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| Preface | vii | ||||
| Introduction | 1 | (18) | |||
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19 | (11) | |||
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30 | (12) | |||
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42 | (10) | |||
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52 | (10) | |||
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62 | (9) | |||
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71 | (12) | |||
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83 | (11) | |||
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94 | (12) | |||
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106 | (8) | |||
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114 | (13) | |||
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127 | (14) | |||
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141 | (11) | |||
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152 | (11) | |||
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163 | (9) | |||
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172 | (9) | |||
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181 | (12) | |||
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193 | (12) | |||
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205 | (14) | |||
| Picture Credits | 219 | (2) | |||
| Index | 221 |
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Chapter One
Blackwater Draw
9300-4000 B.C.
Paleoindian and Archaic cultures
in New Mexico
For centuries the world wondered about the Indian tenure in America. Could people have been in the Americas for thousands of years, or were American Indians a relatively recent arrival? The issue was finally resolved in 1927 at Folsom, New Mexico, where human artifacts associated with the bones of long-extinct animals provided unimpeachable evidence that humans--now called Paleoindians--had lived in the New World since the late Pleistocene.
Once archaeologists knew what to look for, new evidence of ancient Americans proliferated. In 1932 another startling discovery occurred about 150 miles (240 kilometers) south of Folsom. A road construction crew digging in a gravel pit near Clovis plowed up a large but extremely well-made stone tool, not far from a huge animal tooth. Archaeologists were notified and important excavations soon began at a site known as Blackwater Draw. Seven decades later, archaeologist George Frison would call it "the most significant Paleoindian site in North America."
The Clovis Discovery
Blackwater Draw is located on the Llano Estacado (Staked Plain), the southernmost extension of the High Plains. The Llano is one of the flattest landscapes on earth, an almost featureless plateau covering 50,000 square miles (130,000 square kilometers). There are no flowing streams, the only permanent water sources being the smallish lake basins called playas that commonly cover 5 or 6 square miles (13-16 square kilometers), although they were once much larger.
During the Pleistocene, water streamed through Blackwater Draw, a drainage channel flowing across the western edge of the Llano Estacado. But by the time people arrived here, the climate was already changing, drying the stream into several shallow, seasonal ponds that filled only during periods of runoff. Large mammals--mammoths, bison, and others--were naturally attracted to these ponds, as were their human hunters.
After learning of the finds at Blackwater Draw, archaeologists from the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania Museum began serious work there. E. B. Howard led the charge. He had several things on his mind. The scientific community agreed that people had been in North America for several thousand years before the onset of the Christian era (as it was called then), but Howard saw the need to learn much more about the geological, paleontological, and archaeological sequences of these earliest occupations.
The original gravel pit exposure would eventually become known as Blackwater Draw Locality No. 1. But Blackwater Draw itself extends for miles and contains several "blowouts" of eroded bone and the occasional Paleoindian artifact. Today these other fossil areas have prosaic names like the Oasis Park Locality, the Barrow Pit Locality, and the Model-T (Car Body) Locality.
Howard soon picked up some important stratigraphic relationships in these various exposures. He was well aware of geology's principle of superposition: All else being equal, older deposits tend to be buried beneath younger ones. In his regional reconnaissance, Howard observed that the overlying windblown brownish sand contained evidence of more recent pottery-making people. But Folsom-like spearpoints and extinct animal bones were turned up only in the underlying bluish-gray sands, in places where the top sands had been blown away.
Then in 1936-1937 came the real breakthrough. Excavating below the Folsom strata, Howard's team found an unquestionable association between pre-Folsom artifacts and the remains of Columbian mammoths (American elephants). Now Howard and his protégé John Cotter began to search for more subtle differences in the early artifacts they were finding. They soon zeroed in on the characteristically well-made spear points.
Without doubt, several different kinds of projectile points were present at Blackwater Draw, and Howard's team set about trying to separate them. They knew that small, exquisitely made points had been found in some abundance in 1926-1928 at the Folsom site. Terming these "true Folsom points," Howard and Cotter described them as thin, fairly small, and leaf-shaped. Their chief characteristic was a longitudinal groove (the "flute") running along each side or, sometimes, just one face. "True Folsom points" had a concave base, with small earlike projections. The secondary chipping was very fine, showing remarkable control of the flaking tool. Although these spear points are only about 2 inches (5 centimeters) long, up to 150 minute sharpening flakes were sometimes removed from their surface. In an article published in American Naturalist in 1936, Howard called them "the finest examples of the stone-flaking art (319)."
Howard plotted the distribution of "true Folsom" finds, noting that they occurred only in Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico. He traveled to Europe and Russia, studying museum collections from Siberia and elsewhere, searching for prototypes of the distinctive Folsom finds, but he failed to find any. He concluded that if Folsom point technology was not imported, it must have evolved in America. Such an extraordinarily well-made artifact tradition probably did not spring up overnight. The distinctive true Folsom points, Howard argued in the same article, must have been "preceded by other cruder forms which have not yet come to be recognized (319)."
The 1937 excavations at Blackwater Draw clearly confirmed the contemporaneity of humans and mammoths in North America. Because the finds occurred in a deeply buried sand level, there was the promise of establishing a still-earlier sequence of early human artifacts. As Howard had speculated, the mammoth-associated spear points differed in several important respects from true Folsom points, chiefly by being longer and heavier. Howard and Cotter called these larger, earlier, and cruder fluted points "Folsom-like."
Howard suggested an age of perhaps ten thousand years as a conservative estimate for the earliest finds at Blackwater Draw. But when project geologist Ernst Antevs evaluated the geological and paleoclimatological evidence, he expanded the estimate to 12,000 to 13,000 years--a remarkably accurate deduction given the lack of independent dating techniques, such as radiocarbon dating, at the time.
The work of Howard, Cotter, and Antevs at Blackwater Draw stands out as the first truly multidisciplinary attempt to reconstruct late Pleistocene environments in the New World. They not only conducted careful archaeological excavations of the cultural remains, but also initiated detailed stratigraphic and paleoclimatic studies of the sediments and paleontological analysis of the abundant fossil assemblages. They even tried to recover microscopic pollen grains from the ancient sediments.
Refining the Sequence
The Texas Memorial Museum, under the direction of E. H. Sellards and G. L. Evans, conducted excavations at Blackwater Draw in 1949 and 1950, concentrating mostly on clarifying the cultural and stratigraphic sequence of the site. They confirmed conclusively that Columbian mammoth fossils existed only in the lower fills at Blackwater Draw. They also determined that the Folsom-like points were restricted to the lowest strata at the site. Sellards and Evans dropped the name "Folsom-like" in favor of "Clovis Fluted" and applied the overall term "Llano complex" to the cultural materials recovered from this basal stratum. Above it, in the overlying brown sand stratum, they found true Folsom-style projectile points associated with bones of extinct bison. But mammoth and horse bones were conspicuously absent in this stratum.
Although the stratigraphic details have been refined somewhat since then, Sellards and Evans clearly documented the major significance of the Blackwater Draw deposits: For the first time, it became clear that the elephant-hunting Llano or Clovis complex underlies--and therefore is older than--the bison-hunting Folsom complex. Later still is a third Paleoindian tradition that Sellards called the Portales complex, characterized by well-made but unfluted points. These excavations established the basis of the Paleoindian sequence that archaeologists still use today.
Archaeologists around the world now use the term "Clovis" for the earliest well-documented culture in Native America. In western North America, Clovis sites consistently date between 11,500 and 10,900 B.P.; in eastern North America, fluted point assemblages date slightly later, between 10,600 and 10,200 B.P. Such sites contain thousands of diagnostic artifacts--not only the signature Clovis points but also specialized tools used to process various extinct animal parts.
The Clovis complex provides the earliest well-dated association of human cultural and skeletal remains with extinct animals in North America. The best-known Clovis sites, including Blackwater Draw, are mammoth kills. Bison, jackrabbit, and birds are also evident at several Clovis sites, including Lehner Ranch and Murray Springs in Arizona. Other foods, such as nuts, seeds, berries, fish, and fowl, were locally available. The Shawnee-Minisink site in Pennsylvania contained seeds from nearly ten species of plants. Investigators have found grinding stones, probably for processing seeds and roots, at several Clovis sites, and some stone knives show a distinctive polish, apparently from harvesting of grasses.
Current Views on Blackwater Draw
Geoarchaeologist C. Vance Haynes has refined the Blackwater Draw stratigraphic sequence. The age of the precultural basal gravel unit (Stratum A) at Blackwater Draw is unknown. These commercial-grade sand and gravel units lie in an ancient stream channel, ultimately deriving from the mountains to the west. They were deposited sometime before the Pecos River captured the Blackwater Draw drainage.
In the depression above the gravels is a fill unit (Stratum B) consisting of gray or "speckled" sand, up to 5 feet (1.5 meters) thick in places, thinning out somewhat toward the margins of the depression. This unit is overlain on the eastern part of the depression by a wedge of springlaid brown sand (Stratum C). The upper part of this unit contains Clovis points in association with mammoth remains, and dates between 11,000 and 12,000 years old. The lower part of Stratum D contains Folsom-style artifacts.
Previous investigators (including Howard and Sellards) believed that Clovis artifacts occurred in the gray sand (Stratum B). But more recent microstratigraphic research demonstrates that the Clovis artifacts had actually worked their way down from Stratum C to Stratum B when that unit was fluidized by later spring activity. Part of the Clovis occupation is therefore assigned to the overlying spring deposits of the brown sand wedge.
The most distinctive Clovis-age fossil is the Columbian mammoth, deposited as both more or less complete skeletons and isolated parts. Also found in Stratum C are remains of horses, camel, bison, turtles, and various small mammals. Two mammoths that Cotter found, now assigned to Stratum C, were heavily butchered with all bones disarticulated, except for part of one vertebral column. One carcass had a fire built on top, suggesting that some of the meat was cooked and eaten immediately after the kill. Clovis artifacts occur in unquestionable association with these mammoth carcasses.
In Paleoindian times, Blackwater Draw was a series of shallow seasonal ponds that collected sediment during runoff periods. Because these ponds attracted large animals such as mammoths and bison, they became prime spots for Clovis hunters who either ambushed watering animals or followed animals wounded elsewhere. Excavations at Blackwater Draw suggest that a camping area existed along the edge of the former pond, with the kills taking place 100 to 200 feet (30 to 60 meters) from the shoreline.
The Folsom complex appeared about 10,900 years ago and survived for perhaps six centuries. Mammoths were extinct by Folsom times, and the Blackwater Draw hunters targeted mainly a now-extinct form of bison, as well as occasional pronghorn antelope and mountain sheep. Not as widespread as Clovis remains, Folsom remains are confined to the Great Plains, American Southwest, and the central and southern reaches of the Rocky Mountains.
Paleoindian bison hunters of the North American plains must have been intimately familiar with the landscape and the habits of bison. According to George Frison, they used the best weapons known anywhere in the world at the time. Communal bison hunts were staged with regularity, some Paleoindian sites showing repeated use over several thousand years. Judging from the teeth of the bison killed, communal hunts usually took place in late autumn and winter. The hunters probably froze surplus meat temporarily, then placed it in protective caches to be used as needed.
The overlying Stratum D is made up of diatoms--minute planktonic algae--in a matrix of clay and sand. They were deposited in the quiet waters of a shallow pond that fluctuated between fresh and saline conditions during what was probably a time of dropping water levels, increased evaporation rate, and decreased precipitation. This stratum contains a huge bone bed made up of hundreds of bison skeletons. Neither mammoth nor horse occurs here. Folsom points are found in Stratum D, as are a variety of stone butchering tools.
The dark gray carbonaceous silt of Stratum E contains extinct bison remains and artifacts accompanied by later Paleoindian materials, generally known as Plano (which has replaced Sellards's "Portales complex"). The archaeological evidence indicates that extinct bison were hunted as late as seven thousand years ago.
An erosional hiatus occurs at the top of Stratum E, suggesting a period of extreme aridity between about 5000 and 3000 B.C. Numerous ancient wells were dug at this time, extending 4 to 6 feet (1 to 2 meters) below the ground surface to reach the dropping water table. The ancient well-diggers first cut a circle through the massive clay and diatomaceous earth layer, penetrating the underlying water-bearing sands, which they then easily scooped out to deepen the well. Most of these wells were refilled shortly after use, perhaps to keep them from drying up or being used by enemies. Remarkably similar wells have been found elsewhere on the southern High Plains, suggesting an interval of extremely arid climatic conditions.
Stratum F is a brown eolian (wind-deposited) sand that contains post-Paleoindian archaeological materials from the Archaic period. The uppermost layer, a tan eolian sand called Stratum G, also contains Archaic deposits. This sand-dune sequence shows that the water table has not reached the surface of Blackwater Draw for the past five thousand years. In a climate that probably ranged from warm temperate to hot, Plains Indian groups hunted modern bison here, and they must also have been drawn to the lakes at Blackwater Draw --one of the few water sources on the Llano Estacado. Modern horse bones occur in the uppermost portion, showing that this top stratum persisted into the era of Euroamerican contact.
First American Lifestyles
Blackwater Draw's basic archaeological story is a robust stratigraphic sequence that systematically stacked up the stones and bones of the past. But Clovis people were not stones and bones. They were human beings--the first Americans. We cannot project ourselves back in time and will never encounter a Clovis person firsthand, but we can learn about the past from other, more recent hunting groups, such as the Inuit (Eskimo) caribou hunters and the postcontact bison hunters of the Great Plains. Such knowledge allows us to speculate about what life in Clovis times might have been like.
Clovis men and women must have faced extinction daily. They lived close to the land, and America during the Pleistocene was a tough, unforgiving place. One critical mistake and a hunter could suffer serious injury. If he died, his family was immediately at risk. Clovis hunters competed one-on-one for food with fierce predators and scavengers. Once they acquired food, they had to guard it carefully against this competition.
THE GREAT AMERICAN DIE-OFF
The first Americans witnessed one of the world's most dramatic episodes of extinction. Before their eyes, Clovis hunters saw native animal species die out in droves. The large herbivores were the hardest hit--the 20-foot-long (6-meter-long) ground sloths, giant beavers the size of modern bears, horses, camels, mammoths, mastodons, and musk oxen. As the ecological noose tightened, the carnivores soon followed--the sabertooth cat with its 8-inch (20- centimeter) canines, the American cheetah and lion, and the dire wolf. Perhaps most impressive was the short-faced bear, twice the size of today's grizzly. In North America alone, three dozen mammalian genera disappeared.
Some paleontologists blame the ancestral American Indian for hunting these animals into extinction. Is it mere coincidence, they wonder, that the extinctions took place immediately after Clovis hunters first showed up in the Americas? Perhaps because the large herbivores had never before confronted a two-legged predator, these beasts lacked the necessary defenses, and the Clovis hunters took merciless advantage. Paul Martin's so-called "Overkill Hypothesis" suggests that as Clovis people blitzed their way southward, they carelessly left in their wake the bones of animals rapidly passing into extinction.
Most modern scientists have problems with the Overkill Hypothesis. They emphasize instead the degree to which the Clovis people were themselves at risk during a period of rapid global warming. As the climate changed, sea levels rose, growing seasons became longer, and snowfall and annual precipitation decreased significantly.
Many smaller mammals could adapt to these shifting conditions by modifying their ranges. But the larger ones--the mammoths, mastodons, camels, and horses--placed greater demands on their environments. Unable to cope with their transformed surroundings, they were pushed beyond the brink to extinction.
Maybe human hunters did play a role in wiping out certain animal populations. But most scientists now believe that these animals fell victim to a rapidly changing climate. Clovis people adapted. The extinct megafauna did not.
WHAT ABOUT PRE-CLOVIS AMERICANS?
Despite decades of research, documenting a human presence in the Americas before Clovis has been difficult. Today, a handful of pre-Clovis sites have been documented in North America, the best known being Meadowcroft Shelter (Pennsylvania). This site consists of several occupation surfaces with firepits, stone tools and flintknapping debris, part of a wooden spear, a piece of basketry, and two human bone fragments. On the basis of a sequence of fifty-two radiocarbon dates, archaeologist James Adovasio believes that the Meadowcroft occupation extends (at a minimum) from 14,000-14,500 B.P. to A.D. 1776.
For years, most archaeologists question Adovasio's conclusion. Early stone tools at Meadowcroft are rare and nearly identical to much later artifacts. Characteristic Paleoindian artifacts and Pleistocene megafauna are absent. Although the ice front would have been less than 75 kilometers to the north, the local vegetation around Meadowcroft Shelter seems to have been temperate. But by the late 1990s, corroborative evidence had turned up elsewhere, apparently confirming Meadowcroft Shelter as a viable pre-Clovis occupation.
The most compelling proof of a pre-Clovis occupation comes from Monte Verde, an open-air residential site in the cool temperate rain forests of southern Chile. Tom Dillehay and his colleagues have encountered four distinct zones of buried cultural remains there. Nearly one dozen house foundations and fallen pole-frames of residential huts have been excavated, and fragments of hide (perhaps mastodon) still cling to the poles. Abundant plant remains are associated with the archaeological deposits, as well as numerous shaped stone tools. Because of the muddy matrix, other organic remains have been preserved here, including chunks of meat, wild potatoes, seaweed, and wooden tools. Dillehay believes that the upper layers contain evidence of a human presence between about 12,800 and 12,300 B.P., and most archaeologists accept his conclusion. More controversial are the deeper layers at Monte Verde, which have produced two radiocarbon dates of 33,000 B.P., perhaps associated with stone tools and clay-lined pits.
Monte Verde is critical to our understanding of native North America. Not only does this site break the so-called Clovis barrier, but Monte Verde lies 10,000 miles south of the Bering Straits. Perhaps humans migrated by some route other than the land bridge. Perhaps they left Asia much earlier than previously thought. Or maybe both. Today, the earliest occupation of the Americas appears to be more complex than most twentieth-century archaeologists realized.
Archaeologist George Frison believes that life in earliest America centered on the family. Although capable of great self-sufficiency, Clovis people lived in small informal bands, consisting of perhaps four to ten nuclear families. Political leadership, such as it was, probably fell to a dominant male who derived his authority from well-advertised exploits as hunter and provider. Each band hailed from a traditional territory where men hunted everything but mates. To marry within the band was incestuous.
In times of plenty, Clovis bands gathered together from throughout their broad territories. The elders gambled and exchanged food and gossip. The young people played their own games of skill. They compared adventures and they fell in love.
Hunters spent their lives on familiar ground. Growing up, they discovered the nature and needs of their homeland: how to stalk, where to hide, how the wind worked, how animals behaved when startled. They believed that mammoths and long-horned bison voluntarily made themselves available to humans, but only in exchange for a measure of deference. Disrespect was an affront that not only sabotaged the hunt but also threatened the success of later hunters. Religious specialists were sometimes required to assure appropriate etiquette toward the supernatural.
Reciprocity might have been another survival secret. Regardless of who killed an animal or harvested a plant, everyone was entitled to a share. Even the most esteemed hunter or gatherer of plants would fail sometimes, and the prudent practice of sharing shielded all from short-term setbacks. Great honor was accorded both to those who provided best and to those who shared most willingly. Food hoarding was probably a public and criminal transgression.
Clovis people continued to adapt through the centuries, expanding their range and exploiting the dwindling resources of the open grassland. Then, about 11,000 years ago, the Clovis lifeway became as extinct as the mammoths that the Clovis people hunted. But most archaeologists believe that, one way or another, modern American Indian people are descended from these Clovis pioneers.
Further Reading
The best single source on Paleoindians in North America is Search for the First Americans by David J. Meltzer (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993). Other important sources include the following: Clovis: Origins and Adaptations by Robson Bonnichsen and Karen L. Turmire (Corvallis: Center for the Study of the First Americans, Oregon State University, 1991); The First Americans: Search and Research edited by Tom D. Dillehay and David J. Meltzer (Boca Raton, FL: CRS Press, 1991); Prehistoric Hunters of the High Plains , second edition, by George C. Frison (San Diego: Academic Press, 1991); Paleoindian Geoarchaeology of the Southern High Plains by Vance T. Holliday (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997); From Kostenki to Clovis: Upper Paleolithic-Paleo-Indian Adaptations , edited by Olga Soffer and N. D. Praslov (New York: Plenum Press, 1993); and Ice Age Hunters of the Rockies , edited by Dennis J. Stanford and Jane S. Day (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1992).
The evidence for Monte Verde is discussed in Monte Verde: A Late Pleistocene Settlement in Chile. Volume 1. Paleoenvironment and Site Context (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988) and Volume 2. The Archaeological Context and Interpretation (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), both by Tom D. Dillehay.
Further Viewing
Blackwater Draw Locality No. 1 (Clovis, NM; 5 miles [8 kilometers] from the south gate of Cannon Air Force Base on SR 467) is open to the public; guided tours are available daily. The nearby Blackwater Draw Museum (Clovis, NM; 12 miles [19 kilometers] south on SR 70) has numerous displays of extinct animals and the ancient weaponry used to hunt them.
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