombshell. In 1969 the team published that the tool-bearing layer gave about 35,000 years by radiocarbon and about 260,000 years by uranium series. Later work by geologist Virginia Steen-McIntyre and colleagues upheld a date of around 250,000 years, vastly older than the arrival of humans in the Americas that most specialists accept, some 13,000 to 16,000 years ago.

The dispute was bitter. In 1967 José Luis Lorenzo of INAH claimed the tools had been planted by local workers; Irwin-Williams replied with the backing of archaeologists such as Richard MacNeish and Hannah Marie Wormington, who had visited the dig. Over time much of the scientific community rejected the findings, and today they are rarely discussed. There is no site to tour: it is a place of interest for its story, on the shore of the Valsequillo reservoir.