Some Thoughts on "Clovis": Where Were They From, Where Did They Go, Where Do They Fit in the Peopling of the Western Hemisphere

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This talk will present some opinions I have about Clovis - woven with facts to convince the skeptical. I will define what I mean by "Clovis", show what some others mean by "Clovis", and add some additional ways to think about "Clovis" in both synchronic and diachronic directions. I will present what I think about its origins and about where we might be finding "proto-Clovis" already. This Clovis school of knapping (and the assumed bio-linguistic groups within which it was embedded) was parent to several subsequent archaeological culture groups that evolved into the Holocene in multiple places. How do we know this? How do we trace archaeological culture groups into the Holocene? And let’s not forget that Clovis was on landscapes with "others", that is contemporaneous groups such as, Denali/Nenana; Western Stemmed Point/PaleoCoastal; and groups in South America too, where Magellan/Fishtail was "other" to Abriense, Umbu, Itaparica, etc. Where do we see these different groups interacting archaeologically, and what were the outcomes?

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25693