Clovis Colonization of Eastern North America: A Phylogenetic Approach

Over the past several decades, archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists, and others who study cultural phenomena have begun to appreciate that methods developed to reconstruct the evolutionary, or phylogenetic, relationships among biological taxa can be used to create cultural sequences based on heritable continuity. One method in particular is cladistics, which creates hypothetical statements of relatedness—rendered as trees—based on the model and parameters used. To date, cladistics has been used to create phylogenetic orderings of a wide variety of cultural phenomena, including basketry and other textiles, ceramic vessels, stone projectile points, languages, folk tales, manuscripts, residence patterns, and political organization. Here we lay out the basic method of cladistics and show how it has formed the basis for long-term studies of the colonization of eastern North America during the Early Paleoindian period (ca. 13,300–11,900 calendar years before the present). Statement of Significance Archaeologists have long used changes in artifact form to measure the passage of time, the supposition being that if the changes are ordered correctly, a historical sequence of forms is created. This is correct, but oftentimes what archaeologists really want to know is which thing produced another thing as opposed to simply preceding it. This is an evolutionary sequence. Over the past several decades, not only archaeologists but also anthropologists, linguists, and others who study cultural phenomena have begun to use a suite of methods that were developed to reconstruct the evolutionary, or phylogenetic, relationships among biological taxa, one of which is cladistics. This marks a return to the questions on which the founding of much of anthropology rests: the writing of cultural lineages. This return is important to the growth and continued health of archaeology and anthropology because a reconstructed phylogeny helps guide interpretation of the evolution of traits in that it generates hypotheses about the lineages in which those traits arose and under what circumstances. Data availability The authors confirm that all data underlying the findings are fully available without restriction. All relevant data are contained within the paper.