Ice Age America: The Clovis Culture

The Ancients

This episode explores the Clovis culture, one of the most enigmatic hunter-gatherer societies of Ice Age America, known for their distinctive

Key takeaways

Clovis culture existed for only a few hundred years around 13,000 to 12,750 years ago, making it one of the most temporally concentrated prehistoric cultures in North America.
The fluted stone spear points are diagnostic artifacts that indicate advanced lithic technology and widespread cultural diffusion across the continent.

Main topics

Clovis culture
Ice Age North America

Notable quotes

We're really looking at a few hundred years right at the end of the Ice Age and some of the kind of earliest widespread technologies that we see in North America.

Conclusion

The Clovis culture remains a pivotal chapter in understanding early human presence in the Americas. While

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Teutoburg Forest? What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? Or what made Alexander truly great? With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. They're known as America's prehistoric mammoth hunters. Hunter-gatherers who lived near the end of the Ice Age just over 10,000 years ago, defined by their iconic leaf-shaped stone spear tips and the great megafauna carcasses they butchered at sites across America, from New Mexico to Wyoming, from Washington State to Virginia. They're remembered as the Clovis Culture. Prehistoric peoples that have long since fascinated archaeologists working on America's late Ice Age story. Over the decades, more and more information has come to light about who these people were and how they lived, and yet so many mysteries, so many debates still remain. It's this archaeology that we're going to be exploring today. Welcome to the Ancients, I'm Tristan Hughes your host, and this is the latest on America's mammoth hunting Clovis culture. Our guest is Dr. Madeline Mackey, Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wyoming. Speaker 3 (1:46) Maddy, it is such a pleasure to have you on the show. Speaker 2 (1:48) It's great to be here. Thank you for having me. Speaker 3 (1:51) More than welcome. I love talking about these topics from prehistory, especially prehistoric America. And the Clovis culture, Maddy, they've gained this intriguing reputation as America's prehistoric mammoth hunters. Speaker 2 (2:05) That's true. That is, I think most people, when they think of Clovis, what they think of is that iconic image of a small group of humans kind of stalking this. giant multi-ton animal. And it's just so different than how we think of, you know, I think of how a lot of us experience the world today. And it's created this fascination. Speaker 3 (2:21) Absolutely. And the general picture, isn't it? And they've all got their large wooden spears with kind of stone spear tips as well. And they're all kind of hunting the mammoth. And as you say, that is the image that has just been passed down to us today whenever anyone mentions Clovis, the Clovis people, the Clovis culture. Speaker 2 (2:35) Yeah, exactly. And I think for a lot of us today, we feel like that feels really... you know, minimally like minimal on the technology front, right? Where it's just spears with stone tips, but that also kind of underplays how amazing the technology is for creating things like that, the knowledge that goes into being able to live like that. And while that image like captures a lot of the imagination, it also really undervalues the amazing kind of nature of what it took to live in what is today the Americas 13,000 years ago. Speaker 3 (3:05) You've anticipated my next question, which is the date. When talking about the Clovis culture of these people, I mean, how far back are we going? Speaker 2 (3:13) Yeah, so Clovis, we tend to think of, or what we know based off radiocarbon dates and a number of sites, that they date to the very end of the Ice Age or the Pleistocene. And we particularly have them narrowed down to a few hundred years, most centrally between about 13,000. 100 years ago to about 12,750 years ago. Although there's a little bit of fluff, it could go a little bit further back than that, depending on kind of what sites you're looking at and how you're looking at radiocarbon dates. So we're really looking at a few hundred years right at the end of the Ice Age and some of the kind of earliest widespread technologies that we see in North America. Speaker 3 (3:52) But that's remarkable in itself. I mean, for the Ice Age, which is this huge period of time, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, the fact that we have Clovis. You can pinpoint it to only a few hundred years right at the end of the Ice Age. I mean, that in itself is pretty staggering. Speaker 2 (4:06) Oh, for sure. And it's one of those things, too, where that's one of the things that makes Clovis one of the many things we'll talk about that makes Clovis so interesting is that we have this kind of narrower time frame and also this wide geographic extent where we're seeing similar stone tool technologies. We're seeing some behaviors that seem kind of associated with lots of those spaces. then things kind of start changing after that. So understanding how that all works is really interesting. And Speaker 3 (4:33) you mentioned their wide geographic extent. So how wide should we be thinking? Speaker 2 (4:37) So Clovis is really defined by those stone projectile points. That's the kind of iconic, diagnostic, identifying artifact of Clovis. And we call these Clovis points. They're lancelet, so they don't have notches in them. They have... concave bases. And then they're really known because they are what we call fluted. So fluting is when these flakes are taken. So these chips are taken from the center, from the base of the point. And on most Clovis points, they come up about a third to halfway up at most. And this is a really distinctive type of stone tool that we see. They probably, they would have been attached or hafted to spears that were either thrusted or thrown or braced when they were used. And because that is such a unique thing, particularly that fluting, they're really identifiable. And they've been found basically coast to coast in North America, although their densities vary depending on where you are on the continent. Speaker 3 (5:34) So from coast to coast, and I know it is such a large landmass, but can we get a picture of a general type of climate, type of topography that these people were living in at the end of the Ice Age, you know, North America some 13,000 years ago? Speaker 2 (5:51) Yeah, so we find we definitely find or have found Clovis points on the surface coast to coast, but certainly there are more of them, especially east of the Rockies and headed into particularly the American plains into the southeastern portion of the United States where we see some of those highest densities. And some of that is probably to do with like things today, like population density today where people are around kind of walking landscapes to pick those up. Some of it may be some preservation stuff going on. And then some of it may also be reflecting like those are the spaces where people are using that type of technology. But the fact that we find them in such a wide geographic area is really unique to Clovis. And in subsequent time periods, we see much more regionalization going on in at least the tipped spears that are used. Speaker 3 (6:33) But of course, we say Ice Age, we say this is the late Ice Age. But should we imagine, should we be imagining environments covered in ice or steppe or tundra at this time? What should we be thinking? Speaker 2 (6:43) Yeah, exactly. So this is going to be, you know, remember in Ice Age. America's the top of the continent is covered in these giant, two giant ice sheets, the Laurentide and the Cordilleran. And, you know, that comes down to a little bit, depends on the time period, a little bit lower than the Canadian-U.S. border today, although it does move depending on what's going on in ice age weather. And south of that, what we see are landscapes that are in many ways are not totally analogous to what we see today. The geology may not be dramatically different. But particularly the ecosystems that are on those spaces could be really different. Most notably, I think for the Clovis story and something we hear a lot with Clovis is that this landscape is full of megafauna, more than 35 genera of which went extinct at the end of the Ice Age. So this includes, of course, our mammoths, along with a number of other proboscideans or like the elephant order family. So mastodons and we have gonfotheres, which are these like really cool multitusks. Elephants, we also have things like giant ground sloths, polyptodonts, which you can kind of think of like a giant armadillo. The giant armadillo ones with those big shells, Speaker 3 (7:52) right? Yeah. Speaker 2 (7:53) We can also think of horses, camels, bison antiquus, and even bigger bison species. And a lot of those species, or at least 35 genera of them, go extinct at the end of the Ice Age as well. So this is really a landscape that... doesn't have analogies today in many ways in the ecosystems and the species, both plant and animal communities that are living on it. Speaker 3 (8:17) But that's great to highlight straight away, Maddy, as we delve into the Clovis people themselves, is the fact that even though this is late in what we call the Ice Age, you still have lots of those different genera, lots of those different amazing megafauna species still around and still around in large numbers at that time. It's not like they've been... you know, some of them have already gone extinct, you still have lots coexisting with these early humans. Yeah, Speaker 2 (8:43) so this is one of the things that makes Clovis also really unique and special is that we have very serious overlap between a lot of those Pleistocene megafauna, as we call them, and our Clovis foragers that are living on this landscape. Now, we don't have great radiocarbon dates on or like an idea of when the extinction were for all 35 of these genera. That's definitely something. There's a lot of research going on still working, but we know that a number of them are still alive and interacted with Clovis populations, particularly species like mammoth, which actually there's a few different species of mammoth. We have the woolly mammoth, which I think is what a lot of people think of. Speaker 3 (9:21) Yes. Speaker 2 (9:22) But we also, south of the ice sheets, we find some woolly mammoth, but what we find more is Colombian mammoths, which are a little bit bigger, a little less hairy. There's some other biological differences going on. We also see... mastodons that were definitely around that late, gompothures for sure, horses, camels, ground sloths, a number of species. Camels? Oh yeah, camels. Speaker 3 (9:43) Quick dumb question for me on the side, but I'll always think with prehistoric America, I'll always also think like saber-toothed cats and dire wolves. But have they gone by this time or are they still also around? Speaker 2 (9:52) They are still also around. I admit, I don't know the date of saber-toothed cat extinction off the top of my head, but they are definitely still around. We also have a number of other big cats, like there is the American lion and cheetah as well, that we believe are still around at that time period too. Speaker 3 (10:08) And of course, then you get emerging onto the stage, you get the arrival of humans. And Maddy, for a long time, I mean, I have in my notes, the theory, the Clovis, the Clovis first theory. Now, can you explain what this is, what this was and what we now believe? Speaker 2 (10:25) Yeah. So Clovis was, you know, the reason we call Clovis points Clovis points is because of the first site that they were reported kind of being at, particularly in association with association with mammoth remains, which is the site of Blackwater Draw, which is located in New Mexico. And this was in the 1930s. Now, kind of important for understanding the context of this story is that this is only a few years after the discoveries at another site nearby the site of Folsom. which is where another very well-known Pleistocene tool set, Folsom points, were first discovered with bison antiquus, our extinct species of bison. And that was also the site where there first was like wide recognition in the archaeological community that humans had been on North America since the Ice Age. So less than a decade later, we see the discoveries at Blackwater Draw, where we have Clovis points in association with mammoths. And actually right around the same time, there was another site in northern Colorado called the Dent Site that has, I think it's 15 mammoths at it, if I remember correctly, also found in association with Clovis points. And this kind of kicked off this phase of a number of sites coming out where we see Clovis, very clearly Clovis points found in association with megafauna, particularly mammoths. And this started creating this story, especially with this widespread distribution of Clovis, that these were the first. populations in the Americas that they came in following megafauna. They initially settled all of these large landscapes and were going and following kind of these megafauna and going all across the continent. And that really starts in the early 1900s, mid-1900s, and kind of continues on. Speaker 3 (12:08) So that used to be the thinking. Speaker 2 (12:11) But Speaker 3 (12:11) since then, more research has been done that has revealed that actually the arrival of humans in... America in the Americas is a few thousand years earlier, if I'm correct. Speaker 2 (12:21) Yeah. So that was the kind of the running thought for a long period of time through most of the 20th century. There have been a lot of people who were looking for sites that were earlier, what we kind of term as pre-Clovis sites, right? Looking for occupations that predate that very clear Clovis time period of this kind of traditional story of Clovis. And what we've seen is a number of sites have been proposed. I would say this is probably one of the most acrimonious debates in American archaeology. It gets pretty heated among Pleistocene archaeologists when you start talking about this often. But we've seen that a number of sites that have come out that have been pretty widely accepted, although there's lots of debate among archaeologists, particularly Pleistocene archaeologists, of which ones have good evidence for humans before or after. So a lot of people have probably heard of some of these sites. The earliest one was the Monteverde site in Chile. We also have sites like Paisley Caves in Oregon. Cooper's Ferry in Idaho, Page Flats in Florida. And a lot of this kind of made it so the majority of the archaeological community thinks that there were populations here before Clovis, probably for a few thousand years. Although admittedly, there is a lot of debate about that. And if anybody follows archaeological literature, they know there's been a lot of recent debate about that in the literature as well. Speaker 3 (13:36) I wanted to bring that up because we've done an interview in the past with Dr. David Meltzer, kind of all about that, which we'll put a link to in the description. But just important to highlight that it seems to be a few thousand years, humans have reached the Americas, North America, and then you get the emergence in the archaeological record of these stunning Clovis points and these key sites. And Maddy, we'll explore some of these key sites now, including one that you have done a lot of work at. But Speaker 2 (14:02) I'm getting Speaker 3 (14:02) a sense that there's a bit of a trend in the types of sites where you have discovered Clovis archaeology. it seems like there are always kind of extinct megafauna remains close by. Speaker 2 (14:14) Yeah, lots of times there are. Not always, but lots of times. And I will say, and I think this connects a little bit to what I was just talking about as well. You know, one reason I became really interested in Clovis, apart from kind of a fortuitous opportunity walking through my door, thanks to my mentors in graduate school, is like this kind of iconic image and this idea of it being so associated with extinct megafauna, these species we don't see anymore. But also... One thing I will note about Clovis is so often we talk about them, the main focus is that timeline question, like, are they first or not? And there are so many other things to talk about Clovis that they are really interesting and cool and questions we can ask that make understanding the past a lot more relatable and kind of humanistic. And that is a lot of what kind of drives my research. And a lot of the things I'm looking at is less kind of this time marker question and more. What do we know about life for Clovis? How do we figure that out? What are new ways we can look at this? How do we apply new technologies, etc.? And I think that's relevant to some of the sites that I believe we're going to talk about.