Driving east, I next made my way to Texas, in search of the mammoth hunters, to the site of Gault, near Austin. Leaving the freeway, I headed into the countryside and eventually turned off the road on to a track which led to a couple of sheds – these formed the headquarters of the Gault Archaeological Project. There I met Mike Collins, in blue jeans and Stetson the epitome of a Texan archaeologist. He was just putting the finishing touches to a wooden picnic table, which he loaded into his truck and then took me down to the site. It was in the valley below, in a field surrounded by woods.
Gault is one of the largest Clovis occupation sites, around 800m long and 200m wide. When I visited, the archaeologists had two trenches open and were painstakingly excavating and examining a small fraction of the site. The trenches were covered with white tents, to protect them – and the archaeologists at work inside them – from the elements. I followed Mike inside one tent where excavations were ongoing. It was blazing hot outside, but the tent was doing its job – inside it was shady and cool. Three archaeologists were busy in the bottom of a trench, digging down through dark black soil, and I could see stone tools sticking out of the walls of the trench.
‘The site is still incredibly prolific,’ said Mike. ‘There have been people digging at this site for at least eighty years. We estimate that there are hundreds of thousands of artefacts out there, in the antiquities market and in private collections, that came from here.’
The site had a long history of being plundered. In fact, it was looters who initially brought the site to the attention of archaeologists, and the first excavations took place in the 1920s. Looting continued, though, and in the 1980s the then landowner was charging $25 a day for the chance to dig at Gault. Who knows how many precious artefacts were dug up, out of context, and flogged on the antiquities market? In 1991, one of the paid-up diggers dug a little deeper than most, and found two finely flaked, fluted Clovis spear points and a selection of engraved limestone pebbles. Incredibly responsibly, he reported these finds to Mike Collins, who then started scientific excavations at the site again. Even after all that plundering, Gault still held plenty of archaeological interest: the upper layers, containing ‘Archaic’ archaeology, had been heavily disturbed, but Mike was relieved to find that the deeper layers containing palaeoindian artefacts were left almost intact.
‘Well, pretty much the entire prehistory of Texas is represented here,’ Mike told me. ‘It’s amazing. From the artefacts which we’ve found and the dating we’ve been able to get, we can say that people have been here from five hundred years ago, back to at least 13,500 years ago.’
‘Have you found any of those beautiful Clovis spear points here?’
‘Yes – but Clovis points are actually in a very small minority. In our Clovis levels, we’ve got a million and a half artefacts, and just forty of them are projectile points. Every one of those is either broken, or resharpened down to the point that it was discarded. They’re retooling here. They’re making their spear points here, so what we find are the old worn-out ones that they’re chucking away.’
So the Gault palaeoindian layers included Clovis artefacts, although most of them were waste flakes from making tools, like the ones I’d seen scattered on the ground. And there were animal bones, too. But there was no indication from these that the Clovis people at Gault were mammoth or big-game hunters. They seemed to be much more generalised, hunting and eating a great range of animals.1
And, in fact, this seems to be the picture that is now emerging as more Clovis sites are found or re-examined. The Clovis culture spread right across northern and central America, from coast to coast, and from southern Canada to Costa Rica. Recent radiocarbon dates have tightened its duration to a few hundred years, between 13,200 to 12,800 years ago.2 Certainly, many of these sites have produced Clovis points in association with mammoth skeletons (for example, at Dent in Colorado and Naco in Arizona), which have led to the suggestion that the Clovis people were specialised big-game hunters – who may even have brought about the extinction of the mammoths with their deadly effective weaponry. Although some archaeologists have suggested that the sites with mammoth remains and Clovis tools may represent scavenging of carcasses, there are several sites where Clovis points have been found in among the bones of mammoth skeletons, and these seem to prove beyond doubt that hunting of these great beasts did occur. And why not? The existence of massive animals that offered a huge return in terms of energy (imagine how many people you could feed with a mammoth), as well as the convenience of long-term storage during the Ice Age.3
But maybe these mammoth kill sites have produced a skewed view of Clovis people as big-game hunters. Mike Collins argued that Gault is one of a growing number of sites that indicate a more generalised approach to hunting. He also believed that, on a wider scale, the spread of Clovis sites across America spoke of a generalised approach to subsistence – one that was flexible enough to facilitate survival across a large range of environments – rather than a highly specialised form of hunting. Perhaps there are a lot of Clovis sites with mammoth remains because the large bones are exactly what caught the eye of the archaeologists in the first place.4
The less ‘spectacular’ sites paint a different picture, and Mike argues that these show the hunters in their true colours, as generalists, going after mammals ranging in size from raccoons and badgers to bison and mammoths. The diet at Gault also included small mammals, frogs and birds. And it’s not just the animal bones that made Mike doubt the myth of the mammoth hunter. The density of the occupation site at Gault suggests that these people were much less mobile than would be expected if they were (in the main) big-game hunters, tied in to following herd animals around a landscape. In contrast, the later Folsom culture of North America relates to highly mobile and highly specialised bison hunting.1 The stone tools themselves also imply a less mobile lifestyle: unlike some of the Clovis hunting camps and kill sites, where stone tools have often been transported hundreds of miles from the source of the stone, Gault is sited close to a convenient source of chert. More than 99 per cent of stone tools and waste flakes are made from that local stone.2, 4
More generally speaking, ‘foraging theory’, looking at the range and numbers of animals available at the end of the Ice Age, suggests that the early palaeoindians would have been much better off hunting whatever was available, rather than specialising in the large animals.5
But Mike doesn’t claim that Clovis hunters never went after big game. Animals such as mammoth, horse and bison formed part of their diet, but plant materials and smaller animals were generally more important.1 At the time of writing, there were at least twelve known Clovis mammoth or mastodon kill sites – compared with only six across the whole of Upper Palaeolithic Europe. Some archaeologists still argue that these proboscideans were important prey animals to Clovis people – albeit within a wider subsistence strategy – and that humans could have been instrumental in their extinction.2, 6 So, at the end of the day, it seems that labelling the Clovis people as mammoth hunters is not categorically wrong, but it’s a narrow stereotype, like saying the French exist exclusively on frogs’ legs (whereas, of course, they eat a much wider diet, including pâté de foie gras and snails as well …).
I felt I was getting closer to the truth about these early American hunters. At lunchtime we all sat in the shade of a tree, at the newly constructed picnic tables, to eat our sandwiches. After lunch, I went for a walk in the shady woods, beside a stream. The ground was littered with leaves and stone flakes. Next to the stream, lazing in the dappled sunlight, I saw a snake, a water moccasin, and walked very cautiously past it. Its eyes were open, but it didn’t move as I passed by. It would probably have constituted a tasty snack for those Clovis people.
That afternoon, Mike wanted to show me another trench from previous years’ excavations. Over the other side of the stream, just in the woods, was a deep pit.
‘What we’re really excited about, and the reason we’re digging right here, is that prev
ious tests in this part of the site tell us we also have a layer below Clovis. Older than Clovis …’
Mike pointed out layers near the bottom of the pit.
‘Right there is where we find Clovis artefacts, but we continue to get artefacts down 25 to 30cm below that.’
He took a few bags of artefacts out of his pocket to show me.
‘These,’ he said, carefully passing the small stone flakes to me, ‘are from that deep layer. They are pre-Clovis.’
‘But for years and years archaeologists have been saying that Clovis is the oldest culture in the Americas,’ I said.
‘That’s poppycock,’ he replied. ‘That’s a paradigm that we spent seventy years honing and most of it is wrong. The paradigm is shifting. What happens when you break down a paradigm, a long-held theory, is that intellectual chaos follows because you don’t know what the replacement theory is going to be.
‘We have a luminescence date on this layer of 14,400 years ago. That’s a thousand years before Clovis. It means we’ve got to rethink our ideas of the peopling of the Americas.’
For a long time, Clovis appeared to be the earliest archaeology in the Americas, so it seemed reasonable to assume that its makers were the first Americans. It also fitted rather beautifully with the timing of the melting back of the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets, to form an ice-free corridor. This parting of the ice is thought to have happened around 14,000 to 13,500 years ago – and Clovis starts to appear around 13,200 years ago.2 But a selection of sites across North and South America are now challenging the ‘Clovis first’ model. Gault was one of them. There were people in that valley long before the makers of the fine stone points arrived.
Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania has been proposed as another pre-Clovis site, where there is a suggestion of people having been present as early as 22,000 years ago, but the dates are controversial. It’s possible that natural coal in the area may have contaminated the samples from the site, meaning that radiocarbon dating overestimates the date.7
However, there are a growing number of sites with more reliable, pre-Clovis dates. At Schaefer and Hebior in Wisconsin, which would have been close to the southern edge of the Laurentide ice sheet, there’s evidence of hunting or scavenging of mammoths long before the distinctive Clovis culture emerged, between 14,200 and 14,800 years ago. There are also stone tools and the remains of extinct animals at Page-Ladson in Florida, dating to around 14,400 years ago, and at the Paisley Caves in Oregon, three human coprolites were found, dating to 14,100 years ago.2 It’s a patchy archaeological record, though. It would be nice if the archaeologists could find a well-dated occupation site, and maybe even some actual human remains from between 14,000 and 15,000 years ago. At the moment, there are just a few tantalising clues that humans were in North America that early: a handful of stone tools and flakes with animal bones, and some fossilised faeces.
Now, there are some sites that have been claimed to show a human presence earlier than 15,000 years ago, but the traces are very shadowy and the dates controversial. Four sites have recently come to the fore in the search for the earliest Americans: Cactus Hill in Virginia, La Sena in Nebraska, Lovewell in Kansas, and Topper in South Carolina. Topper, like Gault, has Clovis stone artefacts and older pre-Clovis stone tools in underlying sediments, dating to around 15,000 years ago. But in 2004, tools were found in even deeper layers at Topper, and the archaeologists have claimed that they may be in excess of – wait for it – 50,000 years old. But before we get too excited, these tools are not beautifully worked points or even things that are immediately recognisable as having been worked by human hand. They might just be natural. And with the archaeological and genetic data from Asia suggesting that the founding population there was not even in place before 40,000 years ago, this means we should view such a date for the Americas with profound scepticism.2
But it still seems likely that humans got into the Americas a long time before Clovis, maybe 15,000 years ago, perhaps even a bit earlier. In addition to the emerging archaeological clues, there’s the genetic suggestion of an earlier colonisation along that coastal route into the Americas, and the circumstantial evidence relating to the environment along that north-west coast.
For Mike Collins, Clovis getting knocked off its pedestal as the first culture in the Americas didn’t reduce its interest. It’s still fascinating as a phenomenon that stretched across a whole continent, and there are still unanswered questions. Where did it come from? How did it develop? There is no clearly antecedent culture in north-east Asia or Beringia, although there are some common components (such as those ivory foreshafts).
In fact, the closest stone toolkit to Clovis comes from a long way away, in western Europe. The similarity between Solutrean and Clovis points and blades is quite remarkable. Some archaeologists have even suggested that this indicates a completely different origin and route for the peopling of the Americas: from France and Spain, spreading around the North Atlantic.8 It’s an interesting idea, but there is really no other evidence to back this up, and a lot of problems with the suggested route: the Solutrean ended some 5000 years before Clovis started, there’s no evidence of any seafaring tradition in western Europe and the way would have been blocked by ice sheets.9, 10 And then, of course, there are the genes of the Native Americans, which seem firmly to indicate an Asian origin of these people. Having said that, some have argued that the X haplogroup found among Native Americans indicates a European connection – as X is also found in Europe. Actually, this is probably right – but the connection is a very ancient one. The X lineages found in Europe and America split some 30,000 years ago, when the ancestors of those particular groups of Native Americans and Europeans were living on the Siberian steppe, before they went their separate ways to the west and east.11 And recent genetic studies have picked up the X haplogroup among Mongolians, in the Altai region.10 So it seems that the similarity between the Solutrean and Clovis industries may just be coincidental: an example of cultural convergence in these two widely separated (in space and time) groups of Ice Age hunters.
(Months later, in a field in Exeter, back home in England, I was to meet Professor Bruce Bradley and his masters student, Metin Eren. Bruce was quite clear that his hypothesis about the Solutrean-Clovis link and a North Atlantic route into the Americas had not yet been refuted. Indeed, although the best-known Clovis sites were in the western US, he pointed out that the oldest and densest scatter of sites was in the east. As he put it: ‘It’s thicker than the fleas on a dog in south-eastern US.’ He was also much more convinced by the cultural connection between western Europe and North America, whereas, to him, the toolkit at Yana bore similarities to the Gravettian of Europe, but had no real links with American toolkits. This conversation made me realise that the first route into the Americas was still up for grabs – and Bruce and his colleagues were searching for evidence in the east. He was sure the Solutreans could have made their way, by sea, around the North Atlantic. After all, those people had bows and arrows, and spear-throwers. ‘The idea that they didn’t have boats – give me a break!’ exclaimed Bruce.)
The development and dispersal of Clovis is quite remarkable – in just a few hundred years it had spread through America. But if this wasn’t the culture carried by the first colonisers, how was it disseminated? Mike’s idea was that Clovis was a ‘technocomplex’ – a tool-making trend – taken up and shared by a wide range of ethnically diverse people whose ancestors had already dispersed across North America.4 Clovis spread rapidly during the last centuries of the warmish Allerod interstadial, and the overlap between dates from sites widely spaced across North America makes it impossible to know where exactly it started and in which direction it advanced. It disappears from the archaeological record almost as swiftly as it appeared, at the onset of the Younger Dryas stadial, being replaced with another toolkit, named after Folsom, where it was first found.2, 12 The date of the disappearance of Clovis takes us back to that comet impact idea. The black layer and the
beginning of the Younger Dryas seem to mark the end of the megafauna in the fossil record of North America, but also the end of Clovis in the archaeological record. So did that comet strike indeed finish off the mammoths and mastodons and sloths and create such environmental destruction that human survivors were forced to reinvent their subsistence and devise new toolkits?
Later that afternoon I met archaeologist Andy Hemmings for a practical demonstration of the deadly efficiency of Clovis hunting technology. He showed me how the fluted base of a Clovis point enabled it to be hafted into a notch on a shaft. He also showed me bone points, another characteristic feature of Clovis toolkits. Three bone and ivory hooks have been found, of Clovis age, that suggest these hunters used spear-throwers – atlatls – to launch darts.1 We had a go at throwing darts (both bone-tipped and metal-tipped – Andy wasn’t keen on breaking the precious stone tips), using an atlatl, at our target: a car door. It took me a while to get the hang of aiming the contraption, but, when I did, I managed to make a decent hole in the door. I was suitably impressed. The atlatl allowed the dart to be launched with such force that it penetrated sheet steel. And, in Andy’s capable hands, it was even more of a precise and vicious weapon. So the Clovis people certainly had the technology to kill massive animals like bison and mammoths – just not all the time.
It was now time for me to travel south and investigate the story in South America. There are no Clovis sites in Central or South America, although several of a similar age have yielded a basic flake technology which also includes some ‘fishtail’ points, some of which have fluted bases like Clovis points. But they are not Clovis: these sites represent different cultures, and adaptations to a very different environment, in South America – contemporary with Clovis sites in the north. One such site is Pedra Pintada, in the Brazilian Amazon, where excavations at the painted cave in the rainforest have yielded detailed information about the lifestyles of the South American palaeoindians. Sites like this constitute a significant challenge to any hangers-on of the ‘Clovis first’ theory, as it is hard to imagine how colonisers moving down through the ice corridor could have reached South America that quickly.
The Incredible Human Journey Page 39