A critical but particularly difficult aspect of identifying the origin of a specific population is establishing the existence of historical relationships between it and other archaeological cultures. It is one thing to look at a group of artifacts and say they are alike, another to conclude that the likeness indicates that they are related. In Stone Age archaeology we get only minuscule glimpses of the human record, and we seldom have solid information about the more abstract, nonphysical characteristics—such as language, religious beliefs, mythology, music, philosophy, and symbolism—that we tend to use to define culture and ethnicity. Archaeologists are obliged to focus on tool forms, settlement patterns, subsistence strategies, and other features that exist within the natural world, and therefore some come to think that the natural environment is the major determining force in culture. We see both natural and social environments as having strong influences on the choices people make.
To understand and reconstruct broad historical connections between archaeological cultures, we have to clarify our assumptions. At what scale is it probable that two assemblages originated from a common base? When is it more likely that they are similar because there are a limited number of ways to make and use tools? In flaked stone technology (and elsewhere), the more generalized the level of similarity, the greater the chance of independent invention. Bifacial flaking is a basic approach to making usable tools and therefore very likely to have been independently developed by unrelated peoples. By contrast, the more complex the process and the greater the number of choices it entails, the less likely that it and even similar techniques would have been devised independently in different places. For example, the fluting of projectile points seems to be limited in time and space. The technical and conceptual complexities are such that most researchers would agree that fluted projectile points are probably historically related.
It is appropriate at this point to ponder the meaning of independent invention. With only a few known exceptions, all people around the world at one time made stone tools. Archaeologists have established that stone flaking in Africa can be traced back at least 2.5 million years, and most of us presume that its invention was a single event from which all subsequent Stone Age technologies descended.1 Only if it were shown that an ancient group had been isolated from sources of flakable stone for a long time and then started flaking when its members moved to an area with suitable raw material where there weren’t already people to learn from would we consider the possibility that they reinvented the process.
When Upper Paleolithic blade-making people abandoned blades and produced flakes instead, was this an invention? Weren’t their ancestors making flakes during the Middle Paleolithic? Was this then reinvention? What influence might mythology and history have had on the reintroduction of an ancient technology? Can the same questions be asked of specific specialized flaking techniques and methods?
Complex biface thinning appeared around 25,000 years ago in a small part of southwestern Europe and lasted for a relatively short time. How are we to determine whether this was a local invention, an import, or the resurgence of an ancestral technology? In the first instance we would have to identify a developmental sequence in the area. In the second we would have to find an earlier example that could have been brought there. In the third we would have to trace the history of the culture back through time and space. All of these approaches are extremely difficult to accomplish.
We presume that most needs for basic stone tools were the same worldwide and that they were met through intentional tool manufacture. To butcher an animal, people needed sharp, durable cutting edges. To turn an animal hide into usable leather, a scraping tool was required. We also presume that Stone Age peoples operated within established flaked stone technological traditions and that when the need arose for a new tool, their first avenue of experimentation would have been within the tradition they knew. Since different technologies can be used to produce equally functional tools, we see a plethora of different tool forms developed and used to accomplish the same tasks.
An excellent example of this is provided by comparing the projectile points at the sites of Amvrosievka, Ukraine, and Horner, Wyoming.2 In both places many large bison were killed with stone projectile points and subsequently butchered with stone tools. At Amvrosievka the flaked stone projectile point tradition was inset blade: segments of small blades were glued into grooves cut along the sides of sharpened bone points. At Horner single points made in a bifacial tradition were hafted to a spear or dart. Even though they represented very different technological traditions, both weapon systems were effective.
Just how strongly do people hang onto their traditional technology? One extreme case saw a new, unfit raw material bent to technology instead of the converse. During the Middle Paleolithic, between approximately 50,000 and 100,000 years ago, Europe, western Asia, and North Africa had a highly formalized and complex flake production technology now called Levallois. A core was created so that a single large flake, the same shape as the core, could be produced. These flakes were used as and modified into tools. The cores were then shaped into disks, with one face having a low, evenly convex face. After careful platform preparation, a flake was struck from this face that was also basically disk-shaped and had sharp edges all around, except for the platform. Once developed, this technology survived for millennia with a tenacity seldom seen elsewhere in the archaeological record.
At some point, people who used the Levallois technique occupied an area along the Middle Nile River. The only flakable stone there was small pebbles, less than 10 centimeters long, of fine-grained flint, with hard exterior surfaces and rounded sides and ends. It is extremely difficult to flake these pebbles within the Levallois tradition. To archaeologists and modern knappers, who expect the form and size of stone to influence technology, this would have been an ideal situation for a change in technique. Nevertheless, the Levallois tradition was so strong that the Middle Paleolithic knappers found a way to stick to it. First they knocked off both ends of the intractable pebbles, producing sharp opposing angles. Then they removed small bladelets from both ends, overlapping in the middle of the core. One end was used to prepare a typical Levallois faceted platform, from which was struck a Levallois flake.
In my experience this technique is a real challenge, and there is no indication that the bladelets were used. This is an absolutely amazing example of imposing a traditional technology on a difficult stone form. Once a Levallois knapper, always and only a Levallois knapper. Bruce
Once traditions have become established, how they changed and what contributed to the changes are important archaeological issues. One of the new theoretical orientations, called processual archaeology, bases many of its assumptions on adaptation as an explanation for change in the archaeological record.3 This approach sees independent invention of the same technologies as a possible adaptive response to similar conditions. In flaked stone technology, adaptation could be expressed by the appearance of new tool types to exploit a changing or new environment or the adjustment of a technology to allow for exploitation of new stone sources. But although we recognize the influence of changing stone sources on flaked stone technologies, we presume that people would have imposed their traditional technology on new situations before trying something altogether different. We also disagree with processual archaeology’s underlying assumption that early people would have experimented to find the most effective and efficient way to make the tools they needed and accomplish necessary tasks. The archaeological record does not always support this “evolutionary technology” concept. Earlier technology may have been about achieving not perfection but simple adequacy.
How does all of this relate to our goal of identifying the origins of Clovis? We see Clovis flaked stone technology as distinctive, highly developed, and complex. This implies an antecedent with significant history; that is, Clovis is a “deep technology,” the result of long-term development. It is unlikely that this complicated and effective approach to making stone tools was a rapid adaptation to particular local conditions. Its extraordinary utility is implied by its success in virtually every known ecological setting from the subarctic to the subtropics. This technology was imposed on diverse local environments and conditions rather than created by them.
If Clovis did not appear fully developed, where and in what technologies should we be looking for an antecedent? Based on what we know about flaked stone traditions at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum, we find three possibilities: Beringia, inset blade / thick biface; Eurasia, blade; and southwestern Europe, thinned biface/blade. In the present chapter we begin to evaluate these possibilities with quantitative comparisons of pre-Clovis, Clovis, Beringian, and European Upper Palaeolithic flaked stone technologies. Then, in chapter 7 we move to more qualitative comparisons of other aspects of these cultures: artifact form and function, cultural innovation, subsistence patterns, environmental settings, art, and specific human behaviors.
As we have pursued this study, the limitations of the available data have become abundantly clear. For the most part they follow from the small number of investigated sites and their poor state of preservation. With few exceptions only stone and the most durable of organic artifacts, such as bone tools, have survived, and then in only a few sites. This is true for not only whole time periods but whole regions. There is also great variation in the manner in which sites have been investigated and reported and their artifact assemblages analyzed. In many excavations before World War II, only the artifacts that were considered important or interesting were kept. Many “lesser” and broken pieces were discarded before being studied. It is difficult to determine from reports whether or not all artifacts were retained or what the selection criteria were. More than 85 percent of all French Solutrean sites were excavated before 1940, and few have detailed reports. The spoil heaps from these excavations are littered with flakes, bone scraps, and broken tools. Fortunately, by the late 1950s the work of François Bordes, Hallam Movius, and André Leroi-Gourhan had transformed the methodology of Paleolithic archaeology in France, and the more recent Solutrean excavations, such as those by Lawrence Straus and his colleagues in northern Spain and Thierry Aubry and his colleagues in France, have been painstakingly documented, with all artifacts and many environmental samples retained.4
The sizes of samples are highly variable because of differential preservation, recovery method, and the size of the area excavated. Unfortunately, there seems to be an inverse relationship between the care of excavation and the size of the sample. For example, Straus and crew worked meticulously at La Riera, but by the time they got down to the lower Solutrean deposits they were able to excavate only five square meters. However, today’s archaeology has so many analytical methods available that large samples can be an impediment to study. We want to know everything we can about what we recover, so we tend to recover less and analyze it more thoroughly. This approach has led to advances in understanding technology, ancient environments, and intra-site organization, but it has also meant that fewer sites and smaller areas have been investigated. This raises the thorny issue of how to realistically compare site assemblages consisting of tens of objects—including those collected in previous decades, when only portions of the artifacts were taken—with those having tens of thousands.
Another difficulty is our having to rely on secondary publications in situations where either the primary data was not published or we didn’t have access to it. Some sites have been summarized in several books, with major discrepancies among the reports. These usually take the form of different numbers and types of artifacts being reported. Which do we use as our reference? Generally speaking we have relied on the most recent reports. Although these discrepancies do not alter the overall interpretations of the major archaeological culture reconstructions, they inhibit detailed inter-site comparisons. But we contend that even with all of these limitations, archaeologists must keep going back to the available materials and information. We may be able to apply new analysis techniques and tease more information out of the existing collections. This exercise also helps to identify gaps in our data.
Considering the types of archaeological data we have or can acquire through additional analyses, how do we make our comparisons? Does it make sense to compare an assemblage of a score of artifacts from a special-function site with a sample of thousands from a long-term habitation? The obvious answer is that it does not. Why not group the sites into classes and compare within those categories? The answer is once again sample size. When it is possible to identify sites with a similar function, there are often only a few in each category, and these frequently come from huge geographic areas and are of different ages.
With all of these problems, should we just give up and admit the task is impossible or fall back on our subjective feel for similarities? Obviously we should do neither. It is possible to find methods that allow comparisons to be made from which we can draw conclusions, albeit with many qualifiers. This is what we have chosen to do.
To achieve a more robust analytical comparison, we have combined assessments of typological and technological traits, because these are most likely to represent cultural norms across sites that may not include the whole range of activities of an archaeological culture. For example, it is easy enough to say that all the archaeological assemblages we are considering as possibly related to Clovis have flaked stone tools. Everybody agrees, though, that this is not enough similarity upon which to base an interpretation of historical relationship. However, archaeologists commonly compare artifact inventories in conjunction with time and space relationships to identify historical connections, such as Denali deriving from Dyuktai.
The next requirement for establishing the historical connections among sites or assemblages is identifying their relationships in time. For example, it may be possible to make a case for a historical connection between archaeological cultures in Siberia and Alaska, but if the Alaskan material is older than the Siberian, the obvious interpretation is that the culture originated in Alaska and spread into Siberia rather than the other way around. Many sites and assemblages have not been dated and are chronologically placed by their geological context or typological similarity to dated assemblages, some of which are themselves indirectly dated. It is not our purpose here to reevaluate the dating of all these sites and assemblages. The dates we use are the most current we could find in the published literature. We do not, however, include some that may be chronologically mixed or whose dating depends solely on possible similarities to other poorly dated assemblages. (See the appendix for table A.1, which shows the assemblages we use.) We also group dates into large categories, primarily indicating whether they are earlier than, contemporaneous with, or later than 13,000–14,000 years ago. Although our conclusions about historical relationships among archaeological cultures are based on what we know about their chronological nearness or distance, this is not our overriding criterion.
Physical closeness among sites or assemblages is commonly used by many researchers to make interpretations about possible historical connections, although this is also based on our individual assumptions about what physical connections were possible in the past. It is a function not just of distance but also of what the perceived difficulties of travel might have been. The land connection—not the distance—between Alaska and Siberia is the main argument for the current dominant paradigm of Beringia as the origin of people in the New World. Of course physical distance is an important consideration, but we contend that the best criterion for comparison is typological and technological similarity combined with dating, which informs us about the probability of physical connections. We think that New World origin issues have frequently been approached backward: an evaluation of likely routes of movement led to a theory, which archaeological information was then gathered to support.
Tool typology has been used for decades to define and compare archaeological cultures. A standard approach of many archaeologists is to determine tool type proportions within site assemblages and then construct cumulative graphs. They then use correspondences and differences to evaluate relationships among the assemblages. Wide divergences are explained as the product of different archaeological cultures or indications of different site functions or both.
In this study we expand these comparisons by adding technological attributes. Our basic assumption is that there are different ways to make tools and different tools to serve the same purpose and that choices in different technological traditions distinguish archaeological cultures. In addition, we accept that early humans incorporated abstract concepts into the forms and designs of the tools they made. Some designs and even the process of manufacture itself may have had symbolic meaning or even ritual function. The less a particular tool attribute can be shown to be necessary to its physical use, the more likely this attribute was culturally rather than functionally determined. An example of this is corner versus side notching of projectile points: although both served the same function and were fit to purpose, they were produced in these different forms.
Archaeological cultures with a high degree of similarity in the way their artifacts were made, as well as in the abstract and symbolic aspects of their artifacts’ forms and other characteristics, are likely to have a common ancestor. James Adovasio has shown us how this fact can be graphically applied to textile analysis and interpretation, and the same is true for flaked stone.5 It is possible to devise a hierarchical chart with the simplest attributes at the top and the more complex ones toward the bottom. Symbolic aspects of the artifact (e.g., design styles) add even more specificity. Correspondences at the top may be fortuitous, but as they continue down the chart the more likely they are to be historically related.
Since raw material type and initial fracturing are universal features of stone flaking, their similarities in different assemblages do not inform us about possible historical relationships except at the dawn of stone tool making. How materials were selected and manipulated, however, does have the potential to help us identify more recent historical relatedness. This approach is most informative when applied to complex manufacturing technologies, such as bifacial projectile point or blade and microblade production.
We have designed a simple dynamical systems analysis (DSA) diagram that illustrates where two technologies are the same and where they diverge. Flaked stone tool production requires a series of decisions among a number of possibilities. Each action modifies the object, and the following decisions have to take the former results into account. Flaked stone technology is a sequence of causes and effects. Since there are almost always viable options, the choices of action represent the technological framework in which the knapper operates.
FIGURE 6.1.
Dynamic systems analysis chart of Beringian Sluiceway biface, Clovis point, and French Solutrean laurel leaf manufacturing sequences.
Since each manufacturing process begins with the simplest choices, correspondences between different technologies at these steps do not inform us about possible historical relationships. But as flaking continues, correspondence between two technologies is increasingly likely to be the result of a common ancestral technology. Along with sequencing, it is equally important to see where and how the processes diverge. The greater the number of divergences, the earlier they begin to occur in the sequence, and the more divergences there are in a sequence, the more likely the technologies are unrelated.
To illustrate this method we compared the manufacturing sequences of French Solutrean laurel leafs, Clovis points, and Beringian Sluiceway bifaces (one of the earliest kinds of Alaskan bifacial points). We examined identifiable flaking actions in the generalized production sequence from the beginning of the process to the finished piece.6 The resulting DSA diagrams show distinct differences and similarities (figure 6.1).7 The Solutrean and Clovis sequences are identical nearly to the end and diverge in only one attribute (basal treatment), whereas the Beringian sequence deviates early (with proportional shaping versus overshot thinning) from both the Solutrean and Clovis, maintains the divergence through several steps, corresponds for one trait (bifacial pressure flaking), diverges again, and finally corresponds for the last trait (lower margin grinding). These diagrams indicate that there is a much greater likelihood of a relationship between Clovis point and Solutrean laurel leaf technologies than between Sluiceway and laurel leaf or Sluiceway and Clovis technologies.
The similarities between Solutrean laurel leaf and Clovis point manufacture are remarkable, from the initial selection of raw material, which displays a preference for exotic stones, through the final edge treatment. Even the details of flaking are virtually identical (figure 6.2). Both technologies incorporated overshot flaking as the main method of biface thinning, especially during the early and middle stages (table 6.1). They also used the overshot technique to remove square edges. The spacing of the thinning flakes was wide, so only two to four needed to be removed from each face to produce a flat biface. In both systems, thinning flakes were frequently removed from the same face by alternating between edges. Even the preparation of flake platforms was the same. Both used isolated, projected, released ground platforms that were designed to be straight rather than convex.8 Both even had platform grinding that extended from the area of contact on the flake platform to the adjacent flake removal surface. In North America, flakes with these platform attributes are diagnostic of Clovis, and this is true for Solutrean in Europe as well. Limited use of intentional heat treatment of the stone during the flaking process has also been proposed for both technologies.9
FIGURE 6.2.
Technological reduction comparison of middle phase manufacturing of bifaces showing overshot flake scars: (a) Clovis; (b) Solutrean.
Finishing techniques were also virtually identical and included pressure thinning and shaping. The only real difference between the two technologies is that Solutrean laurel leafs exhibit a higher proportion of diving flake thinning than Clovis in the final phase of manufacture, whereas Clovis points were thinned from the base throughout the production process, ending with the distinctive basal flaking known as fluting. Both laurel leafs and Clovis points were finished with edge grinding from the greatest width to the base. Considering the time and space differences, this level of correspondence between technologies is amazing.
TABLE 6.1 Occurrence of Overshot Flaking on Bifaces
It is useful to determine possible historical relationships between individual artifact types, but how do we do the same with whole assemblages? Cluster analysis is a simple yet informative technique for finding natural groupings of objects on the basis of similarities and dissimilarities in their observed variables. No knowledge of group membership or possible number of natural clusters need be predetermined. Cluster analysis of flaked stone assemblages is less than ideal when applied to small collections or those with few attributes or characteristics. We fully recognize these limitations. Nevertheless, it’s a more objective estimation than “they look alike to us.”
As with any statistical method, the selection of which attributes to use influences cluster analysis. Because we think manufacturing technology is highly variable and most likely to reflect cultural choice, we have emphasized this aspect of the collections.
We tested out the cluster analysis method on North American fluted point assemblages, and the results gave us confidence that this is a viable approach to discovering relationships between these traditions and the nearly contemporaneous traditions in Beringia and Western Europe (see the appendix for the first, practice test). However, the large range of time periods, great geographic distance, and small number of sites in some areas required different criteria than were used for the fluted point sites.
Rather than include tool counts converted into proportions, we worked exclusively with the presence and absence of tool types. We also grouped sites and assemblages into major archaeological complexes. For the most part, we considered a type present if it had at least one unambiguous occurrence. For example, if there was a single good graver within the Late Dyuktai assemblages, we marked this type as present. It could certainly be argued that this was overly generous, but the sample sizes are so small that we feel one occurrence is significant.
Although the shaft wrench found at the Murray Springs Clovis site is unique and there is no direct evidence that this type of tool was widely used, almost everybody who has written about Clovis assemblages considers it a Clovis tool type. An ivory flaking tool called a billet, found at Blackwater Draw, is another single occurrence, but in this case we can be sure that it was a common tool type, because thousands of identifiably biface thinning flakes in Clovis sites were made with just such a tool.
As with the fluted point assemblages, for the most part we used the identifications of tool types as they have been published. The only area where we consistently deviated from this rule was in what we labeled bifaces, which were originally called preforms, knives, or just bifaces; however, we did not include bifacial microblade precores in this category. Where the illustrations or descriptions allowed, we made some reclassifications.
Cluster analysis allows certain attributes to be assigned more weight than others, so it would be possible to give more emphasis to common tool types or primary technologies. We have not pursued this, because we feel that the results we achieved without weighting different categories were sufficient and that emphasizing specific categories would probably have produced tighter clusters rather than different ones.
We did two separate analyses, one with stone tool type assemblages and another with technological traits. Appendix table A.2 lists the assemblages and tool type presence and absence assessments we used in the first analysis. Some of these assemblages contain bone, ivory, and antler tools, but their absence from many, most commonly because of poor preservation, influenced us not to include them.
Three distinct groupings emerge at the third level of clustering (figure 6.3). The first includes Pre-Clovis, Ushki/Early Dyuktai, Mesa/Sluiceway, Nenana, and Denali. This incorporates all of the Beringian assemblages and the very limited pre-Clovis sample. The second cluster includes all of the Solutrean assemblages, with the exception of Early French Solutrean, and the fluted point assemblages, including fluted point and Late Dyuktai. The final cluster contains three Upper Paleolithic European archaeological cultures that did not have biface technology: French Gravettian, French Magdalenian, and early French Solutrean.
For us the only surprises are the clustering of pre-Clovis with the Beringian assemblages and of Late Dyuktai with Solutrean and Clovis. Both may be attributed to small sample sizes. Pre-Clovis consists of just a few tool types from only two sites. By contrast, there are relatively huge collections from fluted point and western European Upper Paleolithic sites. It is also possible that the pre-Clovis sites clustered with the Beringian sites because they represent similar functions, or because pre-Clovis significantly contributed to Beringian technology, especially in eastern Beringia. This analysis does not take flaking technology into account, so we do not think it is the best method to investigate possible historical connections. Although most researchers consider them to be closely related, Late Dyuktai did not cluster with Denali. This is curious, as the site functions and sample sizes were similar, and it is a good example of how tool typology is not particularly indicative of technological traditions.
Our next analysis considered flaking technology, handled in much the same manner as tool types: we noted presence and absence and did not weight any attributes. Here we looked at such technological traits as bifaces, microblades, and blades, as well as the technological details of each. We used the same collections, but the variables were obviously different, as shown in Appendix table A.3.
FIGURE 6.3.
Cluster analysis dendrogram of selected Beringian, Early Paleo-American, and Late Paleolithic European assemblages by tool type.
FIGURE 6.4.
Cluster analysis dendrogram of selected Beringian, Early Paleo-American, and Late Paleolithic European assemblages by technology.
The cluster analysis results again produced three groupings at the third level, but now pre-Clovis clustered with the fluted point and Solutrean assemblages (except early French Solutrean), and Late Dyuktai clustered with Ushki/Early Dyuktai, Denali, Mesa/Sluiceway, and Nenana (figure 6.4). This analysis seems to indicate that small samples of artifacts can reveal the underlying technology even when tool type variability is low. The main distinguishing characteristics between these lithic manufacturing systems are blade/microblade and biface technologies, separating the non-bifacial-dominated Upper Paleolithic Eurasian and Asian from the Solutrean and American assemblages.
The distinction between weapons with single stone components (such as hafted Clovis points) and composite points (inset with multiple stone pieces) is also apparent. At lower cluster levels the non-microblade, eastern Beringian assemblages (Nenana and Mesa/Sluiceway) break away from the microblade assemblages (Denali and Dyuktai) in both eastern and western Beringia. Fluted point assemblages separate from the Solutrean at the next to lowest level, and we have to go to the final level before we see the separation of pre-Clovis from the fluted point and Solutrean assemblages. Even more significant, the assemblages that hang together the longest are fluted point and Solutrean.
In considering both cluster analyses, it is clear to us that there are three distinctly different traditions. One is present in the greater Beringian area concurrent with and immediately following Clovis times. Its few similarities with the fluted point tradition can be attributed to a Paleo-Indian penetration into northern Alaska and possibly Siberia after 13,000 years ago, rather than the other way around. The other two clusters are in southwestern Europe, one of which extends west to include continental North America. Even though the Upper Paleolithic cluster that includes the Gravettian, early French Solutrean, and Magdalenian occupies the same territory as the other Solutrean assemblages, these analyses show them to be distinctly different. Clustering also indicates that the Beringian assemblages have more in common with the Upper Paleolithic blade traditions than with the Solutrean and fluted point traditions, probably resulting from a common ancestral technology.
