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Concept
Clovis culture
Summary
Clovis culture is a prehistoric Paleoamerican archaeological culture, named for distinct stone and bone tools found in close association with Pleistocene fauna, particularly two Columbian mammoths, at Blackwater Locality No. 1 near Clovis, New Mexico, in 1936 and 1937, though Paleoindian artifacts had been found at the site since the 1920s. It existed from roughly 11,500 to 10,800 BCE (≈13,500-12,800 years Before Present) near the end of the Last Glacial Period.
Clovis culture is characterized by the manufacture of "Clovis points" and distinctive bone and ivory tools, and it is represented by hundreds of sites, from which >10,000 Clovis points have been recovered. Knowledge of the Clovis culture has primarily been gathered from North America. In South America, the similar related Fishtail or Fell projectile point style was contemporaneous to the usage of Clovis points in North America, and possibly developed from Clovis points.
The only human burial that has been directly associated with tools from the Clovis culture included the remains of an infant boy found in Montana that researchers named Anzick-1. Paleogenetic analyses of Anzick-1's ancient nuclear, mitochondrial, and Y-chromosome DNA reveal that Anzick-1 is closely related to some modern Native American populations, including those in Southern North America, Central America, and South America and populations in Central Asia and Siberia, which lends support to the Beringia or coastal Pacific hypotheses that they were responsible for the initial settlement of the Americas.
The Clovis culture is traditionally considered to have been based on highly mobile hunter-gatherer populations that heavily engaged in big game hunting, though some recent scholarship has questioned how reliant Clovis hunters were on big game.
The Clovis culture was replaced by several more localized regional societies from the Younger Dryas cold-climate period onward. Post-Clovis cultures include the Folsom tradition, Gainey, Suwannee, Simpson, Plainview-Goshen, Cumberland, and Redstone.
Official source
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