A Colorado geochemist and his Texas colleague say they have dealt the mortal blow to Clovis First, the long-held idea that the first Americans were spear-toting hunters who crossed into an uninhabited continent from Asia.
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For decades, schoolchildren were taught that small bands of hide-clad hunters walked into a virgin world over a "land bridge" that linked Siberia to Alaska during the last ice age, about 13,600 years ago.
They quickly dispersed across North America, slaughtering mammoths with a new and highly efficient stone weapon: the Clovis spear point. Clovis hunters and their descendants then rapidly spread through Central America and to the southernmost tip of South America, according to the Clovis First scenario.
But evidence for pre-Clovis occupation of the Americas has been mounting for years at archaeological sites from Wisconsin and Pennsylvania to Chile.
'Final nail' in Clovis coffin
Now Colorado's Thomas Stafford Jr. and Michael Waters of Texas A&M University report findings that Waters says "puts the final nail in the coffin of the Clovis First model."
New radiocarbon dates from Clovis-site bone, ivory and seeds show that the hunters arrived nearly 500 years later than researchers had thought, at a time when unrelated peoples already lived in North and South America, the researchers conclude.
And it now appears that the Clovis culture bloomed and vanished in just two centuries. It seems "humanly impossible" that a group of hunters and their descendants could have spread across the Americas in such a short time span, Stafford said.
Perhaps it makes more sense to think of "Clovis" as a technological advance - a new and super-lethal type of spear point - rather than a group of nomadic hunters, Stafford said. Maybe the innovative Clovis weaponry spread like wildfire through existing populations of early Americans, he said.
"Clovis is a technology that moved into a place that was already populated," he said. "That seems more likely to me." "
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Directory of cultural resource and historic preservation firms.
Gray & Pape, Inc. Archaeology**History**Historic Preservation
Serving your cultural resources needs since 1987.
Ohio -
11-03-11
New South Associates, Inc. New South Associates is a women-owned small business providing cultural resource management services, both nationally and internationally. Our specialities include archaeology, history, architectural history, preservation planning, and public interpretati
Georgia -
03-25-11
Kerns CRM Consultants Cultural and Historical Resource Management Services
Maryland -
01-10-11
Paula S. Reed and Associates, Inc. Paula S. Reed and Associates, Inc. is a small, woman-owned corporation organized in the State of Maryland, which provides cultural resource evaluation on a nation-wide basis, specializing in National Historic Landmark nominations. We meet qualifications o
Maryland -
11-23-10
SWCA Environmental Consultants Acquires Northwest Archaeological Associates SWCA Environmental Consultants has acquired Northwest Archaeological Associates, expanding SWCA's Pacific Northwest presence with a new Seattle office offering cultural and natural resource management and environmental permitting and compliance consulting.
04-04-11
ACHP Section 106 Essentials two-day course which explains the requirements of Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act.
02-02-11
