Ice Age America: The Clovis Culture
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What defines the Clovis culture and why are they called America’s prehistoric mammoth hunters?
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They're known as America's prehistoric mammoth hunters. Hunter-gatherers who lived near the end of the Ice Age just over 10,000 years ago, defined by their iconic leaf-shaped stone spear tips and the great megafauna carcasses they butchered at sites across America, from New Mexico to Wyoming, from Washington State to Virginia. They're remembered as the Clovis culture, prehistoric peoples that have long since fascinated archaeologists working on America's late Ice Age story. Over the decades, More and more information has come to light about who these people were and how they lived. And yet, so many mysteries, so many debates still remain. It's this archaeology that we're going to be exploring today.
Welcome to the Ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And this is the latest on America's mammoth hunting Clovis culture. Our guest is Dr. Madeline Mackey. Maddy, it is such a pleasure to have you on the show.
It's great to be here. Thank you for having me.
More than welcome. I love talking about these topics from prehistory, especially prehistoric America. And the Clovis culture, Maddy, they've gained this intriguing reputation as America's prehistoric mammoth hunters.
That's true. That is, I think most people, when they think of Clovis, what they think of is that like iconic image of a small group of humans kind of stalking this giant multi-ton animal. And it's just so different than how we think of, you know, I think of how a lot of us experience the world today. And it's created this fascination.
Absolutely. And the general picture, isn't it? And they've all got their large wooden spears with kind of stone spear tips as well. And they're all kind of hunting the mammoth. And as you say, that is the image that has just been passed down to us today whenever anyone mentions Clovis, the Clovis people, the Clovis culture.
Yeah, exactly. And I think for a lot of us today, we feel like that feels really, you know, minimally like minimal on the technology front, right, where it's just spears with stone tips. But that also kind of underplays how amazing the technology is for creating things like that, the knowledge that goes into being able to live like that. And while that image captures a lot of the imagination, it also really undervalues the amazing kind of nature of what it took to live in what is today the Americas 13,000 years ago.
You've anticipated my next question, which is the date. When talking about the Clovis culture, these people, I mean, how far back are we going?
Yeah, so Clovis, we tend to think of, or what we know based off radiocarbon dates and a number of sites that they date to the very end of the Ice Age or the Pleistocene. And we particularly have them narrowed down to a few hundred years, most centrally between about 13,100 years ago to about 12,750 years ago. Although there's a little bit of fluff, it could go a little bit further back than that, depending on kind of what sites you're looking at and how you're looking at radiocarbon dates. We're really looking at a few hundred years right at the end of the Ice Age and some of the earliest widespread technologies that we see in North America.
That's remarkable in itself. For the Ice Age, which is this huge period of time, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, the fact that with Clovis, you can pinpoint it to only a few hundred years right at the end of the Ice Age, I find that in itself is pretty staggering.
Oh, for sure. And it's one of those things too, where that's one of the things that makes Clovis one of the many things we'll talk about that makes Clovis so interesting is that we have this kind of narrower timeframe and also this wide geographic extent where we're seeing similar stone tool technologies.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What defines the Clovis culture and why are they called America’s prehistoric mammoth hunters?
0:00–18:23
2
When did the Clovis people live and how precise are the radiocarbon dates?
18:23–24:37
3
How far did Clovis sites spread across North America and what does that tell us about their mobility?
24:37–33:04
4
What was the Ice Age environment like for Clovis peoples and which megafauna co‑existed with them?
33:04–59:30