Clovis culture

The Clovis culture is an

The Clovis culture represents the earliest widely recognised archaeological culture in North America.[13] While historically many scholars held to a "Clovis first" model, where Clovis represented the earliest inhabitants in the Americas, today this is largely rejected, with several generally accepted sites across the Americas like Monte Verde II being dated to at least a thousand years older than the oldest Clovis sites.^[14]

The end of the Clovis culture may have been driven by the decline of the megafauna that the Clovis hunted, as well as decreasing mobility resulting in local differentiation of lithic and cultural traditions across North America.^[15] Beginning around 12,750-12,600 years Before Present, the Clovis culture was succeeded by more regional cultures,^[16] including the Folsom tradition in central North America,^[16] the Cumberland point in mid/southern North America,^[17] the Suwannee and Simpson points in the southeast,^[18] and Gainey points in the northeast-Great Lakes region.^[19] The Clovis and Folsom traditions may have overlapped, perhaps for around 80-400 years.^[20] The end of the Clovis culture is generally thought be the result of normal cultural change through time.^[15][20]

In South America, the widespread similar related Fishtail or Fell point style was contemporaneous to the usage of Clovis points in North America,^[1][21] and possibly developed from Clovis points.^[22]

Discovery

On 29 August 1927, the first in place evidence of Pleistocene humans seen by multiple archaeologists in the Americas was discovered near Folsom, New Mexico. At this site they found the first in situ Folsom point with the bones of the extinct bison species Bison antiquus. This confirmation of a human presence in the Americas during the Pleistocene inspired many people to start looking for evidence of early humans.^[23]

In 1929, 19-year-old Ridgely Whiteman, who had been closely following the excavations in nearby Folsom in the newspaper, discovered the Clovis site near the

The American Journal of Archaeology, in its January–March 1932 edition, mentions E. B. Howard's work in Burnet Cave, including the discovery of extinct fauna and a "Folsom type" point 4 ft below a Basketmaker burial. This brief mention of the Clovis point found in place predates any work done at the Dent site in Colorado. The reference is made to a slightly earlier article on Burnet Cave in The University Museum Bulletin of November, 1931.^[25]

The first report of professional work at the Blackwater Draw Clovis site was published in the 25 November issue of Science News (V22 #601) in 1932.^[26] The publications on Burnet Cave and Blackwater Draw directly contradict statements by several authors (for example see Haynes 2002:56 The Early Settlement of North America^[27]) that Dent, Colorado was the first excavated Clovis site. The Dent site, in Weld County, Colorado, was simply a fossil mammoth excavation in 1932. The first Dent Clovis point was found on 5 November 1932, and the in situ point was found 7 July 1933.^[28] The in situ Clovis point from Burnet Cave was excavated in late August, 1931 (and was reported in early 1932).^[29]

Material culture

A feature considered to be distinctive of the Clovis tradition is overshot flaking, overshot flakes are those which "during the manufacture of a biface are struck from prepared edges of a piece and travel from one edge across the face", with limited removal of the opposite edge. Whether or not the overshot flaking was intentional on the part of the stoneknapper has been contested,^[30] with other authors suggesting that overface flaking (where flakes that travel past the midline, but terminate before reaching the opposite end are removed) was the primary goal.^[6] Other elements considered distinctive of the Clovis culture tool complex include "raw material selectivity; distinctive patterns of flake and blade platform preparation, thinning and flaking; characteristic biface size and morphology, including the presence of end-thinning; and the size, curvature and reduction strategies of blades".^[31] It has long been recognised that the definition of the Clovis culture is to a degree ambiguous, the term being "used in a number of ways, referring to an era, to a culture, and most specifically, to a distinctive projectile point type" with disagreement between scholars about distinguishing between Clovis and various other Paleoindian archaeological cultures.^[32]

Tools

Clovis point

A hallmark of the toolkit associated with the Clovis culture is the distinctively shaped lithic point known as the

Clovis blades are part of the global Upper Paleolithic blade tradition, and are long flakes removed from specially prepared conical or wedge-shaped cores.^[41] Clovis blades are twice as long as they are wide, and were used and modified to create a wide variety of tools, including endscrapers (used to scrape hides), serrated tools and gravers.^[6] Unlike bifaces, Clovis blade cores do not appear to have regularly transported long distances, with only the blades typically carried in the mobile toolkit.^[42]

Bifaces

Bifaces served a variety of roles for Clovis hunter-gatherers, serving as cutting tools, preforms for formal tools such as points, and as portable sources of large flakes useful as preforms or tools.^[43]

Other tools

Other tools associated with the Clovis culture are

A distinctive feature of the Clovis culture generally not found in subsequent cultures is "caching", where a collection of artifacts (typically stone tools, such as Clovis points or bifaces) were deliberately left at a location, presumably with the intention to return to collect them later, though some authors have interpreted cache deposits as ritual behavior. Over 20 such "caches" have been identified across North America.[4]

Art and ritual practices

A few Clovis culture artifacts are suspected to reflect creative expression such as rock art, the use of red ochre, and engraved stones. The best known examples of Clovis art were found at the Gault site in Texas, and consist of limestone nodules incised with expressive geometric patterns, some of which mimic leaf patterns.^[46] Clovis peoples, like other Paleoindian cultures, used red ochre for a variety of artistic and ritual purposes, including burials,^[47] and to cover objects in caches.^[48] Clovis peoples are known to have transported ochre 100 kilometres (62 mi) from the original outcrop.^[47] Clovis peoples are also suggested to have produced beads out of animal bones.^[49]

Lifestyle

Clovis hunter-gatherers are characterized as "high-technology foragers" who utilized sophisticated technology to maintain access to resources under conditions of high mobility.

In the Southern Plains, Clovis people created campsites of considerable size, which are often on the periphery of the region near sources of workable stone, from which they are suggested to have seasonally migrated into the plains to hunt megafauna. In the southeast, Clovis peoples created large camps that may have served as "staging areas", which may have been seasonally occupied, where a number of bands may have gathered for social occasions.[6] At Jake Bluff in northern Oklahoma, Clovis points are associated with numerous butchered Bison antiquus bones, which represented a bison herd of at least 22 individuals. At the time of deposition, the site was a steep-sided arroyo (dry watercourse) that formed a dead-end, suggesting that Clovis hunters trapped the bison herd within the arroyo before killing them.^[58]

Megafauna extinction

Beginning in the 1950s,

The Clovis culture is known from localities across North America, from southern Canada[54] to northern Mexico and across the east and west of the continent.^[1] The area of origin of the Clovis culture remains unclear, though the development of fluted Clovis points appears to have occurred in North America south of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, and not in Beringia. The Clovis culture may have originated from the Dyuktai lithic style widespread in Beringia. While some authors have suggested that the Clovis culture resulted from diffusion of traditions through an already pre-existing Paleoindian population, others have asserted that the culture likely originated from the expansion of a single population.^[3] In Western North America, the Clovis culture was contemporaneous with and perhaps preceded by the Western Stemmed Tradition, which produced unfluted projectile points,^[67] with the Western Stemmed Tradition continuing in the region for several thousand years after the end of Clovis.^[70]

The end of the Clovis culture may have been driven by the decline of the megafauna that the Clovis hunted, as well as decreasing mobility resulting in local differentiation of lithic and cultural traditions across North America.^[15] The end of the Clovis culture is generally considered to be the result of normal cultural change through time.^[15][20] There is no evidence that the disappearance of the Clovis culture was the result of the onset of the Younger Dryas, or that there was a population decline of Paleoindians following the end of the Clovis culture.^[71]

The Clovis culture was succeeded by various regional point styles, such as the Folsom tradition in central North America,^[16] the Cumberland point in mid/southern North America,^[17] the Suwannee and Simpson points in the southeast,^[18] and Gainey points in the northeast-Great Lakes region.^[19] The Clovis and Folsom traditions may have overlapped, perhaps for around 80-400 years.^[20]

A number of authors have suggested that the Clovis culture is ancestral to other fluted point producing cultures in Central and South America, like the widespread Fishtail or Fell point style.^[22]

Notes

References

Further reading

• Carlson, Roy L.; Luke, Dalla Bona, eds. (1996). Early Human Occupation in British Columbia. Vancouver: UBC Press.
  ISBN 978-0-7748-0536-0
  .
• Dixon, E. James (1999). Bones, Boats and Bison: Archeology and the First Colonization of Western North America. Albuquerque:
  OCLC 42022335
  .
• Kennett, D. J.; Kennett, J. P.; West, A.; Mercer, C.; Que Hee, S. S.; Bement, L.; Bunch, T. E.; Sellers, M.; Wolbach, W. S. (2009). "Nanodiamonds in the Younger Dryas Boundary Sediment Layer" (PDF).
  S2CID 206514910
  .
• Madsen, David B. (2004). Entering America: northeast Asia and Beringia before the last glacial maximum. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
  ISBN 978-0-87480-786-8
  .
• Schurr, Theodore G. (2000). "Mitochondrial DNA and the Peopling of the New World".
  S2CID 7527715
  .
• ISBN 978-0-940228-49-8
  .
• Stanford DJ, Bradley BA (2012). Across Atlantic Ice: The Origin of America's Clovis Culture. University of California Press.
  ISBN 978-0-520-22783-5
  .
• Straus, Lawrence G. (April 2000). "Solutrean Settlement of North America? A Review of Reality".
  S2CID 162349551
  .

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