Clovis culture

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Spearhead of the Clovis culture

The Clovis culture was the first extensive prehistoric culture on the American continent. Archaeological it is by their characteristic projectile points from flint with double-sided and two-sided cutting surface retouching defined. The culture is named after the site of Clovis , New Mexico , where the first spikes were excavated in 1937 .

The culture has been dated to about 11,000 to 10,800 Before Present (about 9050 to 8850 BC) using the radiocarbon method. Individual finds differ slightly. This corresponds to the end of the last glacial period (called Wisconsin glaciation in North America ) and thus the transition from the geological epoch of the Pleistocene to the Holocene, which continues to this day .

Predecessor and development

Until the 1980s, it was believed that the Clovis culture paleo-Indians marked the beginning of colonization of America . Since then, mostly in North America, but also sporadically in South America, human remains or artifacts have been found that are up to several millennia before Clovis (English pre Clovis ). The localities are in particular Meadowcroft (Pennsylvania), the Nenana complex in Alaska, Monte Verde ( Chile ), the Serra da Capivara ( Brazil , state of Piauí ), and in the 21st century the Paisley Caves ( Oregon ) and the Buttermilk Creek Complex in Texas . A projectile point made from bone was found in Washington state. These finds place the colonization of America before the Clovis culture, especially since stone tools of a type before Clovis were found for the first time in the Buttermilk Creek Complex in Texas .

The members of the Clovis culture are descended from the first settlers in America who reached the continent at the end of the Ice Age via the Beringia land bridge between Siberia and Alaska, which still existed at the time . The occasional view that Stone Age hunters immigrated from Europe along the ice edge to North America during the last Ice Age is based on similarities between Clovis artifacts and those of the Solutréen culture in France. She was rejected in 2014 by DNA analysis from the bones of a Clovis grave.

The dating of tool finds in the Paisley Caves in the 21st century also allows a further addition to the early settlement epochs. Clovis was not the only culture of its time. In the intermountain region between the Rocky Mountains in the east and the coastal mountains near the Pacific in the west, no Clovis peaks are found, but western stemmed points . They have been confirmed to coincide with Clovis, so that it can be assumed that a wave of immigrants along the coast developed different tools than the immigrants in the eastern part of the continent, where the Clovis finds are available.

Way of life

The Clovis culture spread across the entire North American continent and as far as Central America in just 200 years. It was at the end of the Ice Age, the far north of the continent was still covered with the Laurentide Ice Sheet or the glaciers of the Rocky Mountains and the coastal mountains. In the steppe and forest landscapes south of it lived the megafauna shaped by the Ice Age, consisting of mammoths , various giant sloths ( Eremotherium and Paramylodon ), deer elk , American mastodon and relatives of the American bison . The immigrant people lived in small groups and family groups as nomadic hunters and gatherers from hunting big game, especially mammoths and bison. In addition, there was the hunt for smaller game such as white-tailed deer , pronghorn , bighorn sheep and small animals such as rabbits, but also reptiles and birds, as well as the collection of fruits and seeds from wild plants.

This picture of the main hunting for big game is possibly distorted because most of the sites were hunting grounds (English. Kill sites ) for big game. They were mostly located on low terraces by rivers where the game came to drink. Others were at year-round springs and water holes. Large amounts of stone chippings were found on hills by river courses. These places have been identified as "workshops" where the Clovis people waited for the annual herd of animals to migrate and used the time to make weapons and tools. It is certain that the big game played an important role, as it supplied people with fur, materials from the tusks of mammoths and massive bones, as well as animal hair for textiles.

Not much is known about the habitat of the Clovis people, but it is believed that they retreated into rock niches and caves in winter . One location of post holes or one oval pit are assigned to the Clovis culture, which points to simple huts and forerunners of pit houses . It is known from the Texan Gault Site that the Clovis people carved stone with artistic motifs. In pebbles, they carved lines, geometric patterns and a presumed stylized animal and a flower depiction with a pointed stone.

There is only one known grave from the Clovis culture, at the site of Anzick , near Wilsal in the US state of Montana . There in 1968 the burial of two children's corpses was found in connection with around 100 artefacts made of stone and bone. Fine red ocher powder was sprinkled over the burial , this type of red ocher burial makes the site the first known occurrence of ritual behavior in America. It was used in an identical form in North America thousands of years later.

The assumptions about the spread of the Clovis culture are speculative in detail. The finds range from 11,000 BP to around 10,800 BP. From this a spread through the entire North American continent within a few hundred years was derived. The Clovis culture was widespread in the south as far as Panama. Similar projectile points have been found in South America, which are characterized by a retracted shaft that widens again at the end and are referred to as fish tail points because of their resemblance to a fish tail . They are considered to be the oldest artifacts in South America that are distributed over a large area and are therefore equivalent to the Clovis points . Their dating is not yet clear. Fell's cave in Chile is considered a well-studied site .

Clovis tips from Iowa (partially damaged), with "flutes" = basal scarfing channels
Various Clovis tips

Tools

The Clovis points are the leading artifacts of culture. They are up to 20 cm long and consist of flint or other high-quality chert and were obtained from outcrops , some of which were still used as quarries several thousand years later. The Clovis people, already known as Alibates , obtained particularly high-quality flint from the Alibates Flint Quarries on the Canadian River in the north of what is now Texas , the longest-used quarries in America. Chalcedony came from the Ohio River and the Knife River in what is now the border area between the United States and Canada. Individual finds of obsidian are also attributed to the Clovis culture. They come mainly from the Rocky Mountains and the southwest between Arizona and Texas. The Obsidian Cliff in what is now Yellowstone National Park is known . Especially in the rock-poor regions of eastern North America, the Clovis people traveled great distances to extract high-quality rock. Points have been found several hundred to well over a thousand kilometers from the quarries from which the material came.

The projectile points were beaten into blades on both sides and could not only be used as the point of throwing spears , but could also be used by hand to open and cut the bodies of the hunted game. In addition to the points, the Paleo-Indians used larger hand axes for rough work and flat knives as blades for finer tasks. The larger tools were re-cut when they were worn to save valuable material. The large hand axes also served as a reserve of material, since smaller tools could be made from them at any time.

Extinction of the Ice Age megafauna

At about the same time as the Clovis culture , the ice age megafauna of North America died out . Mammoths , stag elks, giant sloths and the Canis dirus , a relative of the wolf , disappeared, of the large game of the time only the bison remained . A connection with the advance of the Clovis humans has been discussed many times. As an alternative to extermination by hunting, the climate change of the Younger Dryas comes into question, a sharp cold relapse ( stadial ) at the end of the Ice Age and the beginning of the Holocene .

In 2007 theses were published according to which both the extinction of the megafauna and the end of the Clovis culture shortly after 11,000 BP were caused by a meteorite impact or its explosion in deeper layers of the atmosphere . The assumption goes back to finds of large-scale burn marks through North America in layers of the same age, as well as finds of carbon in the form of tiny diamonds , which are explained by the pressure in such an explosion. The finds were dated to 13,000 years uncalibrated, which corresponds to a calibrated age of 11,000 BP. This is countered by studies according to which only the animal species were affected by the changes. A decrease in the human population density that could be assumed in the event of a meteorite impact was not found. More recent research suggests that graphene identified by electron diffraction studies in the meantime was wrongly viewed as nanodiamonds in earlier studies. A systematic evaluation of drill cores from wetlands in North America also came to the conclusion that the isotopic composition does not provide any evidence of a meteorite impact.

At 11,000 BP, the Clovis culture ends and the Folsom culture , also named after a site in New Mexico, begins. Their characteristic projectile tips are smaller and the retouching extends further towards the tip. After the megafauna became extinct, people switched to hunting for smaller game, and the largely end of the climatic influence of the Ice Age also ensured the spread of other food crops.

literature

  • Bruce A. Bradley, Michael B. Collins, Andrew Hemmings: Clovis Technology (= Archaeological Series. Vol. 17). International Monographs in Prehistory, Ann Arbor MI 2010, ISBN 978-1-879621-41-1 .
  • Brian M. Fagan : Ancient North America. The Archeology of a Continent. Thames and Hudson Ltd, London / New York NY 1991, ISBN 0-500-27606-4 (also German: The early North America. Archeology of a continent. Translated and arranged for the German edition by Wolfgang Müller . CH Beck, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-406-37245-7 ).
  • Gary Haynes: The early settlement of North America. The Clovis Era. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge et al. 2002, ISBN 0-521-81900-8 (Reprinted edition. Ibid. 2009, ISBN 978-0-521-81900-8 ).
  • Kenneth B. Tankersley: Clovis Cultural Complex. In: Guy Gibbon: Archeology of Prehistoric Native America. An Encyclopedia (= Garland Reference Library of the Humanities. 1537). Garland Publishing, New York NY et al. 1998, ISBN 0-8153-0725-X , pp. 161ff.
  • Dennis J. Stanford, Bruce A. Bradley: Across Atlantic Ice. The Origin of America's Clovis Culture , University of California Press 2012. ISBN 978-0-520-22783-5 .

Web links

Commons : Clovis culture  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ M. Thomas P. Gilbert, Dennis L. Jenkins et al .: DNA from Pre-Clovis Human Coprolites in Oregon, North America. In: Science , Volume 320, No. 5877, pp. 786-789 - doi : 10.1126 / science.1154116
  2. ↑ Michael R. Waters, Thomas W. Stafford Jr., et al .: Pre-Clovis Mastodon Hunting 13,800 Years ago at the Manis Site, Washington. In: Science , Volume 334, Issue 6054 (October 21, 2011), pages 351-353 - doi : 10.1126 / science.1207663
  3. ↑ Morten Rasmussen, Sarah L. Anzick, et al .: The genome of a Late Pleistocene human from a Clovis burial site in western Montana. In: Nature 506, pages 225-229 (February 13, 2014) doi: 10.1038 / nature13025
  4. ↑ Dennis L. Jenkins, Loren G. Davis, et al .: Clovis Age Western Stemmed Projectile Points and Human Coprolites at the Paisley Caves . Science Vol. 337, pages 223-228, (July 13, 2012), doi: 10.1126 / science.1218443
  5. ↑ Michael R. Waters, Thomas W. Stafford Jr .: Redefining the age of Clovis: Implications for the peopling of the Americas . In: Science , 315, No. 5815, February 23, 2007, pp. 1122-1126, doi : 10.1126 / science.1137166 .
  6. ↑ Michael B. Collins, Thomas R. Hester, et al .: Engraved Cobbles from Early Archaeological Contexts in Central Texas . In: Current Research in the Pleistocene , Volume 8, 1991, pages 13-15
  7. ↑ Larry Lahren, Robson Bonnichsen: Bone Foreshafts from a Clovis Burial in Southwestern Montana . In: Science , Vol. 186, No. 4159 (October 11, 1974), pp. 147-150
  8. ↑ Rex Dalton: Blast in the past? in: Nature , Volume 447, No. 7142 (May 17, 2007), pages 256-257 - doi : 10.1038 / 447256a
  9. ↑ The entire continent was on fire. ( Memento of the original from May 26, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Did a comet wipe out prehistoric Americans? New Scientist, online May 22, 2007. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / space.newscientist.com
  10. ↑ Exploding asteroid theory strengthened by new evidence. In: Space Daily, online, July 7, 2008.
  11. ↑ Cold snap 13,000 years ago - diamond finds support the meteorite thesis In: SPIEGEL Online, January 2, 2009.
  12. ↑ Briggs Buchanan, Mark Collard, Kevan Edinborough: Paleoindian demography and the extraterrestrial impact hypothesis. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 105, No. 33 (August 19, 2008), pages: 11651-11654
  13. ↑ Tyrone L. Daultona, Nicholas Pinter, Andrew C. Scott: No evidence of nanodiamonds in Younger Dryas-sediments to support event of impact. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 107, 2010, p. 16043, doi : 10.1073 / pnas.1003904107 .
  14. ↑ François S. Paquaya, Steven Goderis et al .: Absence of geochemical evidence for impact on events at the Bølling-Allerød / Younger Dryas transition. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . Volume 106, number 51, December 2009, pp. 21505-21510, doi : 10.1073 / pnas.0908874106 , PMID 20007789 , PMC 2799824 (free full text).