Contemporary Views on Clovis Learning and Colonization

Summary

The timing of the earliest colonization of North America is debatable, but what is not at issue is the point of origin of the early colonists: Humans entered the continent from Beringia and then made their way south along or near the Pacific Coast and/or through a corridor than ran between the Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets in western North America. At some point they abandoned their arctic-based tool complex for one more adapted to an entirely different environment. The dispersal of that new techno-complex — Clovis — allows us to examine, at a fine scale, how colonization processes played out across a vast continent that at the time had at best a very small resident population. Clovis has figured prominently in American archaeology since the first Clovis points were identified in eastern New Mexico in the 1930s, but the successful marriage of learning models grounded in evolutionary theory and modern analytical methods that began roughly a decade ago has begun to pay significant dividends in terms of what we know about the rapid spread of human groups across the last sizeable landmass to witness human occupation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20810