Clovis No Longer First

The PreClovis Debate Moves On

A very persnickety analysis of AMS radiocarbon dates from eleven Clovis sites in North America has resulted in narrowing both the length of time for the Clovis phenomenon and the date at which Clovis first appeared on the continent. The redating of the Clovis culture, reported in Science on February 23, 2007 by Michael Waters and Thomas W. Stafford, Jr. has resulted in irrefutable evidence that 'pre-clovis' is a legitimate reality.

Traditionally, Clovis was the first widely recognized cultural complex in the New World, and, traditionally, it is dated to between 11,500 and 10,900 radiocarbon years before the present (RCYBP). For some decades it has become apparent that there are non-Clovis sites, which have been dated about the same time or a little earlier, both in North and South America. The debate concerning whether these sites and others represent a so-called pre-Clovis occupation of the Americas has been fairly heated in some sectors of archaeological science, in part because of the unresolved dating issues.

New Dates for Old Tools

What Waters and Stafford did was go back to the Clovis sites and identify organic artifacts directly associated with the sites--meaning bone, seeds, and antler in uncontested context--and run AMS dates on them. The eleven sites which had Clovis diagnostics in inarguably good contexts included such sites as Lange-Ferguson, SD (11,080+/-40 years ago), Anzick MT (11,040+/-35), Lehner AZ (10,950+/-40), Shawnee-Minisink PA (10,935+/-15), Murray Springs AZ (10,885+/-50), and Jake Bluff, OK (10,765+/-f25). All eleven fell between 11,080 and 10,765; coeval with Fishtail sites in South America such as Fell's Cave, Chile (11,000+/-170), and Goshen sites such as Hell Gap WY (10,995+/-135) and Mill Iron MT (10,840+/-60, and clearly post-dating the non-Clovis mammoth kill sites at Hebior and Schaefer sites in Wisconsin (ca 12,500 years bp), the new Mud Lake, Wisconsin site (ca 13,500) and, of course, Monte Verde, Chile (ca. 12,500) and other pre-Fishtail sites in Argentina.

There's really no way around it, folks. Clovis was not first.

More Sources

In addition to the photograph of the very nice collection of points, there were a few excellent photographs from the Gault site in Texas, so I took the opportunity to post them in high resolution.

• Gault Site Clovis Photographs
• Clovis and PreClovis Archaeology
• Center for the Study of the First Americans
• Archaeology of the First Colonization of the Americas

Michael R. Waters and Thomas W. Stafford Jr. 2007. Redefining the age of Clovis: Implications for the peopling of the Americas. Science 315:1122-1126. The paper won't be online until tomorrow, but I'll add the link when it becomes active.