Clovis hunters left fluted points across North America
For a brief window about 13,050 to 12,750 years ago, Clovis groups spread distinctive stone points across North America. They hunted megafauna as mobile foragers. A teenager's 1929 find near Blackwater Draw gave the culture its type site.
The hunt for Ice Age Americans took off in 1927, when archaeologists near Folsom, New Mexico, saw a spear point lying among bones of the extinct bison Bison antiquus. Two years later Ridgely Whiteman, a 19-year-old who had followed the Folsom dig in the papers, found a site at Blackwater Draw near Clovis, where stone tools lay with Columbian mammoth remains. Crews led by Edgar Billings Howard and then John L. Cotter excavated it between 1932 and 1937. Some scholars argue the style should really bear the name of the Dent site in Colorado, the first place Clovis points turned up with mammoth bones.
The signature artefact is a point worked on both faces and fluted, with a long flake taken from the base that usually runs a third to half of the way up, unlike later points fluted along their whole length. Knappers also used overshot flaking, sending flakes clean across the face, though whether that was deliberate is debated. Points probably tipped spears or darts, perhaps thrown with a spear thrower, and wear shows they doubled as knives. Blades struck from prepared cores became hide scrapers and gravers, and rods of bone, antler and ivory may have served as foreshafts.
Clovis groups were mobile foragers tied especially to mammoths, as well as mastodon, bison and horse, and whether they helped drive those animals extinct remains contested. They left more than twenty caches of tools, apparently stashed for later collection or perhaps as ritual, and at the Gault site in Texas they incised limestone with geometric designs. They also used red ochre in burials and on cached objects.
The old Clovis First idea, that these were the earliest people in the Americas, is now generally rejected, since accepted sites are at least a thousand years older. From roughly 12,750 years ago Clovis gave way to regional traditions such as Folsom and Cumberland, while South America had the similar Fishtail point.
Source: Clovis culture
