Across Atlantic Ice

by Dennis J. Stanford

  Even with all the data limitations, cluster analysis seems to be a useful exercise. This analysis did not allocate sites into different fluted point traditions, perhaps because we did not use detailed technological or metric attributes. The next step, beyond the scope of this study, would to be to apply this approach to post–fluted point Paleo-Indian assemblages and see whether they differ from fluted point traditions. We would also like to see this analysis greatly expanded by adding sites and refining the tool categories, as well as subcategories of bifaces and points that account for fragmentation, break causes, stage of use/reuse, and the like.

  BERINGIAN AND WESTERN EUROPEAN SITE COMPARISON

  Our analyses for stone tool assemblages and technological traits are shown in tables A.2 and A.3.

  TABLE A.2 Tool Types, by Archaeological Culture, Compared in Cluster Analysis

  TABLE A.3 Technological Traits, by Archaeological Culture, Compared in Cluster Analysis

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Gemegah 1999.

  2. Bolles 1999 discusses a poet (Elisha Kent), a professor (Louis Agassiz), and a politician-geologist (Charles Lyell) and “how their clash of egos, ignorance, and imaginations led to the discovery of the Ice Age.”

  3. Hrdlička 1923.

  4. Meltzer 2006.

  5. Wormington 1957.

  6. Boldurian and Cotter 1999.

  7. In this book we have had to deal with the thorny issue of reporting dates so that they are accessible to lay readers as well as archaeologists. We have chosen to report both radiocarbon dates and calendar dates whenever possible. Radiocarbon dating is done on organic remains recovered from sites, be it charcoal from a hearth or collagen from a bone. The date indicates the time of death of the living organism, based on the radioactive decay of carbon-14 that the organism acquired while alive, but it is expressed as radiocarbon years before present (RCYBP) and has a range depending on many factors, such as the purity of the sample and the ranges of individual readings within the sample. Although it was originally thought that the radiocarbon calendar would be the same as our calendar, the amount of radiocarbon in the atmosphere varies through time and therefore the derived dates cannot be used directly. There have been numerous studies that correlate radiocarbon dates with other means of dating, such as tree-ring, to yield absolute (calendar) dates and to derive calibration curves. We have chosen to use the OxCal calibration curve (the version current in September 2009) and have calibrated our dates directly from the online calculator at http://c14.arch.ox.ac.uk/embed.php?File=oxcal.html.

  Even with the calibration curve worked out there are further complications, because radiocarbon dates are always given with a range and standard deviation (e.g., 12,240±40). This indicates that the date could be anywhere between 12,280 and 12,000 RCYBP. So what is the calendar year? This would also be a range of dates. However, to simplify our reporting of calendar dates we have usually chosen to give the calibrated date based on the actual radiocarbon date, disregarding the standard deviation. Therefore the calendar dates we give should be considered approximations rather than absolutes: we frequently use calendar years as general statements, especially when carbon dates were not available (because the dates we have either are based on other approximations, such as geological dating, or extend beyond the calibration curves, which end around 21,000 RCYBP). Readers who want to deal with more explicit calibrations are encouraged to do their own research with the available calculators.

  8. W. A. Johnston 1933.

  9. Hayes 1991.

  10. Thompson 1948. See Dixon 1993 for a complete review of Alaskan fluted points.

  11. Solecki 1951.

  12. Wormington and Forbis 1965.

  13. Stanford 1983a.

  14. Dyke, Moore, and Robertson 2003.

  15. Fladmark 1978.

  16. Bednarik 1997.

  17. For an overview of the controversies about the first Americans, see the papers in Shutler 1983. For a recent update on these issues, see the papers in Bonnichsen et al. 2005.

  18. Jelinek 1965.

  19. Frison and Bradley 1982.

  20. Greenman 1963.

  21. The earthly remains of an individual now known as Kennewick Man for a nearby town or as the Ancient One to Native Americans, were found by two students along the bank of the Columbia River in Washington State. The preliminary coroner’s inquest noted that his skull was shaped significantly differently from those of modern Native Americans and looked more like that of a European. Therefore, it was concluded that he was of European descent, although the weathered condition of his bones implied that he was not a recent casualty but perhaps a nineteenth-century trapper or settler. When a stone weapon tip known to be thousands of years old was found embedded in his hip bone, it was clear that the story of Kennewick Man was more complex and that he would provide important clues to the deep prehistory of the Columbia River Basin. A radiocarbon assay made from a sample taken from one of his finger bones suggested that Kennewick Man lived around 9,500 years ago, sending newspaper reporters into a virtual feeding frenzy, with some of them proclaiming that ancient Europeans discovered the Americas. The popular articles were of course inflammatory, and angry Native Americans clamored for the immediate reburial of the Ancient One.

  The remains of several other individuals from different sites of roughly the same antiquity have been studied since the discovery of Kennewick Man, and they all fall into the same general physical type. The so-called Caucasoid features upon which the original assessment of Kennewick Man was made are indeed characteristic of Europeans today; however, these were common physical traits in early prehistoric populations in the Northern Hemisphere and are even retained by some modern south Asians. The apparent dominance of these physical features at an early date in America implies that the peopling of the New World occurred when early modern humans were first spreading throughout the world. It was only after the north Asian physical type developed that tribes dominating the ancestry of modern Native Americans moved into the Americas and intermingled with the pre-existing populations that they met along the way. For additional details, see Chatters 2001 and Benedict 2003.

  22. There are two forms of DNA, one found in the cell nucleus and one which occurs in the cytoplasm surrounding the nucleus. The latter, termed mitochondrial DNA or mtDNA, is known as the “Eve gene” because it can be used to trace human heritage through time, presumably all the way back to Eve. This is possible because mtDNA is present in the maternal egg cell. Researchers have determined that mtDNA occurs in only a few dozen general patterns, which are called haplogroups. These groups have been assigned letter identifiers, and each one is believed to comprise the descendants of a single prehistoric female. A new haplogroup forms when a mutation occurs, which happens at the rate of 2.2–2.9 percent over a million years. The spread of related female lineages can be traced through the identification of mtDNA haplogroups and their distributions across the landscape. For instance, preliminary research indicated that most Native Americans could be traced back to four Asian haplogroups (A, B, C, and D), while Europeans find that they are descendants of nine haplogroups (I, J, and K, thought to be the original Paleolithic peoples, were followed by H, T, U, V, W, and X). But mitochondrial haplogroup X also occurs in North American populations more than 9,000 years old (see Smith et al. 2002) and in modern Native Americans (see Brown et al. 1998 and Schurr 2000), pointing to an ancient link between western Eurasia and North America. Apparently, mtDNA X originated in North Africa and spread into Europe and into North America sometime between 13,000 and 34,000 years ago, long before Clovis. An important bit of information from our point of view is that the easternmost occurrence of the X haplogroup is in the Altai region of south Siberia. If the ancestors of the Native Americans who carry the X marker and their clans traversed Siberia on their way to America, they did so without leaving any genetic markers behind. This is unlikely human behavior.

  Lepper 2009 suggests that the occurrence of mtDNA X, along w
ith other North American haplogroups, in a small percentage of the Altai region population makes its appearance in the Americas less of a mystery. Before we consider this conclusion a fact, we must understand how X was transmitted from western Europe and why it does not occur in eastern Asia. Note that the Altai region is farther from Nome, Alaska, than from Paris. Another curious bit of information is that X is most common in tribes from the St. Lawrence Basin of eastern North America, becomes increasingly rare to the west, and is totally absent from the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions of North America (and Asia), a pattern that is similar to the distribution of Clovis artifacts. The relationship between mtDNA haplogroup X and either Clovis or Solutrean people is unknown at this time, as no human remains associated with either tradition have been tested, but we hope future research will resolve these issues.

  23. Flemming 2004.

  24. Kirch 2000 presents an excellent overview of the early evidence of boat travels in the Pacific. Strasser et al. 2010 discusses data from twenty-eight pre-ceramic lithic sites found on Crete. These sites have been dated by their geologic context to be at least 130,000 years old. Because Crete has been separated from the mainland for millions of years, the presence of these sites indicates “open-sea navigation and multiple journeys and pushes seafaring in the Mediterranean back more than 100,000 years” (145–90). It will be interesting to follow further research here: if this conclusion is correct, it could have major implications for the dispersal of modern humans.

  1. FLAKED STONE TECHNOLOGY

  1. See, e.g., Cotterell, Kamminga, and Dickson 1985.

  2. Speth 1974.

  3. Whittaker 2004.

  4. Speth 1972, 1974.

  5. Whittaker 1994.

  6. Bradley 1982.

  7. For an example of hand ax technology, see Bradley and Sampson 1986.

  8. Bordes 1961.

  9. Bradley and Giria 1996.

  10. Collins and Lohse 2004.

  11. Goebel 2004.

  12. Bradley and Stanford 1987.

  13. Ingbar and Frison 1987.

  14. Jodry 1998.

  15. Solutrean: Aubry, Nevis, and Walter 2003; Clovis: Bradley, Collins, and Hemmings 2010.

  16. Kelterborn 1984.

  17. Sinclair 1995.

  18. For an example of controlled overshot flaking that is unlikely to be historically related to either Solutrean or Clovis, see Inizan and Tixier 1978.

  19. For a description of one possible fluting method, see Gryba 1988.

  2. CLOVIS

  1. Waters and Stafford 2007.

  2. After the Last Glacial Maximum, between 25,000 and 13,000 years ago, the climate warmed and stabilized. This episode is known as the Bølling interstadial. It lasted from 14,700 to 12,700 years ago and preceded an unstable period whose climate shifted between warmer and cooler conditions. This ended with an abrupt plummet into a long-term cold, dry, and windy episode known as the Younger Dryas, from 12,800 to 11,500 years ago, which returned the environment to ice age conditions.

  3. Bonnichsen and Will 1984.

  4. E. Callahan, personal communication, 1999. See also Gardner 1974.

  5. Collins, personal communication, January 2011.

  6. Collins et al. 1989.

  7. Broster and Norton 1993.

  8. Mason 1962. At the time of Mason’s publication, reviewers cited the lack of both supporting radiocarbon dates and evidence of a progenitor of fluted point technology as reasons to consider his suggestion premature at best.

  9. Brennan 1982.

  10. Lepper 1983.

  11. Renaud 1934. See also Figgens 1934; Cotter 1935.

  12. There are a limited number of other possible variants, but none of these has been well dated or found in stratigraphic relationship to Clovis.

  13. Carson-Conn-Short: Broster and Norton 1993; Williamson: McCary 1951; Adams: T. N. Sanders 1990; Sinclair: J. Broster, personal communication, 2009; Pine Tree and Topper: Goodyear and Steffy 2003.

  14. Frison and Todd 1986.

  15. D. G. Anderson and Gillam 2000.

  16. Blades: Greene 1963; points: Stanford and Jodry 1988; mixes: see, e.g., Frison and Bradley 1999.

  17. Meltzer 2002.

  18. The McInnis Cache, found south of St. Louis, Missouri, comprises eleven bifaces, nine blades, and a broken Clovis point made of Burlington chert. Another Clovis-style biface made of Burlington chert was found on the Columbia River just below the Grand Coulee Dam in the 1950s by Erma Pryor. Mrs. Pryor gave this specimen to Marilyn Palmer. Subsequently, Mrs. Palmer gave the specimen to Peggy Carnes, who along with her daughter, Kelly Carnes, donated it to the Smithsonian. All of these specimens are housed at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Although out of context, the Burlington chert biface was probably made near St. Louis and probably carried in an unmodified condition to a location on the Columbia River. Its likely route of travel was up the Missouri River into western Montana and across the Lolo Trail into the Columbia River Basin. Perhaps a party of Clovis people pioneered the trail that Sacagawea led Lewis and Clark along 13,000 years later: the original voyage of discovery.

  19. The reliability of radiocarbon dating is again under scrutiny, and the current debate, based on new data, indicates that it is very difficult to interpret and should be used with caution. This is especially true for dates between 11,000 and 15,000 years ago derived from non-archaeological sources, where scientists have discovered great inconsistency.

  20. Charlie Lake Cave: Fladmark, Driver, and Alexander 1988; Alaska: Bob Gal, National Park Service archaeologist for Northwest Alaska, personal communication, 2009.

  21. C. V. Haynes Jr. et al. 1999.

  22. T. A. Morrow and J. E. Morrow 1994.

  23. Frison and Bradley 1999.

  24. Beck and Jones 1997.

  25. Adair-Steadman: Tunnell 1977; Lindenmeier: Wilmsen and Roberts 1978; Hanson: Frison and Bradley 1980.

  26. C. V. Haynes Jr. and Huckell 2007.

  27. Bement and Carter 2003.

  28. G. Haynes and Stanford 1984.

  29. A new date from the bone indicates that it was of Clovis age and not related to the later bison kill. See Bement and Carter 2010.

  30. McNett 1985.

  31. Ferring 2001.

  32. Stanford 1983b.

  33. Collins et al. 1989.

  34. Collins 2002.

  35. A Clovis point that retains significant portions of the flake blank surface was included in the Anzick Cache in Montana, and at least four were encountered at Blackwater Draw. Most appear to have been made on thin flakes. The reduced surface is the dorsal side of the flake or blade, and the less modified surface is the ventral side. Pressure flaking to flatten the bulb of percussion and minor edge retouch from shaping are the only modifications on the ventral faces. The dorsal surfaces were finished with the same steps and techniques used to produce a bifacial specimen.

  36. Wilke, Flenniken, and Ozburn 1991.

  37. To develop a comparative sample for the presence of controlled overshot flake scars on non-Clovis bifaces, we examined 418 bifaces from Archaic and Late Prehistoric contexts at the Gault site. These and the underlying Clovis bifaces were produced in the same location, and the knappers had access to the same sources of high-quality flint. Any differences between technologies cannot be explained by raw material availability. We studied bifaces recovered by Prof. J. E. Pearce during excavations in 1929 (see Pearce 1932). The vast majority of these were unfinished, but we did not include fragments. We classified overshot flake scars as: error (the flake removal resulted in the termination of production), unknown effect of overshot flake removal (did not harm the biface), and possibly intentional. Although the artifacts were recovered from post-Clovis deposits, there is the possibility that some were actually Clovis in origin and were mixed into the later deposits in a number of ways (the excavations were done with shovels, and mixing of strata was frequent). Two of the bifaces we examined look to have been Clovis based on a suite of technological traits, including con
trolled overshot flaking, and a distinctive yellow patina seen on many Clovis artifacts. Nevertheless we included these in our sample. Out of a total of 418 bifaces, 409 (98 percent) did not have overshot flake scars and 9 (2 percent) had them. Of these 9, 3 were abandoned because of overshot failure, 1 had what looked like an intentional overshot, and 5 had overshot scars that did not result in abandonment but also were not evidently intentional (most were at the tip or base of the biface). All told, overshot flaking at Gault in post-Clovis technologies is extremely rare and does not represent an intentional part of any of the biface technologies extending from Late Paleo-Indian through Late Prehistoric times.

  38. Bradley 1997.

  39. This possibility is even greater in the Folsom fluting method, which demands even more expertise and has higher failure rates. For other evidence that Folsom fluting may have taken on a ritual function, see Bradley 1982.

  40. Collins 2002.

  41. Broster and Norton 1993.

  42. For more information, see Bradley, Collins, and Hemmings 2010, 10–55.

  43. End scrapers are tools that have been retouched on the end of a flake or blade. Although they are called scrapers, microscopic analysis of use traces has indicated that this tool type had multiple uses—generally for preparing animal skins for rawhide or leather but sometimes for working wood and other more durable materials such as bone and antler.

  44. Shoberg 2010. The butchering reference is in figure 6.4, p. 143.

  45. Tomenchuk and Storck 1997.

  46. Wilke, Flenniken, and Ozburn 1991.

  47. Nami et al. 1997.

  48. Hemmings, Dunbar, and Webb 2004.