The Clovis points
A weapon so standardised it reads like a recipe
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Clovis points are stone spear points with a characteristic channel down the middle, named after the site in New Mexico where they were first found. Clovis was long taken to be the first culture in the Americas, and "Clovis first" was scholarly consensus for fifty years. Older sites — Monte Verde in Chile, Page-Ladson in Florida, Cooper's Ferry in Idaho — have overturned that model; people were here before. That makes Clovis more interesting, not less: the technology is not an arrival but something that arose here and spread across a continent in a few generations.
For children
Across much of North America one finds spear points made in exactly the same way, with a channel down the middle for hafting them to a shaft. They were made for a few hundred years and spread across the continent remarkably fast.
Sources
- Meltzer, First Peoples in a New World (2009)
- Waters m.fl., Science 331 (2011) — funn eldre enn Clovis
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