Across Atlantic Ice
Page 35
49. Hannus 1997.
50. Gramly 1993. The East Wenatchee Cache is also known as Richey-Roberts.
51. Lahren and Bonnichsen 1974.
52. Owsley and Hunt 2001. There are some real problems with these two skeletons relative to their association with the Clovis Cache. The bone foreshafts have a good, solid Clovis age radiocarbon date of 11,040±35 RCYBP. The toddler has a date of 10,680±50 RCYBP, while the other child has a date of 8,600±90 RCYBP. The toddler’s bones are covered with red ocher, but the other child’s remains are not stained. Unfortunately, the entire site, including the artifacts and remains, was disturbed by earthmoving equipment, and the exact locations of the burials relative to the cache are unknown. It may be that they were not associated with the Clovis Cache but were incidentally buried nearby and the red ocher staining the toddler’s bones is purely coincidental.
53. Recent studies indicate that these items were made from elk antler rather than bone; see J. Morrow and Fiedel 2004.
54. Lahren and Bonnichsen 1974.
55. Stanford 1997.
56. C. V. Haynes Jr. and Huckell 2007.
57. C. V. Haynes Jr. and Hemmings 1968.
58. Boldurian and Cotter 1999.
59. While at Point Barrow, Alaska, between 1881 and 1883, J. Murdock, an ethnologist from the Bureau of American Ethnology, collected thirteen hafted mauls and thirteen flaking hammerheads. Murdock 1892 shows a small hammer with a bone head. This hammerhead is undamaged, but others in the collection and hammers used in flintknapping experiments are broken in the manner of the Blackwater Draw specimen.
60. Saunders et al. 1990.
61. The rod was originally identified as ivory, in Frison and Stanford 1982. The analysis in the supporting material for Waters and Stafford 2007 determined that the artifact is made of either bone or antler.
62. S. D. Webb 2006.
63. Dunbar 1991.
64. Wilmeth 1968.
65. Cressman 1946.
66. Tankersley 1997.
67. Hemmings 2004.
68. Stanford, Bonnichsen, and Morlan 1981.
69. Hannus 1989.
70. Bradley 1995.
71. Hester 1972.
72. Collins et al. 1991.
73. Rawls 2009.
3. BERINGIA
1. Hopkins et al. 1982.
2. W. A. Johnston 1933.
3. Mandryk et al. 2001.
4. West 1996.
5. Hopkins et al. 1982.
6. See Colinvaux 1981; Colinvaux 1996.
7. Elias et al. 1996.
8. World Wildlife Fund 2008.
9. With minor reservations, we concur with the interpretations summarized in West 1996. Where we part company is in the interpretation of the existing Arctic data relative to the origin of Clovis culture. See also West 1981.
10. See, e.g., Abramova 1984; Kashin 1991.
11. Pitulko et al. 2004.
12. Although edge grinding is unreported in Siberian assemblages, a putative fluted point from the Uptar Site in northeastern Siberia, dating to less than 9,000 years, has heavy basal grinding. The point is not fluted but instead has an impact scar. When inverted 180 degrees, it fits into the same bi-pointed projectile type as was found at the site. See King and Slobodin 1996.
13. Derev’anko 1998.
14. Goebel, Waters, and Dikova 2003.
15. Dikov 1996; Powers 1973.
16. Mochanov and Fedoseeva 1996.
17. Vereshchagin and Ukraintseva 1985.
18. See Vartanyan 1995; Vartanyan, Garutt, and Sher 1993.
19. Vereshchagin and Ukraintseva 1985.
20. Hoffecker, Powers, and Goebel 1993.
21. D. D. Anderson 1970.
22. Odess and Rasic 2007.
23. Crass and Holmes 2004.
24. West 1996.
25. Larson 1968.
26. Humphrey 1966.
27. Alexander 1987. For additional information on the dating of fluted points in Alaska, see Kuntz and Reanier 1994; Dixon 1999.
28. Hamilton and Porter 1975.
29. Kuntz and Reanier 1995.
30. See, e.g., Dixon 1999.
31. Ted Goebel and Kelly Graff, personal communication, November 2010.
32. Gryba 1988.
33. Fladmark, Driver, and Alexander 1988.
34. Kuntz, Bever, and Adkins 2003.
35. Kuntz and Reanier 1994.
36. Hamilton and Goebel 1999.
37. Justice 2002.
38. Lohse and Sammons 1994.
39. The Sluiceway Site was found and tested by Bob Gal and Tom Hamilton in 1992 and later excavated by Dennis Stanford in 1994 and 1998. During the summer of 1998 a large Sluiceway manufacturing site was found by Jeff Rasic on Tuluaq Hill in the Western Brooks Range, and subsequent surveys in the area and examination of collections produced thirty-four sites with Sluiceway artifacts. See Rasic 2008.
40. See Rasic 2008.
41. Hamilton and Goebel 1999.
42. Cook 1996.
43. See Goebel, Powers, and Biegelow 1991; Holmes 1996; Holmes, VanderHoek, and Dilley 1996.
44. Crass and Holmes 2004.
4. CHALLENGING THE CLOVIS FIRST MODEL
1. Fitzhugh 2001.
2. Not all technologies develop successfully to deal with new situations, and sometimes they transform for unknown reasons. Henrich 2004 examines the change in technology in Tasmania, which has resulted in a continual loss of knowledge, and finds no environmental or adaptational explanation.
3. There is a lengthy history of archaeological research seeking to find “pre-Clovis” in the Americas. See Dixon 1999 for a comprehensive review of these research projects and a critical appraisal of the North American sites considered older than Clovis.
4. For example, we do not include the evidence of an early occupation at the Monte Verde site in Chile, as we do not see a connection between the technology used there and the development of Clovis in North America. We contend that the paleolithic people of Monte Verde had a completely different ancestral heritage, stemming from a population from another place and time than the ancestors of Clovis people.
5. Adovasio and Page 1997. Everything in the text about Adovasio is from here.
6. Although some scholars have argued that the stratum IIa charcoal samples were contaminated by coal particulate or soluble material incorporated into the groundwater to explain their unexpected antiquity, a detailed independent study of the microstratigraphy found no evidence of either contamination or fluctuating groundwater levels and concluded that the early dates are probably as accurate as the later ones. See Goldberg and Arpin 1997.
7. Boldurian 1985.
8. Another argument against the earliest Meadowcroft dates is that the plant and animal remains in the lower levels are all from species adapted to modern woodlands rather than a late Pleistocene environment. However, this incongruity does not invalidate the radiocarbon results. The sample of organic remains from these levels was extremely small. Only eleven animal bones could be identified, from a white-tailed deer, southern flying squirrel, deer mouse, passenger pigeon, snake, and toad. While these animals are indeed characteristic of the Carolinian biotic province (basically a modern habitat; for an excellent discussion, see Colthurst and Waldron 1993), they have broad ecological tolerances and have been found throughout the Carolinian and Canadian biotic ecotone (the boundary of two or more major ecological zones) and in equally old paleontological records farther north, in the Upper Ohio Valley. In fact, animals such as the white-tailed deer are extremely adaptable and thrive in a wide variety of environmental niches, making the significance of their presence ambiguous. J. E. Guilday and P. W. Parmalee, the archaeozoologists who analyzed the Meadowcroft fauna and fauna from many other sites of similar antiquity in the eastern United States, suggest that the period of transition between the ice age and modern environments may have taken place during a relatively short time in western Pennsylvania (see Guilday and Parmalee 1984). Such rapid habitat shifts can be
observed today. For instance, the current warming of our climate has pushed the Baltimore oriole northward sufficiently that its range no longer includes Baltimore, and ravens have replaced it as the Baltimore totem animal. Similarly, robins previously unknown above the Arctic Circle have recently begun to delight the Inuit children at Point Barrow, Alaska, by heralding the onset of summer.
The plant remains indicate that a mixed conifer-hardwood forest dominated by oak, hickory, pine, and walnut trees and with a hackberry understory surrounded Meadowcroft. While these species argue against a boreal or tundra environment, they are compatible with a mosaic or patch environment rather than a uniform periglacial one. This interpretation is supported by Meadowcroft’s low elevation and southern exposure, whose milder ambient temperatures would have allowed earlier colonization by some woodland life forms. Further, the plant and animal associations during the last ice age were “disharmonious” by today’s standards, combining, for example, patches of tundra, woodland, and boreal communities of the kind represented in the Meadowcroft area at the time of the earliest occupations of the shelter.
9. McAvoy and McAvoy 1997.
10. Wagner and McAvoy 1997, 2004.
11. See McWeeney 1997, 2000.
12. Collins 1999.
13. M. F. Johnson 1997.
14. See Lowery 2007; Lowery et al. 2010.
15. Wah 2003.
16. R. C. L. Wilson, Drury, and Chapman 2000 has an excellent summary of the geologic and environmental processes at the end of the LGM.
17. Lowery et al. 2010. Tilghman Island is the namesake of the paleosol, which Lowery named.
18. Lowery 2008.
19. Hobbs 2004.
20. Specialized studies of the Cinmar site include a radiocarbon assay by Tom Stafford of Stafford Research, Inc., Lafayette, Colorado; use-wear studies by Marvin Kay of the Department of Anthropology, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville; a search for the source of the projection point’s rhyolite by Jeff Speakman of the National Museum of Natural History, Smith sonian Institution; and lithic analysis by Bruce Bradley of the Department of Archaeology, University of Exeter.
21. See Stewart 1987; Bondar 2001. For further reading on eastern meta-rhyolites, see Stewart 1984.
22. Shea 1999. See also Grosman et al. 2011.
23. Hallin 1983.
24. Faure, Walter, and Grant 2002.
25. Weaver et al. 2003.
26. Lowery et al. 2010.
27. J. D. Webb 2006.
28. Dunbar and Hemmings 2004.
29. Redder 1985.
30. Daniel and Wisenbaker 1987.
31. Dunbar et al. 2005.
32. Hemmings 2004.
33. Baker and Broster 1996.
34. See Waters and Stafford 2007. Several years after the first dates were obtained from the hearth features, an attempt was made to validate the original results. New charcoal was collected from the cut bank and assayed to circa 9,000 years old. But there is a 9,000-year-old occupation level above the proto-Clovis level, and since the cut bank had eroded since the first assay, the charcoal collected on the second dating attempt was probably either from the wrong level or redeposited down the bank by surface erosion. Whatever the cause of the younger date, it is clear that the artifacts recovered from the lower level are technologically much older than the 9,000 years level, and there is little reason to disregard the dates from the original assay.
35. Adovasio and Page 1997.
36. Overstreet 2004.
37. Overstreet et al. 1997.
38. Overstreet 2004.
39. Arnold 2002.
40. Turner et al. 1997.
41. Mill Iron: Frison 1996; Jim Pitts: Donohue and Sellet 2001.
42. M. C. Wilson and Burns 1999, 235.
5. THE SOLUTREAN
1. Jelinek 1965.
2. See, e.g., Churchill and Smith 2000.
3. For a comprehensive discussion of the Aurignacian, see Bar-Yosef and Zilhão 2006.
4. Pettitt 2008.
5. See Sandars 1968.
6. The traditions in Portugal and Mediterranean Spain share general biface and blade technology, shouldered points, and other artifact forms, such as laurel leafs and end scrapers, with the northern Solutrean. They share other characteristics, such as arrow points, with some North African technologies, which Otte 2002 sees as evidence of Solutrean origin.
7. Pettitt et al. 2003.
8. P. E. L. Smith 1966.
9. See, e.g., Aubry et al. 1998.
10. See, e.g., Straus and Clark 1986.
11. Hogg and Johns 1995.
12. Rigaud and Simek 1990.
13. Sackett 1981.
14. Combier and Montet-White 2002.
15. Walter and Aubry 2001.
16. P. E. L. Smith 1966.
17. Rigaud and Simek 1990.
18. Straus 1986.
19. Clottes and Courtin 1996.
20. Straus and Clark 1986.
21. Bird 2002.
22. See, e.g., Butzer 1986.
23. Adovasio, Soffer, and Kléma 1996.
24. Adovasio, personal communication, 2001.
25. Straus 1992.
26. Pokines and Krupa 1997.
27. Chadelle, Geneste, and Plisson 1991.
28. Straus reports that of the nineteen concave base points found at La Riera Cave, eighteen were from levels 4–7 and the other was out of context. Straus and Clark 1986.
29. P. E. L. Smith 1966. See especially figure 74–13.
30. Sinclair 1995.
31. Bordes, personal communication, 1969; Collins 1973; Tiffagom 2006.
32. Collins insisted it was necessary to show a pattern of heat alteration that occurred during the manufacturing process, after initial flaking and before final flaking, as indicated by differences in luster of adjacent flake scars.
33. Whittaker 1994. Modern knappers frequently use French boxwood billets for striking blades, but it is unlikely that these would have been available to Solutrean knappers.
34. Aubry et al. 2003.
35. To be counted as exhibiting overshot flaking the biface must have had at least one overshot flake scar that removed part of the edge opposite the platform. Many pieces exhibited more than one such scar.
36. Pelegrin 1990.
37. Clottes and Courtin 1996.
38. Toggling harpoons have detachable points tied to a line that either attaches to a float or can be held by hand. When the harpoon penetrates the animal, the shaft detaches, leaving the point inside. Force on the attached line turns the harpoon point sideways, greatly increasing its attachment to the animal. These points were designed to stay in. While this design is superior to that of other points used to procure sea mammals (if a line isn’t attached, many animals are lost when they sink in deep water), other forms have been used successfully, such as the self-barbed spear point. There are also cases where toggling harpoons were used to hunt terrestrial animals.
39. Garcia 1927.
40. P. E. L. Smith 1966; Rigaud and Simek 1990.
41. Bradley, Anikovitch, and Girya 1995.
42. Garrod 1926.
43. Otte 2002.
44. Strasser et al. 2010.
6. QUANTITATIVE CULTURE COMPARISON
1. Toth and Schick 2005.
2. Amvrosievka: Krotova and Belan 1993; Horner: Frison and Todd 1987.
3. D. H. Thomas 1998.
4. See, e.g., Bordes 1972; Movius 1975; Leroi-Gourhan 1957; Straus and Clark 1986; Aubry et al. 2003; Combier and Montet-White 2002.
5. J. M. Adovasio, personal communication, 2007.
6. By generalized we mean reconstructed through the study and analysis of a large number of individual pieces. This sequence is sometimes called the production strategy, and by the French chaîne opératoire. Especially helpful in these reconstructions are pieces on which we are able to refit the flakes and thus see the sequence of individual choices. These are rare, however, so we often have to rely on reconstructions based on pieces that were abandoned dur
ing the flaking process, frequently fragments.
7. We have used early, middle, and late phase to describe Clovis and Solutrean biface reduction, but not all biface technologies can be readily subdivided in this way. Therefore for this analysis we have opted for the terms primary and secondary flaking. Generally, the early and middle stages fit with primary and the late stage with secondary flaking. While we have attempted to use observations that archaeologists would generally agree on, there could certainly be alternative interpretations of specific attributes.
The characteristics selected for use in this analytical approach vary depending on the technologies being compared. For example, the comparison of blade technologies does not include such traits as thinning and finishing. Ideally, the characteristics of a technology are determined through rigorous peer review; although DSA has not undergone this process (yet), we feel it is useful and should be further developed.
8. See Bradley, Collins, and Hemmings 2010 for specific examples and definitions of these technical terms.
9. For the Solutrean: Collins 1973; for Clovis: Wilke, Flenniken, and Ozburn 1991.
7. QUALITATIVE CULTURE COMPARISON
1. Demars and Laurent 1992: 40–41, figure 63 (“micrograttoir de Laugerie-Haute”). These scrapers also appear in the Grimaldi Magdalenian and become common in the Azilian and other Epipaleolithic assemblages.
2. Clovis: Collins 1999; Eurasian Upper Paleolithic: see, e.g., Giria and Bradley 1998.
3. Clovis and Solutrean peoples produced bladelets and larger blades from the same core types, whereas Asian microblades were produced from a variety of specially prepared wedge-shaped microblade cores.
4. Bradley, Collins, and Hemmings 2010.
5. Tunnell 1978; see also Collins 1999.
6. Bradley, Collins, and Hemmings 2010.
7. Lowery and Stanford 2008.
8. Wilke, Flenniken, and Ozburn 1991. However, the appropriately strict criteria developed by Mike Collins to confirm heat treatment were not applied. See Collins 1973.
9. Stanford 1997.
10. Hemmings 2004.
11. Hemmings, Dunbar, and Webb 2004.
12. Picat 2009.
13. Guthrie 2005; Villaverde Bonilla 1994 is an excellent two-volume analysis and illustration of the art of Parpallo Cave.