Information about Clovis Culture

The Clovis culture (less frequently referred to as the Llano culture in the Plains and SW today) is a prehistoric Native American culture that first appears in the archaeological record of North America around 11,000 radiocarbon years ago, at the end of the last ice age. Archaeologists best guess at present suggests this is equal to roughly 13,000 calendar years ago.

The culture is named for artifacts found in the Blackwater Draw near Clovis, New Mexico. Clovis sites have since been identified throughout much, but not all, of the contiguous United States, as well as Mexico and Central America, and even into Northern South America (see Pearson and Ream in Current Research in the Pleistocene 2005, Volume 22).

The Clovis people, one of several Paleo-Indians groups, were long regarded as the first human inhabitants of the New World, and ancestors of all the indigenous cultures of North and South America. However, this view has been contested over the last thirty years by various archaeological finds which are claimed to be much older. (See: Monte Verde and Meadowcroft Rockshelter)

The Clovis culture seems to have ended at the time of the Younger Dryas cold climate period (hypothesized to be the effect of an impact event).

Description

A hallmark of Clovis culture is the use of a distinctively-shaped fluted rock spear point, known as the Clovis point. The Clovis point is distinctively bifacial and fluted on both sides, a feature that possibly allowed the point to be mounted onto a spear in a way so that the point would snap off on impact. Archaeologists do not agree on whether the widespread presence of these artifacts indicates the proliferation of a single people, or the adoption of a superior technology by non-Clovis people. It is generally accepted that Clovis people hunted mammoth: sites abound where Clovis points are found mixed in with mammoth remains. Yet this is only part of the Clovis story. More than 125 species of plants and animals are known to have been used by Clovis People throughout the Western Hemisphere. Whether they drove the mammoth, and other species, to extinction via overhunting--the so-called Pleistocene overkill hypothesis --is still an open, and controversial, question. The greater likelihood is that a combination of climate change, human predation, disease, and additional pressures from newly arrived herbivores (competition) and carnivores (predation) isolated populations and made it impossible for them to reproduce and survive. Alternatively, it has been hypothesized that the Clovis Culture was ended when an extraterrestrial object exploded in Earth's atmosphere above Canada about 12,900 years ago.

At sites stretching from California to the Carolinas and as far north as Alberta and Saskatchewan, researchers have long noted an enigmatic layer of carbon-rich sediment that was laid down nearly 13 millennia ago. "Clovis artifacts are never found above this black mat," says Allen West, a geophysicist with Geoscience Consulting in Dewey, Ariz. The layer, typically a few millimeters thick, lies between older, underlying strata that are chock-full of mammoth bones and younger, fossilfree sediments immediately above, he notes.^[1]

It is important to keep in mind that there is not simply one black mat that blankets the United States at the end of Clovis time. This idea is considerably more controversial than implied by this quote.

Discovery

A cowboy and former slave, George McJunkin, found an Ancient Bison (an extinct relative of the buffalo, not a mammoth) skeleton with an associated Folsom point about 1908 after a massive flood. It was first excavated in 1926, near Folsom, New Mexico under the direction of Harold Cook and Jesse Figgins. In 1929, 19-year-old James Ridgley Whiteman, discovered the Clovis Man Site in the Blackwater Draw in Eastern New Mexico. Despite earlier legitimate Paleoindian discoveries, the best understood evidence of the Clovis tool complex was excavated in 1932 in Clovis, New Mexico, by a crew under the direction of Edgar Billings Howard from the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences/University of Pennsylvania. Howard's crew left their excavation in Burnet Cave, NM (truly the first professionally excavated Clovis site) in August and visited Whiteman and his Blackwater Draw site. In November, Howard was back at Blackwater Draw to investigate additional finds by Whiteman.

There may be earlier reports of the Paleoindian layers of the dig in Burnet Cave, but it seems likely that the first report of professional work at a Clovis site concerns the Blackwater Draw site in the November 25, 1932 issue of Science. This directly contradicts statements by some authors (Haynes 2002:56 The Early Settlement of North America) that Dent, Colorado was the first excavated Clovis site. The Dent Site, Weld County, Colorado, was simply a fossil mammoth excavation in 1932. The first Dent Clovis point was found July 7, 1933. The in situ Clovis point from Burnet Cave was excaveted in late August, 1931 and E. B. Howard brought it to the 3rd Pecos Conference and showed it around (see Woodbury 1983).

Were the Clovis people the first Americans?

Until recently, the standard theory among archaeologists (known as Clovis First) was that the Clovis people were the first inhabitants of the Americas. The primary support of the theory was that no solid evidence of pre-Clovis human inhabitation had been found. According to the standard accepted theory, the Clovis people crossed the Beringia land bridge over the Bering Strait from Siberia to Alaska during the period of lowered sea levels during the ice age, then made their way southward through an ice-free corridor east of the Rocky Mountains in present-day western Canada as the glaciers retreated.

New evidence, however, indicates the Clovis people may not have been the first people in the Americas. According to researchers Michael Waters and Thomas Stafford of Texas A&M University, new radiocarbon dates suggest that the Clovis culture could not have spread so quickly throughout the two continents within the previously assumed timeframe.^[2]

Alternative theories

Pre-Clovis sites

Many archaeologists have long debated the possible existence of a culture older than Clovis in North and South America. Archaeologists working at these sites have identified and dated certain artifacts as pre-Clovis, but some of these claims have been disputed by other archaeologists.

• Luzia, a skull found at at Lagoa Santa, Minas Gerais, Brazil; confirmed to be 11,000 years old.^[3]- Compare with human remains from the Channel Islands of Cal. at ~12,500 RCYBP.
• Paintings found at Vale do Peruaçu, Minas Gerais, Brazil; confirmed to be at least 10,000 years old.^[4]
• One such site, Monte Verde in Chile, appears to have pre-Clovis remains mixed with technology unlike Clovis.
• Another candidate for a pre-Clovis site is Topper in South Carolina, where in 2004 worked stone tools were found that have been dated by radiocarbon techniques to 50,000 years ago, although there is significant dispute regarding these dates.
• A possible pre-Clovis site is located at Cactus Hill in southern Virginia.^[5]
• Another possible pre-Clovis site is Meadowcroft Rockshelter in southwestern Pennsylvania.^[6]
• Tibito, Colombia at roughly 14,400 years BP is worth noting as well (Gonzalo Correal Urrego 1981 Evidencias Culturales y Megafauna Pleistocenica en Colombia).
• Page-Ladson, Jefferson County, Florida on the Aucilla River. A cut mastodon tusk has been dated to 12,300 years BP and there are a few in situ artifacts of similar age (Webb et al 2006 First Floridians and Last Mastodons, Springer).
• Taima Taima, Venezuela has cultural material very similar to Monte Verde II, dating to 12,000 years BP.
• An additional candidate is the Tlapacoya site in central Mexico, with bones, hearths, middens, and a curved obsidian blade, all dated to over 21,700 years BP.
• A site in southwestern Missouri, the Big Eddy Site, is generating a lot of interest and has several possible pre-clovis artifacts or geofacts. In situ artifacts have been found in this well stratified site in association with charcoal. Five different samples have been AMS dated to between 11,300 BP to 12,675 BP.
• A site with stone tools, alleged to be from 13,000 to 15,000 years old based on surrounding geology, was discovered in Walker, Minnesota in 2006. ^[7]
• The Schaefer and Hebior mammoth sites in Kenosha County, Wisconsin clearly show exploitation of this animal by humans. The Schaefer Mammoth site has over 13 highly purified collegen AMS dates and 17 dates on associated wood dating it to 12,300-12,500 radiocarbon years before the present. Hebior has two AMS dates in the same range. Both animals show conclusive butchering marks and associated non-diagnostic tools. ^[8]
• The Mud Lake site, also in Kenosha County, Wisconsin consists of the foreleg of a juvenile mammoth recovered in the 1930's. Over 100 stone tool butchering marks are found on the bones. Several purified collegen AMS dates show the animal to be 13,450 rcybp. ^[9]

Coastal migration route

Recent studies of the mitochondrial DNA of First Nations/Native Americans suggests that the people of the New World may have diverged genetically from Siberians as early as 20,000 years ago, far earlier than the standard theory would suggest. According to one alternative theory, the Pacific coast of North America may have been free of ice such as to allow the first peoples in North America to come down this route prior to the formation of the ice-free corridor in the continental interior. No solid evidence has yet been found to support this hypothesis except that genetic analysis of coastal marine life indicate diverse fauna persisting in refugia throughout the Pleistocene ice ages along the coasts of Alaska and British Columbia; these refugia include common food sources of coastal aboriginal peoples, suggesting that a migration along the coastline was feasible at the time.

Solutrean hypothesis

The controversial Solutrean hypothesis proposed in 1999 by Smithsonian archaeologist Dennis Stanford and colleague Bruce Bradley (Stanford and Bradley 2002), suggests that the Clovis people could have inherited technology from the Solutrean people who lived in southern Europe 21,000-15,000 years ago, and who created the first Stone Age artwork in present-day southern France. The link is suggested by the similarity in technology between the projectile points of the Solutreans and those of the Clovis people. Such a theory would require that the Solutreans crossed via the edge of the pack ice in the North Atlantic Ocean that then extended to the Atlantic coast of France. They could have done this using survival skills similar to those of the modern Inuit people. Supporters of this hypothesis suggest that stone tools found at Cactus Hill (an early American site in Virginia), that are knapped in a style between Clovis and Solutrean, support a possible link between the Clovis people and Solutrean people in Europe.

Mitochondrial DNA analysis (see Map in Single-origin hypothesis) has found that some members of some native North American tribes have a maternal ancestry (called haplogroup X) (Schurr 2000), which appears to be more closely linked to the maternal ancestors of some present day individuals in Europe and western Asia than to the ancestors of any present-day individuals in eastern Asia.

University of New Mexico anthropologist Lawrence G. Straus, a primary critic of the Solutrean hypothesis, points to the theoretical difficulty of the ocean crossing, a lack of Solutrean-specific features in pre-Clovis artifacts, as well as the lack of art (such as that found at Lascaux in France) among the Clovis people, as major deficiencies in the Solutrean hypothesis. The 3,000 to 5,000 radiocarbon year gap between the Solutrean period of France and Spain and the Clovis of the New World also makes such a connection problematic (Straus 2000). In response, defenders of the hypothesis state that the Solutreans introduced a tool-making innovation and not necessarily cultural or artistic practices.

See also

• Archaeology of the Americas
• Models of migration to the New World

References

• Dixon, E. James (1999). Bones, Boats and Bison: Archeology and the First Colonization of Western North America. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. ISBN 0-826-32057-0. OCLC 42022335. 
• Schurr, Theodore G. (2000). "Mitochondrial DNA and the Peopling of the New World". American Scientist 88 (3): pp.246–253. DOI:10.1511/2000.3.246. ISSN 0003-0996. 
• Stanford, Dennis; and Bruce Bradley (2002). "Ocean Trails and Prairie Paths? Thoughts About Clovis Origins." in edited proceedings of The Fourth Wattis Symposium, 'The First Americans: The Pleistocene Colonization of the New World,' October 2, 1999. Nina G. Jablonski (ed.) The First Americans: The Pleistocene Colonization of the New World (Memoirs of the California Academy of Sciences, No. 27.): pp.255–271, San Francisco: California Academy of Sciences. ISBN 0-940-22849-1. 
• Straus, Lawrence G. (April 2000). "Solutrean Settlement of North America? A Review of Reality". American Antiquity 65 (2): pp.219–226. DOI:10.2307/2694056. ISSN 00027316. 

External links

• America's Stone Age Explorers. NOVA. PBS TV (2004). Retrieved on 2006-06-01.
• CNN article on the South Carolina discoveries
• 40,000 year old human footprints in Puebla, Mexico
• Clovis and Solutrean: Is There a Common Thread? by James M. Chandler
• Articles on Clovis and Peopling of the Americas
• Stone Age Columbus BBC TV programme summary
• Possible pre-Clovis Site in Ohio
• The Gault site, Central Texas - one of the most significant Clovis sites in North America
• Texas Beyond History
• Carbon-rich layer fortifies theory on comet impact
• Ice Age Ends Smashingly: Did a comet blow up over eastern Canada?
• Texas Arrowheads