Bridging the Gap: An Updated Overview of Clovis across Middle America and its Techno-Cultural Relation with Fluted Point Assemblages from South America

ABSTRACT

This paper presents the results of technological and morphological analyses carried out on fluted point collections from North, Central, and South America. Technological similarities support a Clovis demic expansion at least as far as Venezuela. The presence of the fluting technique on various types of projectiles in northern South America suggests that this area may have been a zone of technological innovation/reorganization or human contact where ideas and possibly populations fused and merged. Moreover, numerous similarities between Central American lanceolate points and Clovis assemblages from the Gulf region of the United States indicate that a cultural network may have existed along the now submerged Atlantic coast.

KEYWORDS:

• Fishtail
• Clovis
• Caribbean
• Paleoindian
• fluting technique
• Panama

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Robert A. Beckwith for his invaluable field assistance in Panama. I also wish to extend a debt of gratitude to Richard Cooke for being a mentor and a friend. Work at the Museo Nacional in Costa Rica was made possible thanks to the help and hospitality of many archaeologists, namely Wilson Valerio-Lobo, and all the museum administrators. I wish to thank Don G. Wyckoff and Susan Richter for their assistance during my analysis of the Bell collection at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History. Andrew Hemmings also deserves some praise for being a great host during my stay in Gainesville. Articles and photographs were graciously shared by Rafael Suárez, Ugo Meneghin, Gustavo Santos, and Juliet Morrow. Figures were reworked and cleaned by Marion Coe. Finally I wish to thank Hugo Nami, Guadalupe Sánchez, Francisco J. Aceituno, three anonymous reviewers, and Ted Goebel for their helpful comments and assistance on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Georges A. Pearson has studied Paleoamerican collections from North, Central, and South America. His goal is to understand how similarities and differences between assemblages reflect early human movements across the continents. He has been based in Panama for the last 15 years where he has carried out surveys and excavations of new fluted point localities and megafaunal deposits.