Clovis – and Earlier

Of the archeological sites which are considered to have signs of pre-Clovis human activity there are four that I want to focus on today, for a reason, which I’ll get to in a minute.

When and how people first came to the New World has long been an archeological mystery.   Whenever the first Europeans arrived here (either in 1492, and thereafter, or earlier, if you prefer, with Leif Ericsson), they found people already living here.  But where had they come from?  And how?  And when?

Beginning in the 1920’s and thereafter, archeologists (and others) began finding large uniquely shaped stone spear points, and thought, “Aha! Here is evidence of the first people to inhabit the Americas.”  The points were unique in that they had a distinctive fluting, which permitted the point to be hafted onto a shaft.  (See the illustrations.)  The first of these archaic points was found near the town of Clovis, New Mexico, and the culture that had created these beautiful tools became known as the Clovis culture. crain-clovis-hh1Clovis Point

The scientists knew these points were old, because, for example, they found some wedged in mammoth bones.  And as dating techniques became more refined, the points were dated to roughly thirteen thousand years ago. [1] At the time of the discovery of the Clovis points, and for a long time after that, that there was no evidence of any human occupation before that time, roughly 13,000 years BP (Before Present).  

So, based on the discovery of these old stone tools, and the absence of evidence of an earlier human presence, the predominant theory developed.  The theory is often called the Clovis First theory.  That theory was fairly straightforward:  During the last glacial maximum, between sixteen thousand and twelve thousand years ago, the sea level was so low that Siberia and Alaska were connected by a vast land bridge called Beringia; and the people who made those Clovis points, the first humans to come into the Americas, had walked across that land; had come here from Siberia, down through Canada, and into the Americas.  And the theory was plausible, because at that time, not only were the seas low enough to permit travel from Siberia to Alaska on foot, across the vast land today known as Beringia, but also, because at that time there was an ice-free corridor which would have let the wanderers pass down from Alaska between the glaciers, and so into Canada, and the rest of the Americas. And, at that time there was no evidence to suggest that people had been here earlier.

Thus, the Clovis First theory says that those people, who came across Beringia between sixteen thousand and twelve thousand years ago, were the first people to enter North America.  And it was thought, that by 13,000 years ago, they and their culture had diffused as far south as Clovis, New Mexico.

It was a very neat theory.  And, for that matter, it’s a theory that may well reflect (a part of) what really happened.  That is to say, it is likely that some people did, in fact, come into the Americas via Beringia, during that time.

But – it may be that that was not the only way that people got here; and it also may be that people got here earlier than previously thought.

Cue four sites of human settlement in the Americas:

Meadowcroft, Pennsylvania

Saltville, Virginia

Cactus Hill, Virginia

Topper, South Carolina

Why?  Why these four sites?

Two reasons:

First, each has evidence of human activity earlier than 13,000 years ago; evidence of the human presence before the Clovis First theory  permits.

One of the interesting things about archeology is that it isn’t like going to a museum.  The discoveries are not complete little villages, all laid out in a neat diorama.  There are no complete sets of bows and arrows, just lying around.  The materials discovered are often fragmentary, contradictory, and require detailed analysis, and some level of conjecture, before inferences may be drawn, and tentative conclusions reached.

To a greater or lesser extent each of these sites is controversial, insofar as each purports to show evidence of human activity before 13,000 years BP, in large part because the evidence is so equivocal.  I’ll review the sites in greater detail later, but for now, it’s sufficient to state that each shows (or claims to show) evidence of human activity much earlier than the commonly accepted dates of Clovis culture.

How much earlier?    A million years?

Five hundred thousand years?

One hundred thousand years?

Nope.  Three thousand years, four maybe, maybe five thousand years, maybe a little more.

I’ve oversimplified a little.  As noted above, these sites are dated using radiocarbon analysis and that method generates different dates than calendar dates.  There are formulas, however, which allow radiocarbon dates to be translated, roughly, into calendar dates, and using that conversion factor, we can derive evidence of human activity at these sites that goes back as far as 20,000 years BP.

Now that is not hundreds of thousands of years, not even tens of thousands of years, but it is thousands of years.  Thousands (plural) of years.   That’s a long time.  Christianity is only two thousand years old; the pyramids were built five thousand years ago.  And we’re back way before that, and, for that matter, way before the Clovis dates.  Thousands of years earlier.

As I say, each site is somewhat controversial.  But let us assume, for now, that they accurately show evidence of human activity thousands of years before Clovis culture developed.

That leads to the second reason to consider these four sites:

Look where they are.  They’re all on the east coast.

They are thousands of miles away from Clovis, New Mexico; thousands of miles away from the ice-free corridor which led down through Alaska and Canada into North America.  These sites are way over in the east.

Somebody did some traveling.

Somebody traveled far enough to be way over in Virginia, thousands of years before the Clovis culture began.  Who?  Where’d they come from? How’d they get here?

These sites therefore, are significant for a number of reasons:

First, they show evidence that there were people here thousands of years earlier than the Clovis First theory posits.

Second, they show that those people, (whoever they were, however they got here, whenever they got here), were widely spread out across North America.

Third, the locations suggest that people must have entered North America much earlier than the dates posited under the Clovis First theory, in order to give them enough time have travelled so far.

But look at this cool map here.[2]

Bering Strait1

See how it shows routes of travel?  The first Americans could go anywhere they wanted (subject to the location of the ice sheets during the various ice ages).  Don’t makethe mistake of thinking that just because Clovis points were first found in New Mexico that that was where the Clovis culture began.  It’s not as though the first people came over the land bridge, directly down to Clovis, New Mexico, devised this new stone technique and then spread out from there.  In fact, Clovis points have been found all over America, and there is no single answer to where it began.  

Still, it is interesting that once was once considered the first record of the peopling of the Americas is now being superseded by evidence of human inhabitation of the Americas much earlier than originally thought, from sites that are very widely diffused.

I’ll bet you’d like the answer, huh?  Who were these people? When did they get here?  How?

Stick around.





[1]Dates are commonly obtained by radiocarbon dating, and the dates are given as RCYBP, which stands for RadioCarbon Years Before Present.  Radiocarbon years do not exactly equal calendar years. Under that measure Clovis culture is thought to have begun about 11,500 RCYBP.  This translates, however (roughly) to 13000 – 135000 years ago. The whole radiocarbon dating/time scale conversion issue is well beyond the scope of this blog, or this blog entry at least.  So for now, let’s just agree that Clovis culture began sometime around about thirteen thousand years ago.


[2] I found this map in the article “Prehistoric Migration of American Indians,” by (I think) Katherine Bolman, BS, MFA, MEd, MSW, EdD., at  The map itself is attributed to Jose Arredondo.  The link to the website is



The Door Opens





A simple story and a beautiful one.









Four – maybe bold sailors sailed right across the Pacific.

Five – maybe equally bold sailors sailed right across the Atlantic.



When did people first come to the Americas?  How?
