Chapter 8
Clovis
The Great American Invention?
Clovis is the capstone of North American archaeology. Clovis artifacts are the most sought-after by big-time arrowhead collectors; ten-grand might get you into the bidding for a nice big fluted Clovis projectile point, but it would take a quarter of a million dollars to buy the best one. Access to Clovis archaeology is institutional bread-and-butter for scoring large grants and long-time funding for research projects. Acquiring the rights to dig a Clovis site or study its contents is a potential industry for an academically anchored archaeologist.
The Clovis Culture, as many call it, is also the beginning and the end of a way of life in the Americas. As a colonizing event, Clovis is unprecedented in archaeological history. Its signature weapon, the Clovis projectile point, shows up all over North America within 200 years of its sudden appearance. What drove these people to move so far so fast? Of course, some archaeologists think that it was not the Clovis hunters themselves who raced across the continent but their technology, which spread throughout a substantial pre-Clovis population who already occupied the lower 48 states but for whom compelling evidence has yet to be found. But any way you look at the Clovis movement, it’s so rapid that it defies standard models of dispersion and even logic. You think of things like Wanderlust.
The end, of course, was also astonishingly abrupt. The diagnostic lithic tools of Clovis disappear at the same moment as many of the great megafauna—somewhere around 12,900 to 12,800 years ago, pretty close to the onset of the Younger Dryas cooling period.
If we consider Clovis culture, or its lithic technology, as something that spread, then it must have come from somewhere—emanated from some point of origin. This is not the same as raindrops falling in a pool of still water, wavelets steadily moving out with time in perfect concentric circles. A principal argument is that Clovis people pursued and hunted mammoth. Another claim, supported by some evidence (Chapter 9), is that mammoth and other herds of big herbivores were moving around a lot during the changing climate of the last days of the Pleistocene, a time span that embraces Clovis culture. Mammoth were moving northward as well as southward, looking for productive grazing areas prior to the Younger Dryas. This implies that the spread of Clovis lithic technique and culture across the continent might not have been a simple, linear dispersion; Clovis could have emerged from the ice-free corridor—or the east coast—radiated out for a few generations, then returned following the big game.
What are the origins of Clovis? This is, perhaps, the Holy Grail of American archaeology. Very recent titles from scientifically vetted publications and esteemed publishing houses include: “…the Origins of Clovis…” (out of Texas); and “…The Origin of American Clovis Culture…” (from the Solutreans of Spain or France). I mention these publications to illustrate the profession’s intense and continuing interest in Clovis origins and because we will deal with this debate in this chapter. They are relevant to discussion of the Montana Clovis child burial, especially the one called the “Solutrean theory.”
Four or five possibilities have been proposed to explain the origins of Clovis. First, that the culture came from the Solutreans of Spain and France, across the Atlantic ice 18,000 years ago. Secondly, the presumably abundant though archaeologically dim pre-Clovis population developed it in place (a Texas-first theory). Third, Clovis technology originated in the American Southeast where the most projectile points have been found (the fluted points are stylistically more varied in the Southeast and it is assumed that this diversity means antiquity). Fourth, seal hunters who came down the Northwest Coast 14,000 years ago and moved inland might have invented it. And last, the oldest theory, the people coming down the ice-free corridor invented the iconic fluted spear point when they first ran into mammoth and found quality stone quarries where they could experiment and polish their lithic technique to make a weapon suitable for bringing down mammoth. This last possibility probably means that Clovis technology originated in the Missouri River country of Montana, because suitable rock quarries have not been located in Alberta.
Then the signature Clovis weapon itself: Having had the privilege to hold one of these projectile points, there is no mistaking its functional beauty. This deadly, balanced six-inch blade was designed to hunt animals bigger than bison. Rabbits and squirrels never come to mind; instead, you sense immediately that the Clovis world revolved around the hunting of proboscideans. And there is something else; the skill, the love with which the best of these points are crafted transcends function and passes into a higher domain. The remarkable aesthetics of the Clovis point suggest to some archaeologists that some of these artifacts might have been used as talismans or as holy objects to be exchanged in social contracts. Clovis people may have continued to produce these exquisite spearheads after the mammoth herds had disappeared at the far edges of their range. After all, it was only a 200-300 year time span.
Clovis people were highly mobile big-game hunters. Here and there they may have settled down temporarily as generalized hunters and gatherers, usually around bedrock sources of quality lithic material for their stone artifacts. They camped near kill sites. At least part of the time, Clovis hunters specialized in mammoth or mastodon. In the desert country of Sonora, Mexico, not far inland from where I began my expedition down the coast of the Sea of Cortez, they likely killed and ate a gomphothere, a four-tusked relative of the mastodon thought to have gone extinct in this part of North America 30,000 years ago, though not in South America. (Another cautionary note: The gomphothere, like the Aztlan rabbit, was believed to have gone regionally extinct long before the last glacial maximum. Yet here a single, credible specimen lived long enough to be hunted, or scavenged, by Clovis people. The youngest fossil record of a species [Chapter 9] doesn’t necessarily indicate its extinction date.) Bison, horse and no doubt camel and tapir were also on the menu. So were turtles and smaller animals. Down in southeastern Arizona, Clovis people pit-barbequed a baby mammoth, a black bear and a rabbit.
Some archaeologists question why there isn’t more evidence of mastodon hunting during Clovis times. There’s a significant mastodon site with a few fluted points at Kimmswick, Missouri—along the Mississippi. Another mastodon was probably butchered near my old Boy Scout camp in Michigan. Except for Sonora, that’s about it. Mastodons were probably solitary feeders. Maybe Clovis people didn’t like the taste of mastodon (assuming meat was sufficiently abundant so they could afford to be picky). Mastodon browsed spruce trees. In survival situations, I sometimes snare and eat spruce grouse in early spring or late fall, when normal grouse-food such as berries is scarce. Even properly grilled, the bird is bitter fare to choke down, like chewing on an evergreen branch.
There are a dozen documented sites where Clovis killed or butchered mammoth, two (three counting the related gomphothere) more kill sites for mastodon. Most of the kill sites are located in the West.
The interpretation of these 14 sites is that of the classic argument of a half-full or half-empty vessel and is used to argue for or against humans killing off the American megafauna. The extremes of this argument contend: First, the Clovis diet was based on generalized hunting augmented with shallow pluvial lake food such as mollusks, fish, birds and lots of turtles. Or, secondly, these people specialized in hunting the biggest game on the continent. The latter contention is the essential argument for humans hunting the megafauna to extinction (commonly called “overkill”).
Those against overkill would ask: What evidence? Twelve kill sites to explain the disappearance of an estimated 1,000,000 mammoth during Clovis times and two more to account for the death of another million mastodon? And no kill sites whatever (a possible kill site for now-extinct horses has been found in Alberta) for the other 33 genera of animals? They see overkill as a pathetic argument and an example of where absence of evidence really means evidence of absence. Besides, four of those 14 sites are located in southeastern Arizona, only separated by 20-some miles, and may represent a single band of Clovis hunters gone gonzo on a killing spree.
The other half of the glass: There is an astounding amount of data to prove Clovis hunters targeted and killed mammoth and mastodon. Why? Compare the Pleistocene archaeological record of kill sites in North America to the Old World. Humans hunted elephants in Africa over a time span hundreds of times longer than the 300 years during which Clovis people chased mammoths and mastodons across America. Only 12 ancient elephant kill sites have been located in Africa. In fact, in all of Europe, Asia and Africa only about 25 sites have been located where humans hunted mammoth, mastodon and elephants. And only two or three of these kill sites, they say, have human weapons associated with them. So, the argument goes, that’s only 17 proven elephant-family kill sites in all Africa, North America, Europe and Asia, and 13 of those are here in the American West, with another in Missouri.
This is probably an argument, similar to those explaining the causes of Late Pleistocene extinctions or the significance of a pre-Clovis population, which no one can win for the moment. There are simply not enough smoking guns to convince everyone. But what if, for the sake of discussion, Clovis was indeed the fast-moving mammoth-hunting culture that chased the huge animals over the next pass, leap frogging to the next proboscidean refuge until they hit the edges of the continent? Admittedly, this tactic doesn’t sound quite practical or even rational. Why not hunt bison instead of mammoth and mastodon? The tribe of elephant is dangerous, wickedly remembering insult and injury. A wounded mammoth swinging his gigantic tusks through a group of hunters could imperil the lives of an entire band. Bison lived where mammoth did. They were numerous and easier to locate. Bison can be herded into box canyons and driven over cliffs. Buffalo can be killed with much smaller weapons or projectile points, like Folsom points, than the Clovis people used on mammoth. But even when great herds of bison were present, Clovis hunters went on making big fluted points and pursuing mammoth. If the early hunters had been bison people, they could have settled down on the great rivers of the Plains. But they didn’t. Clovis people apparently kept hounding mammoth until they ran out of them. And beyond: To the southeastern U.S. where the classic Clovis projectile point shows stylistic diversity or Texas where they could settle down near quality lithic outcrops and look for smaller game. Still, whenever they encountered mammoths, they likely went after them, as in southeastern Arizona.
Why did they move so fast (assuming there was not a significant pre-Clovis population to pass along the Clovis technology)?
Maybe these people slingshot out of the corridor so fast they couldn’t slow down. Their psychic momentum combined with the leapfrog tactic of chasing mammoth herds drove Clovis to the far ocean shores in record time. Movement down the corridor (the evidence in this chapter from the Anzick site appears to point to the IFC route) could have set a world colonizing record for speed. Since there was little to eat in the recently deglaciated corridor besides migratory birds, progenitors of the Clovis people would not have lingered, but rather blasted down with their dogs and packs of pemmican. They could have made the some 2,000 miles in a handful of years. Or less. That’s incredibly fast and perhaps the lifestyle lingered deep in their collective consciousness.
It’s possible the Clovis culture was different from other pulses of American settlers looking for a home. Clovis people could have had little interest in settling down in one place or in subsisting on turtle soup. Just as some archaeologists have suggested the iconic Clovis projectile point may have served as a talisman or a sacred item to be exchanged in ceremonies, the object of that point—the mammoth—may have occupied a spiritual corner of the Clovis cosmos that compelled constant movement.
Before stumbling into the ditch of pop-psychology altogether, there are other notions of whacked-out cultures; the Aztecs come to mind: They seemingly lived on a doomsday psychic abyss whereby thousands, on some days many thousands, of humans had their hearts cut out to insure the continued rising of the sun. I look out at the snow-covered mountains from my insular 21st century comfort wondering how those ice-age people lived. We don’t necessarily think alike.
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There’s as much scholarly ink on Clovis as on any other topic of North American archaeology. Still, we know little of the kinds of shelters they constructed or what plants they might have used. After 13,000 years, little remains of perishable materials. The stone tool kit is well known and characterized by fluted points, bifaces and blades. There’s little evidence of art. A few incised stones have been found, most of them of limestone and from Texas. Clovis probably constructed temporary structures of wood and hides; circular soil stains may mark postholes. They didn’t use caves much. Clovis people left spectacular caches of stone artifacts on the land (private collectors have paid millions of dollars for some of these). About twenty caches of Clovis points, bifaces and blades have been located in North America. I visited one of these places with my friend Mark Aronson, the Iowan ecologist and educator. The Rummells-Maske site is located on an Iowan hilltop overlooking a lovely creek cutting a small valley lined with live oak trees. It is a beautiful place to leave a rare stash of finished, fluted Clovis points.
Rummels-Maske cache. Courtesy of Bill Whitaker.
A few Clovis caches were covered with red ochre. A couple of these “caches,” like the Montana child, may in fact represent funeral offerings. Clovis people left few archaeological sites on the land, as you might expect from broad-ranging explorers. High-quality stone was necessary for tools, so bedrock quarries with nearby water are attractive sites; Clovis people settled some of these areas in New York, Virginia and Texas. A few professionals have made the case that such sedentary sites were the Clovis norm. Just as likely, they are unique, rich niches of quality rock and resources at the edges of Clovis migration.
There is much more information available on Clovis and my intent remains to just summarize a portion this material. What little I have to add comes from Montana, from the reason I decided to write this book—my involvement with the Wilsall Clovis child burial, also known as the Anzick Site.
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The Anzick site is the most important archaeological site on the continent. At least that’s what I told Helen Anzick, matriarch of the land-owning family, when Larry Lahren, Mark Papworth and myself asked permission to re-excavate the site in 1999.
One hot summer day in 1961, Montana teenager Bill Bray followed a sluggish creek down to a fishing-hole at the base of a sandstone outcrop, overlooking Flathead Creek’s confluence with a major tributary (the Shields River) of the Yellowstone River. He spotted where a badger had dug into a rodent burrow and on top of the freshly excavated soil he saw “knuckle bones” that were stained red. He reached down into the dirt pile and picked up a striking stone artifact, a six-inch-long shimmering blue chert blade flaked on both sides.
Seven years later, Ben Hargis and Calvin Sarver were using a front-end loader to remove talus for a drain field when they accidentally discovered more than a hundred red ochre-covered stone and antler artifacts in the same place where Bill Bray had found his badger burrow.
“If only,” archaeologist Larry Lahren laments, “I had known about Bray’s biface.” To be fair, Larry was a mere teenager in 1961 and became hooked on archaeology only when he found his grandfather’s Bull Durham sack full of arrowheads in 1966. But his point remains: Had Lahren or another professional been aware of the Clovis biface, four decades of denial, misrepresentation and confusion could have been avoided.
The burial of the one-and-a-half-year-old child is the oldest skeleton in the Americas, the only known Clovis burial, and the largest and most spectacular assemblage of Clovis artifacts ever found. The child was found within a lens of “gunpowder”-like sediment in the lower profile of a short cliff-face of sandy mudstones. It was not a rock shelter. The collection constitutes a complete Clovis tool kit for the killing and butchering of large mammals like mammoth. The grave offerings, all heavily stained with red ocher, consisted of eight projectile points, a minimum of six (probably eight) elk antler foreshafts, 86 bifaces—the largest over a foot-long—six flakes (unifaces), one end scraper and a couple pieces of broken flakes—about 110 artifacts in all.
Establishment archaeologists often refer to the basic Clovis tool kit as something portable: “the entire assemblage could be carried in an attaché-like pouch… compact [in] size and light weight.” Should anyone want to heft the considerable Anzick tool kit, which I doubt has ever been weighed, it would have required a Schwarzenegger-tailored pouch. Many of the pieces show abrasive wear on the sides, suggesting they had been transported in hide packs or kept as heirloom items. Clovis people did occasionally leave caches of tools on the land, but the Anzick materials are all burial offerings.
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The Montana child burial offers clues that point to late ice-age utilization of the ice-free corridor (IFC), to finding the origins of Clovis technology and the use, or misuse, by professional anthropologists of the child’s skeletal remains. It also directly challenges the hypothesis that Clovis culture originated in Europe.
The Anzick burial contains six to eight elk-antler foreshafts, a couple broken, one of them, accordingly to Lahren, intentionally. In occupied elk range, antlers are common, whether today or in the last days of the Ice Age (I saw several hundred pounds of dropped elk antler on an easy April hike in Yellowstone Park in 2012). The antlers are heavy and not the sort of baggage you’d want to carry down the IFC. Lahren and Rob Bonnichsen published an article on the Anzick foreshafts, which suggested, “that they were constructed to serve as (detachable or nondetachable) foreshafts for attaching fluted projectile points to lance shafts.” The study suggests the foreshafts were mated to the fluted Clovis points (eight fluted points and eight foreshafts) and of the same age of manufacture.
The last round of radiocarbon dating on the Anzick site tested two foreshafts and a human rib. The two elk antler foreshafts both dated an uncanny 13,040 years (11,040 radiocarbon years, published in 2006). These identical dates are the best dates for this Clovis site; dating on the human skeleton may be unreliable due to modern human contamination (discussed below).
The date of 13,040 years ago marks the first known appearance of elk in the lower-48. Humans in central Alaska also hunted elk around 13,300 years ago. Elk only arrived in North America from Siberia at the very end of the Ice Age, after the global warming of 14,700 years ago and had to wait in Alaska for the IFC to open in order to get down to Montana. The habitat requirements of elk and their speed of migration are probably the same today as at the end of the Pleistocene. That would have meant a fully revegetated ice-free corridor; any elk habitat expert, hunters as well as biologists, might take a stab at the time required for elk to make that journey. I would guess perhaps at least a couple-hundred years.
The antler foreshafts provide evidence for the use of the ice-free corridor and when that route was available for human passage. If modern elk came down the corridor at least 13,300 years ago, humans could have made the same trip earlier because people wouldn’t have required a completely recovered habitat in terms of flora and fauna. That would push back the date for earliest possible human travel down the IFC back to around 13,500 years ago, not far off from the original much-discredited “Clovis-first” story. An interesting question is why did the people who inhabited eastern Beringia 13,300 years ago wait until around 13,100 years ago to make the journey south. Pleistocene predators?
One may quibble with the exact timeline, but it is clear that the Anzick child’s ancestors could and probably did (because of the elk antler) come down the ice-free corridor. The corollary to this observation, and the dates from the Foothill Erratic Trains (Chapter 6), is that anyone stating the IFC opened too late to accommodate Clovis migration southward is dead wrong.
As one moves southward through the IFC, the first quality lithic quarries appear south of the Missouri River in Montana, where the corridor dumped out. Larry Lahren, who did his Ph.D. work in archaeology at the University of Calgary, believes these are the northern-most quarries on the corridor route and that suitable lithic material was not available in Alberta. The stone material from which the Clovis burial artifacts have been flaked comes from five or six different bedrock sources, based on macroscopic examination by lithic experts, both archaeologists and local authorities. As an out-dated and old-fashioned geologist, I am skeptical of these petrological guesses. There is too much mineralogical variation in the local quarries within 75 miles of the Anzick site. Much of the material used to flake the Anzick tools likely came from quarries north of the site as close as 30 or 40 miles distant. Lahren has located three or four of these quarries and could, with some help, find the others. The material used for the artifacts includes moss-agate, phosphoria and porcellite. We need to test rock samples and prove where the bedrock sources of the Anzick artifacts are located, not just guess. Several laboratories can do this, including the Idaho Accelerator Center in Pocatello that irradiates and analyzes artifacts to accurately match them to their exact bedrock source. Gamma rays are zapped through the artifacts so their contained (and signature) trace elements can be measured. Previously, you could only do this in a reactor that turned arrowheads into nuclear waste. With the new method, they say, you set the objects aside “for a few days until they are radiation free.”
The Solutrean theory has resurfaced in a 2012 book (Across Atlantic Ice: The Origins of America’s Clovis Culture, by Dennis Stanford and Bruce Bradley) and has direct relevancy here—the Anzick site is referenced several times in that book. The Solutrean theory authors argue that the direction of movement of raw material for the dozen or so Clovis artifact-caches across the U.S. tracks with the larger colonization of the Americas. That is, if the lithic material used to manufacture the Montana Anzick artifacts came from eastern Wyoming, then the people were coming out of eastern regions, from the point of Clovis origins. In fact, the Anzick burial objects have been used by Solutrean advocates to bolster such an east-to-west movement: Two sources of exotic bedrock material are listed for the Anzick artifacts, moss-agate from far central eastern Wyoming, the authors of Across Atlantic Ice say, and another rock quarry from the southeastern corner of Montana, again to the east. Indeed, nearly all the Clovis caches referenced by Solutrean advocates indicate a west-northwest movement of raw materials; hence, the argument goes, people spreading Clovis technology from origins on the eastern coast of North America.
The big problem is that, in the case of the Anzick materials, these cited source locations of exotic stone are pure guesses. Moss-agate is also found in quarries just 40 miles north of the Anzick site. No one has tested any of the Anzick artifacts’ rock sources with credible analytical geological techniques and no one knows with certainty where they came from.
A sister argument of the Solutrean theory is that because greater numbers and sizes of Clovis sites (based on Clovis points found on the surface) are located in the East, the authors’ propose that “Solutrean/Clovis” technology was introduced to America near Chesapeake Bay and came into full blossom in what is now the eastern United States. Clovis people then started exploring, the theory goes, and carrying their spear points up the big rivers and, eventually, into the American West. These scientists argue that these would have been small groups of hunters who left evidence of only small, scattered sites near big game kills. The upper Yellowstone and the Anzick site would have been about the last stop on this purely imaginative trip.
Does stylistic variation and diversity of Clovis projectile points equal antiquity? Or, assuming the iconic point (and apparently extremely successful weapon) was invented “suddenly” in the lower 48 states and spread like wildfire within a hundred years, could this stylistic variation simply reflect big game strategies and the kind of rock quarries hunters discovered? The opposite direction of Clovis movement, from Montana to the southeastern U.S. states, might also have taken place: A few hunting groups with few big projectile points, moving eastward and southward, the population growing with the generations until the a denser population making more diversified and greater numbers of spear points had time to adapt their technology to forested habitats in the East.
There’s no solid data to support any of these conjectured movements. The most recent and reliable dates for Clovis culture across North America demonstrate no temporal or geographical gradient to show that Clovis came from the north, south, east or west. So far the evidence points to Clovis popping up all over the place at almost the same time. Of course, Clovis does have an origin; we just haven’t found it yet.
The archaeologists who argue a Solutrean origin of Clovis imply these hunters originally were Europeans. Sometime after Clovis spread from the East, they say, a Siberian migration might have also colonized the Americas. This stance means a Clovis culture skeleton should reflect European genetic characteristics. If the Anzick child burial instead pointed to a Siberian ancestor, that would be a crucial nail in the Solutrean coffin. A lab in Copenhagen, Denmark has already analyzed the skeletal material from the Anzick child and it’s said they have recovered some nuclear DNA as well as mitochondrial DNA. The report has not been released. If, as rumored, the DNA of the Anzick child indicated Asian ancestry, that might be bad news for those peddling the book on the Solutrean-becoming-Clovis theory.
Unless: The Anzick child burial is not Clovis at all and the skeletal remains are unrelated to the associated spectacular cache of Clovis materials. This happens to be the position of the authors of Across Atlantic Ice, who wrote: “It may be that they (the child’s bones) were not associated with the Clovis Cache but were incidentally buried nearby and the red ochre staining the toddler’s (that’s what the Solutrean authors call the Anzick child) bones is purely coincidental.”
Such a far-fetched coincidence would also allow the authors to conveniently ignore key archaeological evidence from the Anzick site that doesn’t fit their model.
Future investigators should analyze the red ochre on the artifacts and compare it to the ochre on the skeleton. A 2001 paper by Smithsonian anthropologists used standard color hue charts to compare the red ochre on the bones to the stains on the artifacts; they were indeed similar. But this superficial comparison is hardly definitive. The red ochre on the stone artifacts and the human remains will require more sophisticated geologic analysis. Scientists could carry out this simple, important analysis at any time, at modest costs.
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Curiously, no obsidian (volcanic glass) was used to make the Anzick burial objects. Yellowstone obsidian is perhaps the most desired quality lithic material in this part of the Northern Rockies, and was a valued trade good (I found a big core of what archaeologist Mark Papworth believed was Yellowstone obsidian in a Michigan red-ocher burial that dated nearly four thousand years old). Clovis caches from Idaho and points southward, westward and eastward contain spectacular obsidian Clovis points. Why didn’t the Clovis at the Anzick site utilize this most-
Anzick burial artifact replicas. Courtesy of Stockton White.
prized of local lithic materials?
Because, no doubt, they hadn’t found the quarry yet. One lithic expert stated (an educated guess based on macroscopic impressions) that some of the Anzick artifact stone came from quarries in Wyoming, twice as far away as Yellowstone; this muddled picture of from where the material used to make the Anzick artifacts was derived is an abiding mystery. Montana is a place where river sedimentation in the flood-plains can bury Clovis-age materials. For example, just 15 miles down the Shield’s River from the Anzick site, rancher Ben Stein found mammoth bones sticking out of a cut bank, according to Larry Lahren, under 30 feet of sediment; the dates from the buried mammoth remains are roughly coeval with Clovis. Outside the Anzick artifacts, less than a dozen Clovis fluted points have been found in the entire state. One of them was found at the Gardiner Post Office construction site, on the edge of Yellowstone Park, about 20-some miles north of Obsidian Cliffs, where the famous quarry is located. The spear point from Gardner was flaked from Yellowstone obsidian, a material absent from the Anzick Clovis artifacts.
What all this might suggest is that the Anzick people could have been among the earlier of Clovis people—the Clovis material at Anzick is older than the Gardner Post Office Clovis projectile point—and closer to the origins of known Clovis technology.
Could archaeologists hope to find the mother site of Clovis, the place where the iconic fluted projectile point was invented? I believe, as Lahren has long suspected, that they can. Many professional lithic experts state that one can deduce Clovis technology from its debitage—the flakes and cores left behind when you make a big projectile point. Here is a mystery—the origins of Clovis—that could be solved by modern archaeological excavation and lithic analysis of debris from those Missouri River quarries just north of the Anzick site. It’s provable: Irradiate the artifacts and the quarry rock, identify the trace elements indicating the bedrock source of the lithic material and then excavate. I’ve visited two of these quarries and they are archaeologically intact—not yet looted or significantly damaged. If confirmed, this would lay to rest several core controversies of the archaeology of early Americans—and serve as the final nail pounded into the coffin of Texas-first or any Solutrean-origin theories.
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The story of the bones, the skeletal remains of the year and a half-old child, is wrapped in controversy and disrespect. For me, it is also a partisan issue: As hinted throughout this book, I carry little admiration for the archaeologists, and their institutions, who jetted up to Montana to scoop up a sample of the child’s bones for radiocarbon or DNA testing without once pausing to attempt to contact a Native American or question the broader sentiment of The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). As my objectivity wanders here, I will attempt to compartmentalize the facts surrounding the Clovis burial from my opinions.
In the last decade, big-shot archaeologists with the means and cash have crawled out from the edges of the continent to scoop up Anzick burial items and the skeletal remains, making repeated end-runs around NAGPRA, to publish their easy efforts in peer-reviewed articles. The locals, both professionals and laypersons—who have invested as much as 40 years in maintaining the integrity of the site and preventing the collection from being split up and sold to the highest bidder—have been ignored or pushed aside, despite their intimate historical knowledge of the site. The published results of these professional incursions have many facts wrong.
The most common misconceptions confuse the spatial relationships of the burial goods, the Clovis child’s remains, and a human parietal bone found about 25 yards away on the surface of the talus slope. This skull bone, picked up by Calvin Sarver at the time of the discovery of the burial, was not connected in any way to the Clovis burial and not stained with red ochre. Ben Hargis kept it separate from the rest of the Anzick burial goods and, for a while, carried it around in the metal tool box bolted to the back of his pickup. The bleached bone dated about 10,000 years old and bears witness to the importance of this geographic landmark to indigenous people, which, as Mark Papworth suspected, probably constitutes a Paleoindian cemetery.
The most reliable telling of the discovery of the site comes from the people who found it. Once Ben Hargis and Calvin Sarver hit the burial with the front-end loader, they stopped and turned off the heavy machine. Joined by their wives that evening, the two discovers hand picked their way through the burial, recovering the remaining 95% of the collection from an area of about a yard-square. The artifacts, both stone and antler, were originally stacked on top of the human skeleton. When the bifaces were pulled out, they “clinked.” Everything was covered with red ochre. Lahren interviewed these people shortly after the initial discovery. In 1999, Lahren, Mark Papworth and myself conducted another interview of Calvin Sarver and Faye Hargis at the burial site. This interview was recorded on audiotape and videotape. There’s a shot of Calvin Sarver placing one large hand over the other to show how tightly the bifaces and points were stacked together on the child.
It’s possible no ancient American human skeleton has been treated more shabbily than the Anzick child. The discoverers, not understanding the significance of their find, took the burial materials home and scrubbed them hard with brushes in the sink, trying to get all that red stuff off. The fragmented human remains have been separated and handled by dozens, maybe many dozens, of modern humans since their discovery. Cranial fragments were glued together with rubber cement. Everybody who came through carried off a few pieces of the child’s skeleton. D.C. Taylor of the University of Montana investigated the site in 1968 and left with red-ocher-stained human remains and about twenty artifacts. When Taylor died, his son at the Northern Arizona University retained part of the child’s skeletal remains. Lahren secured the return of these bones to Montana about 1998; he retrieved the twenty artifacts from Oregon State University (Bonnichsen) in 1997. Lahren and Bonnichsen also found the child’s red ocher-stained clavicle (in Taylor’s backfill) during their 1971 field season. The Anzick Clovis skeletal remains have been stored in scattered closets, drawers and cigar boxes for forty years, handled by many who came by and showed an interest. One should assume all the Anzick human bone samples are contaminated thorough handling by modern humans. Could this have corrupted the resultant radiocarbon dates? I don’t know the answer to that. Perhaps future scientists will be able to come up with methods to determine accurate radiocarbon dates derived from the contaminated skeletal remains.
The range of carbon-14 dates on the Anzick skeleton stretch from 10,680 (in 1983) to 11,550 (in 1997). The same investigator analyzed both samples. The first date, about 12,680 years ago, is very late, some 200 years after the Younger Dryas cooling; the second date, about 13,550 years ago would mark the very beginning of Clovis. The most recent dates, reported in 2006, from the two Anzick elk antler foreshafts are identical and convincing—13,040 years old. The foreshafts lay on top of the skeleton. Contamination of the smaller human-bone fragments by modern people might explain the wide age discrepancy.
Larry Lahren has made a heroic effort to keep the collection together, to have all the missing artifacts and skeletal remains returned to the Anzick family. Several institutions have flown out to collect samples and report: The Smithsonian and the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A&M in 2001; Arkansas State University in 2006, whose investigator reported, “Sarah Anzick, owner of the human skeletal remains and foreshafts, gave permission…” to test the two foreshafts and a rib; Texas A&M University in 2007 and again later to get a sample of the Clovis child for DNA analysis (the analysis is finished, completed in Denmark, but the promised report for some reason has not been released). These recent raids on the child’s bones are what raise my hackles.
Of course, the Anzick child burial was found on private land. I wondered if NAGPRA applies to all institutions, so I checked; indeed, the act states that all institutions that receive federal funding are subject to NAGPRA law. Why didn’t anyone at least try to contact the Native American community? Such a gesture would at least approach the minimal heart and the spirit of repatriation. It’s not simple or easy; I wrote and called Crow leader Bill Yellowtail but never heard back (Sarah Anzick, I was told, tried to work with the Cheyenne when she was with NIH, apparently with similar results). But the spirit of the law works: Archaeologists in Alaska worked out a partnership with the Tlingit whereby a skeleton almost 10,000 year old was studied by the scientists and then returned to the tribe. Everyone understands a thirteen-thousand-year-old skeleton will not, in terms of cultural patrimony, have a direct connection to modern tribes.
The scientists who have run off with samples of the child’s skeleton, often omit referencing their home institutions on academic publications, avoiding potential legalities if not their respective university’s reputation. Why don’t they try to deal with the repatriation issue, it seems easy enough to make the effort?
Heeding NAGPRA is not the only problem with the Clovis burial site. Lahren is concerned with how the line of moneyed institutions coming into play with the Anzick material is affecting “the ploys and politics” of the profession he so loves. His ex-partner, Rob Bonnichsen, used the Anzick site as a “marketing tool” for the Center for the Study of the First Americans, a center Bonnichsen founded that, in 2002, moved to Texas A&M. Currently, the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A&M is funding, or has funded, any number of important Clovis and pre-Clovis projects, such as “Redefining the Age of Clovis,” whereby it retested radiocarbon dates on material from Clovis-age sites, including Anzick, and recalibrated the Clovis period to about 13,100 to 12,800 years old—a valuable contribution. They also sent the Clovis child’s bones to Denmark for DNA testing. The Center funded the AMS testing and scans of that “bone point” imbedded in a mastodon rib that was found in the 1970s on the Olympic Peninsula. The Center led excavations of pre-Clovis material from an area of the Gault Site (Buttermilk Creek) in Texas. The collective direction of all these investigations, papers and press releases is a broader, partisan argument for a sizeable pre-Clovis population in the Americas—an aggressively pursued and expensive agenda. They could be right. In time, with new excavations and analytical techniques, science will sift through these arguments.
Of the Clovis burial, the Arkansas State University author wrote in 2006: “To date, we are unaware of claims of affiliation or requests for repatriation made by any Native American group in the 37 years since the Anzick site was discovered.” I heard those same tired, much repeated words in 2001 at a state legislature hearing by a Montana museum curator who wanted to keep the Anzick artifacts in his collection. But how should any Native American group even know of that Clovis find? The Anzick site remained a discredited secret until the past decade. 1968 seems a long time ago. Now, the site is an apparent archaeological gold mine. The child’s story lives on; it’s time he found an earthly home.
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Despite the unsolved mysteries of its emergence and disappearance, the Clovis culture’s colonization of the region south of the ice was astounding. The Clovis tool kit stands in contrast to all earlier American people. Pre-Clovis projectile points are uncommon and mostly small. Larger ones come from the Meadowcroft rock shelter in Pennsylvania, but this fascinating site seems an anomaly among other pre-Clovis locations: a microclimate of temperate weather so close to the glacier’s edge. Some think triangular and teardrop-shaped points found in the upper Yukon basin in central Alaska, dating to about 13,300 years old, are possible progenitors of Clovis.
Clovis, on the other hand, had huge spear points, probably hunting dogs and an apparent fierce madness for killing big animals. I’m thinking of the Late Pleistocene predators again. A few of them were still around during the early days of Clovis: Some short-faced bears lived in the lower forty-eight around 13,000 years ago. Arctodus simus might have been diminishing in numbers, if the herbivores they scavenged and ate were also in decline—an entirely plausible scenario. (If short-faced bears had presented formidable opposition to Clovis people at their kill sites, might we have expected to find a fossil bear bone amid the scattered mammoth remains?) This evidence and material is contested and discussed in the next chapter. Pre-Clovis cultures might not have had a chance to flourish if Pleistocene lions, short-faced bears and sabertooths regularly checked their numbers by predation and discouraged their hunting and gathering forays.
The Clovis people, however, freely roamed the continent and defended their mammoth kills from whatever Pleistocene scavengers that were around. Apparently: There really isn’t much hard evidence here. The Pleistocene megafauna and the Clovis culture march into the sunset at the same time, with the sudden cooling of the Younger Dryas hot on their heels. What caused this great extinction of great American animals?