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The Clovis culture is an archaeological culture from the Paleoindian period of North America, spanning around 13,050 to 12,750 years Before Present (BP). The type site is Blackwater Draw 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 , which are projectile points with a fluted, shape.Fluted: Having a flake removed from the base, either on one or both sides.
Lanceolate: Tapering to a point at one end, like the head of a lance. 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 (megafauna). Clovis peoples had a particularly strong association with mammoths, and to a lesser extent with mastodon, Cuvieronius, Bison antiquus, and horse; they also consumed smaller animals and plants.Thomas A. Jennings and Ashley M. Smallwood " The Clovis Record" The SAA Archaeological Record May 2019 • Volume 19 • Number 3 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,New Rdiocarbon Dates for the Anzick Clovis Burial by Juliet E. Morrow and Stuart J.Fiedel. In Paleoindian Archaeology, edited by J.E.Morrow and C.G.Gnecco. University Press of Florida, Gainesville. who has a close genetic relation to some modern Amerindian populations, primarily in Central America and South America.
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 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 point and Simpson point 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.
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 Paleo-Indians 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 (4th ed. 1957). Gary Haynes, in his book The Early Settlement of North America, suggested the type of point thereafter associated with megafauna (especially mammoths) 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.
Clovis artifacts have often been found associated with big game, including (Columbian mammoth, mastodon, and the gomphothere Cuvieronius), bison, and equines of the genus Equus. A handful of sites possibly suggest the hunting of Caribou, Peccary ( Platygonus, Mylohyus), ground sloths ( Paramylodon), glyptodonts ( Glyptotherium), , the camel Camelops, and the llama Hemiauchenia. Proboscideans (predominantly mammoths) are the most common recorded species found in Clovis sites, followed by bison. However, the Clovis culture is not exclusively associated with large animals, with several sites showing the exploitation of small game like tortoises, with Lagomorpha, predominantly jackrabbits, being found at around 31% of all sites. It is generally agreed that the people who produced the Clovis culture were reliant on big game for a significant portion of their diet, while also consuming smaller animals and plants, though some authors have argued for a generalist hunter-gatherer lifestyle that also involved the occasional targeting of megafauna.
Plant remains at Clovis sites (which are almost exclusively from eastern North America) primarily consist of food that can be easily gathered, such as fruit that required little processing, with little evidence of plant processing tools being found.J. A. M. Gingerich, N. R. Kitchel, " Early Paleoindian subsistence strategies in eastern North America: A continuation of the Clovis tradition? Or evidence of regional adaptations" in Clovis: On the Edge of a New Understanding, A. M. Smallwood, T. A. Jennings, Eds. (Texas A&M Press, 2015), pp. 297–318. The effectiveness of Clovis tools for hunting proboscideans has been contested by some authors, though others have asserted that Clovis points were likely capable of killing proboscideans, noting that replica Clovis points have been able to penetrate elephant hide in experimental tests, and that groups of hunter-gatherers in Africa have been observed killing elephants using spears. Isotope analysis of the only known Clovis burial, the young child Anzick-1 from Montana, suggests that mammoths made up a large proportion (~35–40%) of the total diet of this group, with major contributions also coming from elk and probably bison, with small animals only making up a small proportion (~4%) of the diet.
In the Great 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. 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 hunters trapped the bison herd within the arroyo before killing them.
Historically, many authors argued for a "Clovis first" paradigm, where Clovis, which represents the earliest recognisable archaeological culture in North America, were suggested to represent the earliest inhabitants of the Americas south of the Laurentide ice sheet (the ice sheet that, along with the smaller Cordilleran ice sheet to the west, covered most of Canada and parts of the northern contiguous United States, separating central North America from the ice-free East Beringia region comprising Alaska and parts of Yukon). However, since the beginning of the 21st century, this hypothesis has been abandoned by most researchers, as several widely accepted sites, notably Monte Verde in Chile (c. 14,500 years BP) as well as Paisley Caves in Oregon (c. 14,200 years BP) and Cooper's Ferry in Idaho (c. 15,800 years BP) are suggested to be considerably older than the oldest Clovis sites. Historically, it was suggested that the ancestors of the people who produced the Clovis culture migrated into North America along the "ice-free corridor" (the boundary region between the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets that is suggested to have melted and become ice-free prior to the melting of the rest of the ice sheets, providing a passageway between Eastern Beringia and central North America), but many later scholars have suggested that a migration along the Pacific coast is more likely. A 2022 study proposed that the ice-free corridor was impassible until around 13,800 years ago, long after the earliest confirmed human presence in the Americas south of the ice sheets. It has also been suggested that the fluted projectile-point style of the Clovis culture originated in temperate North America south of the ice sheet and was later transported northwards along the expanding ice-free corridor.
The Clovis culture is known from localities across North America, from southern Canada to northern Mexico and across the east and west of the continent. The area of its origin 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 Cave 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. In Western North America, the Clovis culture was contemporaneous with and perhaps preceded by the Western Stemmed Tradition, which produced unfluted projectile points, with the Western Stemmed Tradition continuing in the region for several thousand years after the end of Clovis.Rosencrance, R. L., D. Duke, A. Hartman, and A. Hoskins. 2024. "Western Stemmed Tradition Projectile Point Chronology in the Intermountain West". In Current Perspectives of Stemmed and Fluted Technologies in the American Far West, edited by K. N. McDonough, R. L. Rosencrance, and J. E. Pratt, 21–58. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
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. This is generally considered to be the result of normal cultural change through time. 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.
The Clovis culture was succeeded by various regional point styles, such as the Folsom tradition in central North America, the Cumberland point in mid/southern North America, the Suwannee point and Simpson point points in the southeast, and the Gainey points in the northeast-Great Lakes region. The Clovis and Folsom traditions may have overlapped, perhaps for around 80–400 years.
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.
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