Clovis culture


The Clovis culture is an archaeological culture from the Paleoindian period of North America, spanning around 13,050 to 12,750 years Before Present. The type site is Blackwater Draw locality No. 1 near Clovis, New Mexico, where stone tools were found alongside the remains of Columbian mammoths in 1929. Clovis sites have been found across North America. The most distinctive part of the Clovis culture toolkit are Clovis points, which are projectile points with a fluted, lanceolate shape. Clovis points are typically large, sometimes exceeding in length. These points were multifunctional, also serving as cutting tools. Other stone tools used by the Clovis culture include knives, scrapers, and bifacial tools, with bone tools including beveled rods and shaft wrenches, with possible ivory points also being identified. Hides, wood, and natural fibers may also have been utilized, though no direct evidence of this has been preserved. Clovis artifacts are often found grouped together in caches where they had been stored for later retrieval, and over 20 Clovis caches have been identified.
The Clovis peoples are thought to have been highly mobile groups of hunter-gatherers. It is generally agreed that these groups were reliant on hunting big game. Clovis peoples had a particularly strong association with mammoths, and to a lesser extent with mastodon, gomphothere, bison, and horse; they also consumed smaller animals and plants. The Clovis hunters may have contributed to the Late Pleistocene megafauna extinctions in North America, though this idea has been subject to controversy. Only one human burial has been directly associated with tools from the Clovis culture: Anzick-1, a young boy found buried in Montana, who has a close genetic relation to some modern Amerindian populations, primarily in Central and South America.
He has also been shown to share DNA with the 24,000-year-old Mal'ta boy from central Siberia.
The Clovis culture represents the earliest widely recognised archaeological culture in North America; however, in western North America, it appears to have been contemporaneous with the Western Stemmed Tradition. 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, Cooper's Ferry, and Paisley Caves being dated to at least a thousand years earlier than the oldest Clovis sites.
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. Beginning around 12,750–12,600 years BP, the Clovis culture was succeeded by more regional cultures, including the Folsom tradition in central North America, the Cumberland point in mid/southern North America, the Suwannee and Simpson points in the southeast, and Gainey points in the Northeast–Great Lakes region. The Clovis and Folsom traditions may have overlapped, perhaps for around 80–400 years. The end of the Clovis culture is generally thought to be the result of normal cultural change over time.
In South America, the widespread similar Fishtail or Fell point style was contemporaneous to the usage of Clovis points in North America; they possibly developed from Clovis points.

Discovery

On August 29, 1927, the first 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.
In 1929, 19-year-old Ridgely Whiteman, who had been closely following the excavations in nearby Folsom in the newspapers, discovered the Clovis site near the Blackwater Draw in eastern New Mexico. Despite several earlier Paleoindian discoveries, the best documented evidence of the Clovis complex was collected and excavated between 1932 and 1937 near Clovis, New Mexico, by a crew under the direction of Edgar Billings Howard until 1935 and later by John L. Cotter from the Academy of Natural Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. Howard's crew left their excavation in Burnet Cave, the first professionally excavated Clovis site, in August 1932, and visited Whiteman and his Blackwater Draw site. By November, Howard was back at Blackwater Draw to investigate additional finds from a construction project.
The American Journal of Archaeology, in its January–March 1932 edition, mentions Howard's work in Burnet Cave, including the discovery of extinct fauna and a "Folsom type" point 4 ft below a Basketmaker burial. Reference is made to a slightly earlier article on Burnet Cave in The University Museum Bulletin from November 1931.
The Dent site in Colorado was the first known association of Clovis points with mammoth bones, as noted by Hannah Marie Wormington in her book Ancient Man in North America. Gary Haynes, in his book The Early Settlement of North America, suggested the type of fluted point thereafter associated with megafauna at over a dozen other archaeological sites in North America would have been more appropriately named "Dent" rather than Clovis, the town near Blackwater Draw that gave the type of point its name.

Material culture

A feature considered to be distinctive of the Clovis tradition is overshot flaking, which is defined as flakes that "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, with other authors suggesting that overface flaking was the primary goal. 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". 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.

Tools

Clovis point

A hallmark of the toolkit associated with the Clovis culture is the distinctively shaped lithic point known as the Clovis point. Clovis points are bifacial and typically fluted on both sides, with the fluting typically running up a third or a half of the length of the point, distinct from many later Paleoindian traditions where the flute runs up the entire point length. Clovis points are typically parallel-sided to slightly convex, with the base of the point being concave. Although no direct evidence of what was attached to Clovis points has been found, Clovis points are commonly thought to have served as tips for spears/darts likely used as handheld thrusting or throwing weapons, possibly in combination with a spear thrower, for hunting and possibly self-defense. Wear on Clovis points indicates that they were multifunctional objects that also served as cutting and slicing tools, with some authors suggesting that some Clovis-point types were primarily used as knives. Clovis points were at least sometimes resharpened, though the idea that they were continually resharpened "long-life" tools has been questioned. The shape and size of Clovis points varies significantly over space and time; the largest points exceed in length. The points required considerable effort to make and often broke during knapping, particularly during fluting. The fluting may have served to make the finished points more durable during use by acting as a "shock absorber" to redistribute stress during impact, though others have suggested that it may have been purely stylistic or used to strengthen the hafting to the spear handle. The points were generally produced from nodules or siliceous cryptocrystalline rocks. Clovis points were thinned using end-thinning. They were initially prepared using percussion flaking, with the point being finished using pressure flaking.

Blades

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

Bifaces

s served a variety of roles for Clovis hunter-gatherers, such as cutting tools, preforms for formal tools such as points, and as portable sources of large flakes useful as preforms or tools.

Other tools

Other tools associated with the Clovis culture are adzes, bone "shaft wrenches", as well as rods, some of which have beveled ends. These rods are made of bone, antlers, and ivory. The function of the rods is unknown and has been subject to numerous hypotheses. Rods that were beveled on both ends are most often interpreted as foreshafts to which stone points were hafted, with a pair of rods surrounding each side of the point while rods that are beveled on only one end, with the other being pointed, are most often interpreted as projectile points. The rods may have served other purposes, such as prybars. Clovis people are also known to have used ivory and bone to create projectile points.