Search

We previously showed that stone-tool technological attributes thought to be unique to the Clovis period were present in a radiocarbon and OSL dated middle Holocene-age stratum at Goodson Shelter, O...

Folsom is an early Paleoindian archaeological tradition found in the North American West. Here we report new AMS radiocarbon dates for the Barger Gulch and Lindenmeier sites in Colorado along with ...

The Antelope Springs Folsom locality is located near Trout Creek Pass, which connects South Park, a high elevation basin in the Rocky Mountains, with the headwaters region of the Arkansas River. Th...

The Peopling of the Americas was a multi-millennium process involving both the hunter-gatherer colonization of new landscapes as well as the ‘settling in’ to local environments. This process is typically identified archaeologically by an increase in the number of recognized point types, site frequency, changes in subsistence patterns, and increased geographic patterning in stone tool variation. Here, we add to this list by examining preferential toolstone use by Clovis and Folsom peoples, reasoning that Folsom groups formed stricter habits of toolstone procurement relative to Clovis people as the former pursued their increasingly familiar seasonal rounds. After generating lithic raw material data from 49 Folsom assemblages, we constructed a ‘Folsom lithic network’ that we compared to a ‘Clovis lithic network’, which consisted of 38 assemblages. Our results show that the Folsom lithic network is significantly denser than the Clovis lithic network. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that Folsom people started to form regular habits of toolstone procurement relative to Clovis people. More broadly, our comparison of lithic networks further supports the hypothesis that the Clovis-to-Folsom transition represents the process of foragers increasingly adapting to their local resource distribution.

It has long been assumed that Folsom points are more standardized than Clovis points, although an adequate test of this proposition has yet to be undertaken. Here, we address that deficiency by using data from a sample of Folsom and Clovis points recovered from sites across the western United States. We used geometric morphometric techniques to capture point shape and then conducted statistical analyses of variability associated with Clovis and Folsom point bases and blades. Our results demonstrate that Folsom bases and blades are less variable than those on earlier Clovis points, indicating an increase in point standardization during the Early Paleoindian period. In addition, despite published claims to the contrary, Clovis and Folsom point bases are no more variable than blades. Based on these results, we conducted additional analyses to examine the modularity and size of Clovis and Folsom points. The results suggest Clovis points have more integrated base and blade segments than Folsom points. We suggest that several classes of Clovis points—intended for different functions—might have been in use during the Clovis period and that the later Folsom points might have served only as weapon tips, the shape of which were constrained by the fluting process.

Clovis technology is argued to possess distinctive attributes that make a stone tool assemblage recognizable as Clovis, even absent its hallmark fluted projectile points, or radiometric ages that place the assemblage in the late Pleistocene. Excavations at Goodson Shelter in Oklahoma yielded artifacts bearing unmistakable attributes of Clovis biface and blade technology, such as fluted bifaces, overface flaking, and prismatic blades, all from a clearly-delineated, unmixed stratigraphic layer securely dated to the mid-Holocene. This indicates that those technological attributes are not unique to Clovis, and cannot be used by themselves to identify Clovis age material. To illustrate the consequences of this result, we review biface and blade caches assigned to Clovis by their technology alone. Although many could be Clovis in age, they are not demonstrably so. Overall, our findings emphasize the importance of looking at suites of evidence, chronological, technological and otherwise, in assigning ass...

Paleo Crossing (33ME274), a Clovis site in Medina County, Northeast Ohio, USA, has played an important role in debates on the Pleistocene Peopling of the Americas given its published, and assumed accurate, age of 10,980 ± 75 BP (12,717–13,020 calibrated BP, median age 12,854 cal BP). However, there are still questions surrounding the radiocarbon ages from the site. We aimed to bypass using the association of charcoal with features or artifacts, and instead date the Clovis artifacts directly via luminescence dating. The chronometric results of 9.14 ± 2.18 kya and 8.92 ± 3.03 kya suggest one of two possibilities: (1) there was a fire at Paleo Crossing sometime during the Early Archaic period or, more likely, (2) the inner parts of the lithics were partially bleached, reducing the signal, while they were exposed on the surface.

The Nelson stone tool cache was discovered in 2008 in Mount Vernon, Ohio. The cache does not include any diagnostic materials, and independent age control is unavailable. Although aspects of its 164 bifaces are suggestive of a Clovis affiliation – including the occasional occurrence of unmistakable flute scars – nearly all are in the early- to mid-stages of production, there are no definitive finished Clovis fluted points that would make it possible to assign the cache to that time period. To ascertain its cultural affiliation, we undertook a detailed qualitative and quantitative comparison of the Nelson cache bifaces with ones known to be both Clovis and post-Clovis in age. We also conducted geochemical sourcing, ochre analyses, and microwear analysis to understand the context of the cache, regardless of its age and cultural affinity. By some key measures it is consistent with Clovis caches in this region and elsewhere, but the case remains unproven. Nonetheless, if the Nelson cache is from the Clovis period, it is significant that most of its bifaces appear to be made on large flakes, in keeping with Clovis technology in the Lower Great Lakes, and an economically conservative, risk-mitigating strategy that conforms to predictions of human foragers colonizing the area in late Pleistocene times.

Five Clovis lithic artifacts were found in a plowed farm field just north of an unnamed tributary of the Mahoning River, Columbiana County, Northeast Ohio, approximately 700 m northeast of the Hartley Mastodon discovery. These artifacts include the base of a Clovis fluted projectile point, a preform base with a prepared fluting “nipple”, a large flake, a biface tip, and a biface mid-section. We present here basic artifact morphometrics; observations involving stone tool raw material, production, and discard; microwear analysis; and stone-source-to-site straight-line and least-cost distances. Overall, our results are relevant to two discussion points. First, there is currently no strong evidence linking the five Clovis stone tools to the Hartley Mastodon. Second, the area in which the five artifacts were found would have been attractive to Clovis Paleoindians for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that the immediate area is a glacially-deposited secondary chert source.

Three different sorts of unifacial stone tool allometric patterns – representing three different sorts of flake design and exploitation patterns – are used to consider the role landscape familiarity plays in producing variability in hunter–gatherer lithic technologies. It had been previously hypothesized that colonizers' unifacial tools (on the population level) should possess the design property of longevity because as people travel in unfamiliar landscapes they could not be certain of encountering new stone outcrops to replenish their stock. Previous analyses of Clovis unifacial tools were consistent with this hypothesis and showed the first allometric pattern, namely that larger tools possessed flatter, less spherical shapes than the smaller tools, suggesting Clovis foragers exploited the retouch potential afforded by the larger, flatter blanks. Here, we hypothesized that the design property of longevity in unifacial tools would be less important to non-colonizing post-Clovis foragers because they would have been more familiar with environments and stone outcrop locations, and thus better able to tailor their unifacial tools to habitat-specific functional and scheduling requirements. Operationally, this lack of concern with tool longevity would be demonstrated by a second or third allometric pattern, namely that there is no relationship between tool size and shape, or that larger tools are rounder than smaller tools. We tested this prediction with analyses of 435 unifacial stone tools from several post-Clovis groups in vastly different environments, including Parkhill (Great Lakes), Folsom (Rocky Mountains), and Cody/Alberta (High Plains). Regardless of whether the post-Clovis dataset was examined in its entirety or by individual cultures, no iteration of the analyses exhibited an allometric pattern similar to the Clovis one. Overall, these results suggest that landscape familiarity plays a significant role in hunter–gatherer unifacial stone tool technological organization.

The notion that Paleoindians used bifaces as “mobile cores” is widespread in Late Pleistocene lithic research, although it can be difficult to test empirically. Here, we use experimental replication to establish two quantitative predictions that would be indicative of biface-core transport. If bifaces are being used as mobile cores, then we should see among a group of sites of varying toolstone procurement distances (a) a negative relationship between toolstone procurement distance and the mean unifacial tool maximum-thickness value from each site; and (b) a negative relationship between toolstone procurement distance and the variability (standard deviation) of maximum flake thickness values from each site. We then test these predictions against data from six Clovis sites of varying toolstone procurement distance in the Lower Great Lakes region. The results show that both sets of data possess a strong, positive relationship with increasing toolstone procurement distance, which is inconsistent with the notion that biface-cores were transported. Since the Clovis presence in the Lower Great Lakes is widely acknowledged to be a colonization pulse, we conclude that the lack of biface-core transport there is an economizing and risk-mitigating behavior consistent with the models of Kuhn (1994) and Meltzer (2002, 2003, 2004).

Most models of Folsom adaptation consider specialized bison hunting and high rates of residential mobility to be defining characteristics. We use spatial and assemblage content data from a sample of 619 Folsom sites located throughout the Great Plains, Rocky Mountains, and Southwest to evaluate whether the archaeological record actually reflects these characteristics. Three spatial scales of analysis are utilized. First, site scale analysis of a subset of sites shows a great deal of variability in spatial and temporal characteristics. Sites can be roughly divided into small, single occupation locales and large, serially occupied sites. Second, day-to-day foraging occurs at what we term the foraging scale. This intermediate spatial scale is poorly understood for Folsom groups, though large sites such as Blackwater Draw and Lindenmeier provide clues that are supplemented by information from the ethnographic record. Third, the macro-regional scale analysis utilizes the entire site sample and indicates that the Folsom archaeological record consists primarily of small locales scattered across the landscape punctuated by only a few large, serially occupied sites. Overall, our analysis suggests that Folsom adaptive systems were more variable than normally recognized, and, in certain settings, may have been characterized by reduced residential mobility. Furthermore, we postulate that Folsom land use, rather than being conditioned primarily by mobile prey, may have been at least partly conditioned by more predictable resources such as wood, water, and toolstone.

Consolidation is the reduction in sediment volume that occurs in response to natural overburden loading. As void space is reduced, solid particles within the consolidating sediment undergo rearrangement, including downward displacement and reduction in inclination angle. Buried artifacts are also subject to this rearrangement. An experiment was designed to simulate consolidation of artifact-bearing sediments and document the extent of artifact rearrangement caused by varying degrees of consolidation. Results indicate that artifacts will generally follow the downward movement of the sediment regardless of individual artifact attributes, and that significant reductions in artifact inclination angle can occur. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

This paper reports on 10 years of research at the Black Mountain Archaeological District, located in north central Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountain range. It focuses specifically on two rockshelters: 48BH1827 (Two Moon Shelter) and 48BH1065 (BA Cave). Two Moon Shelter bears stratified Paleoindian deposits that include a Folsom projectile point fragment, a 10,060 ± 60 B.P. radiocarbon date, and an undated Paleoindian component positioned stratigraphically below the Folsom occupation. Upper levels in the site date to about 8500 B.P. and are associated with the Late Paleoindian Pryor Stemmed complex. BA Cave is a well-stratified and well-dated archaeological deposit yielding cultural occupations spanning the last 4,000 years. Geoarchaeological investigations at BA Cave describe changes in sediment depositional regimes that may reflect significant Late Holocene trends in centennial-to-millennial-scale climatic changes in the Middle Rocky Mountain region. Together, research at these two rockshelters provides...