What’s Not Clovis? An Examination of Fluted Points in the Far West

ABSTRACT

Within thirty years of the 1927 Folsom discovery, post-Clovis fluted point types were being described in all regions North America except the Far West, where “if it’s not Folsom, it’s Clovis” remained the norm. This was largely because of the existence of a different technology, the Western Stemmed Tradition, then believed to have derived from Clovis. Only in the last twenty years has there been any discussion of the possibility of a non-Clovis fluted form in this region, although there has been a reluctance to go beyond referring to points differing from Clovis as “Clovis-like,” “Western Fluted,” or “Great Basin Fluted.” In this paper we present the first large-scale, systematic comparison of fluted points from the Far West with Classic Clovis points in order to determine if, in fact, there is a non-Clovis fluted point form in this region, as is the case in all other regions of North America.

KEYWORDS:

• Paleoindian
• Clovis
• intermountain west
• California
• non-Clovis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Charlotte Beck is a Professor emerita from Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. She received her PhD from the University of Washington. Her research interests include Paleoindian archaeology, with emphasis on the Intermountain West, evolutionary theory, chronology, and lithic analysis.

George T. Jones is a Professor emeritus from Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. He received his PhD from the University of Washington. His research interests include evolutionary and ecological theory, Paleoindian archaeology, hunter-gatherer adaptations to arid environments, and lithic and paleoenvironmental analyses.

Amanda K. Taylor is an archaeologist at Willamette Cultural Resources Associates in Seattle, Washington. She received her PhD from the University of Washington. Her research interests include Paleoarchaic technologies of the Pacific Northwest, human territoriality, and lithic and shell midden analysis.

Notes

1. During the summer of 1933, when the Clovis points were discovered at Blackwater Draw, Jesse Figgins, who had just recently excavated the Folsom Site, was excavating several mammoth carcasses at the site of Dent in Colorado where he also found two fluted points associated with mammoths.

2. Although guide flakes may have been used by Clovis knappers (see, for example, Morrow (2015, 146)), they are rarely visible on the finished product because, as Tesar and Whitfield points out, in contrast to Crabtree (1972), the fluting of Clovis points was conducted earlier in the reduction sequence than previously thought, and it was followed by a considerable amount of thinning and shaping. Consequently, any evidence of guide scars would have, in most cases, been removed during this latter process. Among the 95 Clovis points used for comparison, only three have ‘possible’ guide flakes. In contrast, post-Clovis points were fluted relatively late in the reduction process, so, unless the scars left by guide flakes were removed by the fluting process, they should still be visible. Therefore, visible guide scars were used as evidence that a point was not Clovis.

3. Guide scars are not always easy to identify; thus those scars that could definitely be identified as guide scars were coded “Not Clovis” or NC, while those that could be identified only as “possible” guide scars were coded “Possibly Not Clovis” or PNC.

4. Nearly complete points are those missing only a small portion of the upper blade and/or tip that can be reconstructed for measurement.