clovis
aardvarchaeology | February 13, 2014I've blogged before about the woebegone Solutrean hypothesis, and I'm happy to say that it is now dead.
The oldest well-characterised archaeological culture in America is the Clovis culture. Its main diagnostic type is a large knapped stone spearhead with a fluted base. The Solutrean hypothesis starts from a comparison with spearheads from the Solutrean culture in south-west Europe, noting that certain Solutrean points have an outline that is similar to that of Clovis points. Is the Clovis point a typological descendant on the Solutrean point? No, say most Palaeolithic scholars, because never…
gregladen | November 11, 2012I want to talk about the book Across Atlantic Ice: The Origin of America's Clovis Culture. It was written by Dennis Stanford and Bruce Bradley, both highly respected archaeologists. The point they make in the book is very simple: An important archaeological culture known as the "Clovis" is actually a European culture that traveled east to west from Europe to North America, arriving first along the New England coast and then fairly quickly spreading across the US to the Rockies, and subsequently kinda petering out though there are bits and pieces of Clovis looking stuff farther west.
From…