The Clovis Discusion

It may not be hot news, but I'd like to pass along this nicely accessible discussion of the Clovis debate.

Scientists have unearthed ancient artifacts that are upending the history of mankind Clovis culture is the most ancient and famous of the specific "cultural toolkits" archaeologists have identified in the American pre-historical past, and once upon a time, scientists thought they understood the Clovis story pretty well. Yet the more data modern researchers collect, the more mysterious the Clovis people become. Link

Perhaps the Solutrean (sp?) invented the Clovis type?

I'm not to knowledgeable in this area but it is a field that i'm particularly interested in learning more of.

I'll be waiting for Hanslune, Punkinworks, and Kilgores responses.

Thanks for posting!

reply to post by JohnnyCanuck


My fondest memories of my undergrad work was down in a big hole at Blackwater draw, New Mexico digging for my mentor Dr. George Agogino back in the 60s. Earlyman archeology was in it's early stages but even then we always thought it was just the tip of the iceberg for man in the Americas.

I also had the honor to dig with Dr Cynthia Irwin Williams at another early man site in the Sandia Mts. Neast of Albuquerque.

nmgs.nmt.edu...

www.enmu.edu...

Thanks for this thread!

reply to post by olaru12


I had no Idea you worked or was interested in this area.

I look forward to your responses as well, olaru.

reply to post by kimish


And Slayer.

Interesting developments. Bookmarking for later.

reply to post by JohnnyCanuck


The saddest part is the researchers who lost careers for finding sites that disputed the "Clovis First" theory. It may have been several, or only a few. The fact that it happened at all should hopefully be a slight bit of shame that reminds this discipline to be more open to data. You don't have to be absurd, just reasonable.

Had "reasonable" been employed, this may have been settled some time ago.

Funny...i just asked about this topic today in another thread.

The key point is

Clovis-first orthodoxy began to lose its unquestioned dominance at academic conferences and among the editors of peer-reviewed journals, and when the major figures in the debate arrived in Austin, Texas, for a 2008 Paleoamerican workshop organized by Tom Pertierra, the status quo finally shifted.

"Were there fistfights? No," Pertierra says. "Was there spirited discussion? Yes. But you know what we came out of there with? About an 80-20 turn [in favor of the older-than-Clovis evidence]."

reply to post by JohnnyCanuck


Hi johnnyc,
That is a very good article. It mentions something I've been saying for years, it's clear that Clovis developed in the south east, with a northern and western expansion. I hate to pull the underwater card, but if it were accesable, I bet we would find the Clovis origins out on the continental shelf.
One other thing they mentuon, an idea that I've held for quite sometime, is that in some instances Clovis is a traded commodity, and not necessarily a people per say. This shows in the degradation of the style over time, non Clovis people obtained the point and tried to copy it without knowing the basic techniques, or which stone makes the best point.
I would also counter the mainstream idea that Clovis died out, it most certainly didn't, they were ,however driven out of their ancestral range by the 800 lb gorilla in the room, that in not going to derail this awesome thread over.
Clovis shows up in California after they are supposed to have gone extinct in the eastern US . And at the Witt site, they occupy an abandoned ancient site, that is decidedly not Clovis. They work their way north through the great central valley to tule lake in nor cal, and south tbrought the intercoastal valleys of the coast range and show up in mailbu at the farpoint site about 9000 years ago. These aren't Clovis influenced or derived groups but actual Clovis,as they have the complete Clovis tool kit, not just Clovis like points.
Got to get back to work, wil be back with more.

reply to post by punkinworks10


Suggestion the Witt site on wiki sucks, if you have the time you might want to expand the info on that important site

Originally posted by Hanslune
reply to post by punkinworks10

 

Suggestion the Witt site on wiki
ucks, if you have the time you might want to expand the info on that important site

Hans,
I agree that the available info on the Witt site is sparce, this pdf of a paper by noted icthyologist Kenneth Gobalet, has some of the best info on dating off the Witt site and the faunal assemblages.

www.ucmp.berkeley.edu...

I'll sift through my pdfs and try to find the work done in the nineties, that describes the middens themselves. If I remember correctly the middens are nearly a quarter mile long and 6'? tall. And they are made of tiny fresh water mussels.

Originally posted by punkinworks10

Originally posted by Hanslune
reply to post by punkinworks10

 

Suggestion the Witt site on wiki
ucks, if you have the time you might want to expand the info on that important site

Hans,
I agree that the available info on the Witt site is sparce, this pdf of a paper by noted icthyologist Kenneth Gobalet, has some of the best info on dating off the Witt site and the faunal assemblages.

www.ucmp.berkeley.edu...

I'll sift through my pdfs and try to find the work done in the nineties, that describes the middens themselves. If I remember correctly the middens are nearly a quarter mile long and 6'? tall. And they are made of tiny fresh water mussels.

Yeah more material like that!

reply to post by Hanslune

Here's another describing late Pleistocene occupation at china lake in the Mojave.


www.pcas.org...


I remember reading , recently in a commentary on the paisley cave finds, that western stemmed points and Clovis fluted points will never be found in the same site, but at the Witt site you have just that.
Also in the deeper layers at Witt there are no lithics, only chipped bone tools.

books.google.com... 21#v=onepage&q&f=true

I found this book while doing some reading for Hans' thread on GT and I realized that some early native American cultures and some recent tribes would be a corollary for the people of GT at the time, while not truely an agricultural people, nor were they true h/g but were at the horticultural level. They tended the plants that were beneficial and that started the path to domestication.
So, what does all that have to do with the clovis you might ask.
In her reply to Hans, Bryd mentions the Chumash, of the central cal coast. The chumash ,I believe,
are direct descendants of the Clovis.
While reading up on early native American seed processing, I came across this article on metates and manos, Indian grind stones. And the author goes on to mention the Chumash's neighbors and language cousins, the Diegoans and their extremely old grind stones.
The second article in the book is the one on metates, on page 29, there is some astounding information,
Human remains found in la Jolla that date to 46k, and nearly 80k

Here's a good summary of the Chumash

The Chumash people thrived at a very early period in California prehistory, with some settlements dating to at least 10,000 years before present.[17] Sites of the Millingstone Horizon date from 7000 cal BC to 4500 cal BC; they evidence a subsistence system focused on the processing of seeds with metates and manos.[18] During that time people used bipointed bone objects and line to catch fish and began making beads from shells of the marine olive snail (Olivella biplicata).[19]
Some researchers believe the Chumash may have been visited by Polynesians between AD 400 and 800, nearly 1,000 years before Christopher Columbus reached The Americas.[20] Although the concept is rejected by most archaeologists who work with the Chumash culture, studies published in peer-reviewed journals have given the idea greater plausibility.[21][22] The Chumash advanced sewn-plank canoe design, which is used throughout the Polynesian Islands but is unknown in North America except by those two tribes, is cited as the chief evidence for contact. Comparative linguistics also may provide evidence as the Chumash word for "sewn-plank canoe," tomolo'o, may have been derived from kumulā'au, the Polynesian word for the redwood logs used in that construction. However, the language comparison is generally considered tentative. Furthermore, the development of the Chumash plank canoe is fairly well represented in the archaeological record and spans a time period of several centuries.[23][24]

The clovis connection, is that Clovis shows up in the central valley , around 11,000 years ago, and a little later in Malibu at the far point site.

www.farpointsite.blogspot.com...

And on top of the clovis layer at far point. is one of the earliest Chumash sites.

But when the clovis arrive at thhat coastal site in Malibu, there are already people there, and have been for quite some time.

www.nps.gov...

Arlington Springs Man lived at the end of the Pleistocene when the four northern Channel Islands were all still united together as one mega-island, and the climate was much cooler than today. The evidence that people had arrived on that island by 13,000 years ago demonstrates that watercraft were in use along the California coast at that early date and lends support for a theory that the earliest peoples to enter the Western Hemisphere may have migrated along the Pacific coast from Siberia and Alaska using boats. Recent radiocarbon dating by Dr. Larry Agenbroad of pygmy mammoth fossils from Santa Rosa Island suggests that the last of these unique mammals may have been present on the island at the time the first humans arrived.

These people are the people who are thought to have traveled the kelp highway from Asia, as their broadly similar
technologies are found all along the pacific rim.
Their descendants are some of the tribes, but not all, on the west coast, and elsewhere.
I would suspect that these people's ancestors in Asia are the ancestors of the austronesians, as the remains from the channel islands have been characterized as such.

So you basically two unrelated groups in California 11,000 years ago.
The clovis people whose origins are clearly in the southeastern US, and the recently arrived Asiatic people of the west coast