Dental anthropology played a seminal role in early studies of the peopling of the New World, and was a foundation of the early three wave model proposed by Greenberg, Turner and Zegura. In recent years, however, developments in anthropological genetics, craniometry, and archaeological discoveries have largely omit-ted dental anthropology from debates regarding Native American origins. Here we consider this situation and reassert dental anthropology's relevance to the topic by presenting an inter-individual analysis of Paleoindian and Paleoamerican dentitions. A small set of dental morphological variables was used to estimate Gower similarity coefficients between individual specimens. The resulting similarity matrix was ordinated using multidimensional scaling; all analyses were per-formed in Clustan v. 7.05. While results should be considered preliminary, patterns of variation suggest morphological similarity along both coasts of North and South America with a somewhat distinct grouping of North American Paleoindians deriving from more inland portions of the continent. This pattern is consistent with recent genetic scenarios, notably the bicoastal model presented by O'Rourke and Raff (2010), which indicates that Paleoindians may have taken multiple migration routes from Beringia, moving along both coasts as well as through the ice free corridor. Future studies may build on this work to reintegrate dental data and analysis into research concerning the peopling of the New World.

This thesis covers more than thirty years of the author's research into the Paleoamerican period of the Middle Atlantic Region of North America, including the last 19+ years of focused work on the Cactus Hill site (44SX202) and replication of the Paleoamerican occupation discovered there. Using a landform and geology based predictive model derived from the Paleoamerican occupation at Cactus Hill, the author directed preliminary archaeological testing in three other areas of the same Nottoway River Valley, where Cactus Hill is located. These areas were the Barr site, located 11 miles (18 km.) downriver from Cactus Hill; the Chub Sandhill Natural Resource Conservation Area, located 19 miles (30 km.) downriver from Cactus Hill; and the Blueberry Hill site (44SX327), located approximately 1,000 feet (300 meters) east of Cactus Hill. The latter two produced OSL dated, pre-Younger-Dryas landforms, as predicted. The Rubis-Pearsall site (44SX360), located in the Chub Sandhill preserve also produced a buried Paleoamerican, Clovis age cultural level confirming the model. In addition to the OSL dates, Blueberry Hill also produced a distinct and apparently discrete activity surface with a possible pre-Clovis age Cactus Hill point at the same depth as the Paleoamerican levels at Cactus Hill and Rubis-Pearsall.