Hunter-gatherer gatherings: stone-tool microwear from the Welling Site (33-Co-2), Ohio, U.S.A. supports Clovis use of outcrop-related base camps during the Pleistocene Peopling of the Americas

ABSTRACT

During the Pleistocene Peopling of North America, the use of stone outcrops for forager gatherings would have provided Clovis colonizing hunter-gatherers with several advantages beyond that of toolstone procurement. Stone outcrops would have been predictable and immovable places on an emerging map of a landscape for a thinly scattered colonizing population needing to find one another, as well as ideal teaching locales where novice flintknappers could learn to make the complex Clovis fluted projectile point without worrying about running out of, or transporting, raw material. For these reasons, several researchers have suggested that stone outcrops were ‘hubs’ of regional Clovis activity where Clovis people not only made tools, but also assembled in large groups at outcrop-related base camps. Once there, they exchanged information and mates, feasted, lived and explored. Here the authors test, using microwear analysis of stone tools, the hypothesis that the Welling site, located within the Upper Mercer chert source area, was an outcrop-related base camp. Their results – suggesting a variety of stone tool functions including dry- and fresh-hide scraping, hide cutting, meat butchering, sawing and scraping bone/antler, sawing and scraping wood, and plant scraping – were consistent with the idea that Welling represents an outcrop-related basecamp in which Clovis foragers assembled, carried out a variety of activities, and regularly travelled to and from the site. These results, when considered in conjunction with recent morphometric analysis of Clovis fluted projectile points, suggest that Welling was indeed a ‘hub’ of Clovis regional activity in Northeast Ohio, and permit us to propose a scenario for how the region was colonized during the terminal Pleistocene.

KEYWORDS:

• Clovis
• peopling of the Americas
• hunter-gatherers
• lithic microwear
• colonization

Acknowledgements

We would like to sincerely thank the Prufer family, in particular Trina Prufer and Jason Prufer, for their help with numerous aspects of this project. We would also like to thank Ashley and Nick McMillin, the current landowners of Welling, for gracefully talking with M.R.B. and M.I.E. when we showed up unannounced to their house in October 2017 to gauge the current status of the Welling site. M.R.B. is financially supported by the Kent State University Biomedical Sciences (Biological Anthropology) Program. M.I.E. is supported by the Kent State University College of Arts and Sciences and M.I.E. and B.B. are supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF Award ID: 1649395).

Notes

1. Gardner (1977) originally used the term ‘quarry’ (e.g. ‘quarry-related base camp’) rather than ‘outcrop’ to refer to locations where toolstone was acquired. However, Bradley, Collins, and Hemmings (2010, 8) suggest ‘that we refrain from using the term quarry to refer to a stone source and use it only to denote a specific kind of procurement. In western European prehistory the verb to quarry means the process of excavation to remove a resource where the material recovered is used directly in very high proportions’ (italics in original). Given that it is rarely, if ever, demonstrated that Clovis foragers quarried toolstone, we use the term outcrop throughout this manuscript.

2. The loss of Welling excavation documentation is unfortunate for multiple reasons, but one in particular is that preliminary reports and impressions from the excavators suggest there may have been up to four artefact clusters at the site (Prufer and Wright 1970; Prufer and Pedde 1997).

3. This tally of lithic specimens includes those from the Nellie Heights site. As Lepper and Wright (1989, 29) note, though Welling and Nellie Heights are ‘now separate, [they] appear originally to have been a continuous occupation site artificially segmented by historic and recent gravel quarrying.’

Additional information

Notes on contributors

G. Logan Miller

G. Logan Miller is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Illinois State University.

Michelle R. Bebber

Michelle R. Bebber is a Ph.D. candidate at Kent State University.

Ashley Rutkoski

Ashley Rutkoski is a M.A. candidate at Kent State University.

Richard Haythorn

Richard Haythorn completed his B.A. at Kent State University and is currently a M.A./Ph.D. candidate at the University of Tulsa.

Matthew T. Boulanger

Matthew T. Boulanger is a Lecturer of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University.

Briggs Buchanan

Briggs Buchanan is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Tulsa.

Jennifer Bush

Jennifer Bush is the Director of the Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum.

C. Owen Lovejoy

C. Owen Lovejoy is a Professor of Anthropology at Kent State University and a member of the U.S.A. National Academy of Sciences.

Metin I. Eren

Metin I. Eren is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Director of Archaeology at Kent State University and a Research Associate at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.