Topper, Archaeological site in Allendale County, South Carolina, US.
Topper is an archaeological site on the eastern bank of the Savannah River in Allendale County, South Carolina. The ground there holds several layers of deposits, each containing stone tools and other remains left by people who lived in this river valley at different periods.
When archaeologists dug below the layers already known from earlier digs in the late 1990s, they found stone artifacts that seemed far older than any human remains previously documented in North America. That discovery led researchers to question the established picture of when people first arrived on the continent.
The site sits along a riverbank where people quarried local stone to make tools for hunting and everyday tasks. The objects found there give a concrete sense of how people in this region once worked with what the land offered them.
The site is in a rural part of South Carolina and is not set up for general tourism, so it is best suited for those with a specific interest in archaeology. People curious about the findings can visit the University of South Carolina, which displays material excavated from the site.
The artifacts found beneath the main layers were preserved inside thick beds of ancient sand deposited by the river over a very long time. That natural sealing by river sand is what kept the oldest materials intact long enough for researchers to study them.
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