Charcoal Versus Manganese Mineral Wad and the Geochronology of the Kimmswick Clovis Site

ABSTRACT

Hydrated manganese oxide, known as mineral wad, is sometimes mistaken for charcoal, as US National Museum geologist W. H. Holmes and archaeologist Gerald Fowke did in 1902. Here we discuss the Kimmswick Clovis site as an example and provide recent radiocarbon results pertinent to Mississippi Valley geochronology.

KEYWORDS:

• Charcoal
• wad
• manganese
• Clovis
• radiocarbon

Acknowledgements

Constructive comments that improved the manuscript, provided by Vance T. Holliday and R. Bruce McMillan, are much appreciated. We also thank Barbara Fregoso for expert word processing and Jim Abbott for computer rendering the line drawings. The suggestions of four anonymous reviewers for improving the typescript are much appreciated.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

C. Vance Haynes Jr is emeritus regents professor at the University of Arizona and has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1990. He is best known for his interdisciplinary investigation of Paleoindian archaeology of San Pedro Valley, Arizona, and a series of geoarchaeological studies of Paleoindian and Paleolithic sites in North America and northern Africa.

Dennis Stanford is curator of North and South American Paleolithic, Asian Paleolithic, and Western United States archaeological collections at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. He has conducted Paleoindian archaeological research throughout the Americas, and among his recent publications is Across Atlantic Ice: The Origin of America’s Clovis Culture (2013, University of California Press), with Bruce A. Bradley.

Donald L. Johnson was professor emeritus of Geography and Geographic Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign until his demise on May 10, 2013. He earned a PhD in Geography at the University of Kansas in 1972, and over his career he published more than 80 articles in scientific journals and books. Dr Johnson received the Rip Rapp Archaeological Geology Award from the Geological Society of America in 1993, and the Distinguished Career Award from the Geomorphology Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers in 2005.