Ice Age America: The Clovis Culture

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America's Mammoth Hunters

0:30They'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 speartips and the great megafauna carcasses they butchered at sites across America,

1:00from 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.

1:30I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is the latest on America's mammoth-hunting Clovis culture. Our guest is Dr. Madeline Mackey.

1:42Maddie, it is such a pleasure to have you on the show. It's great to be here. Thank you for having me. You're more than welcome. I love talking about these topics from prehistory, especially with prehistoric America. The Clovis culture, Maddie, they've gained this intriguing reputation as America's prehistoric mammoth hunters. That's true. I think most people, when they think of Clovis, what they think of is that iconic image of a small group of humans stalking this giant, multi-ton animal. It's just so different than how a lot of us experience the world today.

2:15And 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

2:46for creating things like that, the knowledge that goes into being able to live like that. And while that image like 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.

Dating the Clovis Culture

3:02You've anticipated my next question, which is the date. When talking about the Clovis culture of 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,

3:32it 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. So we're really looking at a few hundred years right at the end of the Ice Age and some of the kind of earliest widespread technologies that we see in North America. But that's remarkable in itself. I mean, 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, I mean, that in itself is pretty staggering. Oh, for sure.

4:04And 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. We're seeing some behaviors that seem kind of associated with lots of those spaces. Then things kind of start changing after that. So understanding how that all works is really interesting.

Fluted Points and Ice Age Geography

4:29And you mentioned their wide geographic extent. So how wide should we be thinking? So Clovis is really defined by those stone projectile points. That's the kind of iconic, diagnostic, identifying artifact of Clovis. And we call these Clovis points. They're lancelet, so they don't have notches in them. They have concave bases. And then they're really known because they are what we call fluted. So fluting is when these flakes are taken, so these chips are taken from the center, from the base of the point.

5:00And on most Clovis points, they come up about a third to halfway up at most. And this is a really distinctive type of stone tool that we see. They probably, they would have been attached or hafted to spears that were either thrusted or thrown or braced when they were used. And because that is such a unique thing, particularly that fluting, they're really identifiable. And they've been found basically coast to coast in North America. Although their densities vary depending on where you are on the continent.

5:31So from coast to coast, and I know it is such a large land mass, but can we get a picture of a general type of climate, type of topography that these people were living in at the end of the Ice Age, you know, North America some 13,000 years ago? Yeah. So we find, we definitely find, or have found Clovis points on the surface, coast to coast, but certainly there are more of them, especially east of the Rockies and headed into particularly the American Plains into the southeastern portion of the United States

6:03where we see some of those highest densities. And some of that is probably to do with like things today, like population density today, where people are around kind of walking landscapes to pick those up. Some of it may be some preservation stuff going on. And then some of it may also be reflecting like those are the spaces where people are using that type of technology. But the fact that we find them in such a wide geographic area is really unique to Clovis. And in subsequent time periods, we see much more regionalization going on in at least the tipped spheres that are used. But of course, we say Ice Age, we say this is the late Ice Age,

6:33but should we imagine, should we be imagining environments covered in ice or steppe or tundra at this time? What should we be thinking? Yeah, exactly. So this is going to be, you know, remember in Ice Age Americas, the top of the continent is covered in these giant, two giant ice sheets, the Laurentide and the Cordillern. And, you know, that comes down to a little bit, depends on the time period, a little bit lower than the Canadian-US border today, although it does move depending on what's going on in Ice Age weather. And south of that, what we see are landscapes

7:04that are in many ways are not totally analogous to what we see today. The geology may not be dramatically different, but particularly the ecosystems that are on those faces could be really different. Most notably, I think for the Clovis story and something we hear a lot with Clovis is that this landscape is full of megafauna, more than 35 genera of which went extinct at the end of the Ice Age. So this includes, of course, our mammoths, along with a number of other Crobocidians or like the elephant order family. So mastodons, and we have gonfothyrs,

7:37which are these like really cool multitusks elephants. We also have things like giant ground slots, polyptodons, which you can kind of think of like a giant armadillo. The giant armadillo ones with those big shells, right? Yeah. We can also think of horses, camels, bison antiquus, and even bigger bison species. And a lot of those species, or at least 35 genera of them, go extinct at the end of the Ice Age as well. So this is really a landscape that doesn't have analogies today in many ways

8:09in the ecosystems and the species, both plant and animal communities that are living on it. But that's great to highlight straight away, Maddie, as we delve into the Clovis people themselves, is the fact that even though this is late in what we call the Ice Age, you still have lots of those different genera, lots of those different amazing megafauna species still around and still around in large numbers at that time. It's not like they've been, you know, some of them have already gone extinct. You still have lots coexisting with these early humans.

8:39Yeah. So this is one of the things that makes Clovis also really unique and special is that we have very serious overlap between a lot of those Pleistocene megafauna, as we call them, and our Clovis foragers that are living on this landscape. Now, we don't have great radiocarbon dates on, or like an idea of when the extinction were for all 35 of these genera. That's definitely something, there's a lot of research going on still working, but we know that a number of them are still alive and interacted with Clovis populations,

9:09particularly species like mammoth, which actually there's a few different species of mammoth. We have the woolly mammoth, which I think is what a lot of people think of. Yes. But we also, south of the Ice Sheets, we find some woolly mammoth, but what we find more is Colombian mammoths, which are a little bit bigger, a little less hairy. There's some other biological differences going on. We also see mastodons that were definitely around that late, gompathiers for sure, horses, camels, ground sloths, a number of species. Oh yeah, camels. Sorry, quick dumb question for me on the side,

9:41but I'll always think with prehistoric America, I'll always also think like saber-toothed cats and direwolves, but have they gone by this time or are they still also around? They are still also around. I admit I don't know the date of saber-toothed cat extinction off the top of my head, but they are definitely still around. We also have a number of other big cats, like there is the American lion and cheetah as well, that we believe are still around at that time period too. And of course, then you get emerging onto the stage, you get the arrival of humans.

The Clovis First Theory

10:09And Maddie, for a long time, I mean, I have in my notes, the theory, the Clovis first theory. Now, can you explain what this is, what this was and what we now believe? Yeah. So Clovis was, you know, the reason we call Clovis points, Clovis points is because of the first site that they were reported kind of being at, particularly in association with association with mammoth remains, which is the site of Blackwater Draw, which is located in New Mexico. And this was in the 1930s.

10:40Now, kind of important for understanding the context of this story is that this is only a few years after the discoveries at another site nearby the site of Folsom, which is where another very well-known Pleistocene tool set, Folsom points, were first discovered with bison antiquus, are extinct species of bison. And that was also the site where there first was like wide recognition in the archaeological community that humans had been on North America since the Ice Age. So less than a decade later,

11:11we see the discoveries at Blackwater Draw, where we have Clovis points in association with mammoths. And actually right around the same time, there was another site in northern Colorado called the Dent site that has, I think it's 15 mammoths at it, if I remember correctly, also found in association with Clovis points. And this kind of kicked off this phase of a number of sites coming out where we see Clovis, very clearly Clovis points found in association with megafauna, particularly mammoths. And this started creating this story,

11:41especially with this widespread distribution of Clovis, that these were the first populations in the Americas that they came in following megafauna. They initially settled all of these large landscapes and were going and following kind of these megafauna and going all across the continent. And that really starts in, you know, the early 1900s, mid-1900s and kind of continues on. So that was, that used to be the thinking. But since then, more research has been done that has revealed that actually the arrival of humans

12:12in America, in the Americas, is a few thousand years earlier, if I'm correct. Yeah. So that was the kind of the running thought for a long period of time through most of the 20th century. There have been a lot of people who were looking for sites that were earlier, what we kind of term as pre-Clovis sites, right, looking for occupations that predate that very clear Clovis time period of this kind of traditional story of Clovis. And what we've seen is a number of sites have been proposed. I would say this is probably one of the most acrimonious debates

12:44in American archaeology. It gets pretty heated among the Pleistocene archaeologists when you start talking about this often. But we've seen that a number of sites that have come out that have been pretty widely accepted, although there's lots of debate among archaeologists, particularly the Pleistocene archaeologists, of which ones have good evidence for humans before or after. So a lot of people have probably heard of some of these sites. The earliest one was the Monteverde site in Chile. We also have sites like Paisley Caves in Oregon, Cooper's Ferry in Idaho, Paige Bladsen

13:14in Florida. And a lot of this kind of made it so the majority of the archaeological community thinks that there were populations here before Clovis probably for a few thousand years. Although admittedly, there is a lot of debate about that. And if anybody follows archaeological literature, they know there's been a lot of recent debate about that in the literature as well. I wanted to bring that up because we've done an interview in the past with Dr. David Meltzer kind of all about that, which we'll put a link to in the description. But just important to highlight that, you know, it seems to be a few thousand years humans have reached the Americas, North America, and then you get

13:44the emergence in the archaeological record of these stunning Clovis points and these key sites. And Maddy, we'll explore some of these key sites now, including one that you have done a lot of work at. But I'm getting a sense that there's a bit of a trend in the types of sites where you have discovered Clovis archaeology. I mean, it seems like there are always kind of extinct megafauna remains close by. Yeah, lots of times there are. Not always, but lots of times. And I will say, and I think this connects

14:15a little bit to what I was just talking about as well, you know, one reason I became really interested in Clovis, apart from kind of a fortuitous opportunity walking through my door thanks to my mentors in graduate school, is like this kind of iconic image and this idea of it being so associated with extinct megafauna, these species we don't see anymore. But also, one thing I will note about Clovis is so often when we talk about them, the main focus is that timeline question. Like, are they first or not? And there are so many other things to talk about Clovis

14:46that they are really interesting and cool and questions we can ask that make understanding the past a lot more relatable and kind of humanistic. And that is a lot of what kind of drives my research and a lot of the things I'm looking at is less kind of this time marker question and more what do we know about life for Clovis? How do we figure that out? What are new ways we can look at this? How do we apply new technologies? Etc. And I think that's relevant to some of the sites that I believe we're going to talk about. Yes, I mean, give us a sense,

15:16Maddie. So where we're sitting now in 2026, I mean, has there been a lot more archaeological work done, more information revealed, not just that, you know, that they're these extinct mammoths and that they had these sharp spear points and that, you know, debates about the date. Do we now have more information? Have we now found new sites that is revealing more tantalizing information about the people themselves, who they were, how they lived? Yeah, I definitely think that we're starting to see both some new site discoveries or kind of diving

15:47into existing sites and new discoveries at those existing sites that's starting to offer really different perspectives on Clovis. And this is something that's certainly relevant to a lot of the work that has kind of inspired my research. So as I mentioned in my graduate studies, I had the opportunity to start working on a site that I'm now co-principal investigator on, the LaProwl site,

The La Prel Site in Wyoming

16:09which is located

The La Prel Site in Wyoming

16:10in eastern Wyoming. And that site, I think, really typifies how continued research at existing sites or new research at these sites and new technologies can offer these much more in-depth perception of what's going on during these time periods. And geographically, because I had a look at the map just before starting, you mentioned the Clovis site, the original Clovis site, Blackwater Draw in New Mexico. That's the type site for the Clovis culture. And then I looked at where LaProwl is in Wyoming, and it's like over a thousand kilometers north

16:40of Blackwater Draw. And I think that in itself just gives you a sense of kind of the geographic extent of this culture we're talking about. Yeah, and this is one of the things, so one thing we do know about Clovis from a number of sites across the continent is that these people were moving, and they were moving far, and they were moving often. And one of the ways we see this is that we find the stone tools they're making, the stone they're making them out of, transported hundreds of kilometers in different time periods.

17:11You know, we also see that to some degree there's certainly some variation. People are making a projectile point, right, that's tipped on this sphere that looks similar across thousands of miles in some cases. Now, you know, that's not to say every person who made a Clovis point identified as the exact same community, right? We as archaeologists, we love our materials, right? We don't, it's not the same as like in a self-identified culture of today, but it's really amazing when we think about this geographic scale. And yeah, La Crelle is, you know, very far away

17:41from the Blackwater draw site, and there's Clovis sites and plenty of Clovis points in between those, but it's really the scale, especially when we compare it to other, you know, continents is really amazing and pretty mind-blowing. And is that something we should also really highlight straight away is the fact that, I mean, generally speaking, these are what we know as kind of prehistoric hunter-gatherers or hunter-gatherer fishers, you know, kind of moving through the landscape, going after the herds, hunting these great beasts

18:12or small beasts or scavenging, and then going from place to place. But I guess the important point for the archaeology is the fact that they're not leaving great stone houses behind. I mean, the archaeology that they leave behind is, you know, naturally more invisible than what you get later on. Yeah, and this is something I talk to my students a lot about when teaching in the U.S. is that I think when people think of archaeology, they think of these, like, massive, you know, tombs and temples and Indiana Jones and, like, that stuff is amazing.

18:42But when we talk about Ice Age archaeology, we're talking about stuff that, like, you could walk past and you have no idea that it's there unless you really know what you're looking for or someone goes out kind of looking for it. Because most of these sites, what we find is, you know, some chipped, maybe a few thousand pieces of chipped stone, some projectile points, maybe some animal bone if we have good preservation. But it's very minimal on kind of impacts to the topography of an area that's not these big constructions and that's just

19:14because of how these people live, right? And that's what we see from more recent foragers and ethnographic accounts as well is that sometimes they do create big constructions like mounds, but lots of times it's much, much more ephemeral on the landscape and much harder to see. Well, let's focus on this site that you've done lots of work at and how it's revealing more about the people themselves alongside their activities. So Leprel, I mean, how was this site discovered in rural Wyoming? So actually this site, like many of the Clovis sites

19:44that have really defined how we talk about Clovis, was discovered by locals. So the site was actually discovered in 1986 when a couple of locals from the nearby town of Douglas, Wyoming were walking along from Leprel Creek and they noticed some large bones coming out. And this is one reason why I think we do see a lot of mammoth remains reported when maybe we don't see smaller animal remains reported is like, you know, if you see a bison, you could be like, oh, that might be a cow unless you're familiar with, you know, it's pretty hard to tell those parts still.

20:14When you see a mammoth, you're like, that's big. That's weird. What is that? So they, the find eventually got reported to the University of Wyoming and a very well-known Plains archaeologist, Dr. George Frizen, who went out and tested the site, found the partial remains of a sub-adult mammoth, nearly fully grown, but still not quite fully grown, and then a stone tool and a couple chips from resharpening a stone tool. And basically, that he left with the idea

20:45that this may be culturally associated, there may have been humans involved. He knew that was really notable and would be a really important site, but wasn't able to go back. And in the 2000s, myself, along with my co-PIs, Todd Serval, Bob Kelly, Spencer Pelton, Matt O'Brien, we got the opportunity to go back and start working on the site. And one of the first things we wanted to resolve was, was there a human signature here? Because there had been some very reasonable questions raised on if it was a natural mammoth death site with some archaeology

21:16that fell on top of it or if it was associated with actual human activity. So we started going back in about 2014 and spent, I think it was nine seasons over the next 11 years working on this site. So we've done a ton since that time. And what did you slowly uncover through those excavation seasons? Was this just the site of a natural mammoth meeting its end or were there humans

Uncovering a Prehistoric Campsite

21:40also at play? So the first thing we found out or the first question we said to answer was exactly that. It was, were humans at play or not? And we started by excavating kind of right around where the mammoth bone was originally found. We found some artifacts but most importantly it was a pretty lucky discovery. A very talented retired archaeologist, Dr. Rich Adams was building a path to help us get to our screens for screening all the sediment that came out of the site. And he found this large chopping tool

22:10about 10 meters away from the mammoth the first season we were out there and all of us were like oh, that's really interesting. And what do you mean what do you mean by a chopping tool? What should we be thinking? So basically it kind of looks like an old one tool. It's literally a river river cobble with a couple flakes taken off. Yes, an old one tool so that's like what they were using early humans or Australopithecus were using in Central Africa almost three million years ago. Okay. Yeah, so and by that I mean you know not making an analogy for what's you know anything along the lines except for the fact this was a really

22:40probably something that was made right on site. Someone picked up a cobble from a river nearby needed a pretty sharp blunt instrument to maybe butcher a mammoth right and made a little sharp edge on it and that was what we found but we found it in a place where we didn't think there was archaeology before and we also found it in a place where it was geologically out of place. the site was buried with kind of gradual flooding and then we found this big cobble and we were like well nature probably wouldn't move that so maybe a human did and that led us to start testing

23:10kind of wider areas of the site and what we found was eventually something like more than 50,000 flakes at least four concentrations of artifacts a few hundred stone tools we found some eventually mammoth ivory and we started finding out that this site wasn't just a set of butchered mammoth remains but was really kind of this space where humans probably lived while they were interacting with kind of those mammoth remains butchering them processing them

23:41preserving them whatever they're kind of interested in doing with that animal. It's logical isn't it though the fact that as you find more realizing that okay this isn't just a butchery site we have evidence of as would make sense if you're butchering a mammoth or mammoths which have lots of food on them and you've got a small community there's evidence that the people were staying here for some time whilst they were doing that and doing much else so you've got a campsite there as well I guess exactly so think of it this way if you take down a multi-ton mammal like a mammoth and you're already

24:12what we call residentially mobile you move your house there all the time instead of dragging portions of that animal back to your house it makes much more sense to just move your house to that animal your pitch tent yeah you pitch your tent there right yeah you pitch your tent there now I should say this is not like an idea we came up with like this has been hypothesized and in fact there is another site where we have an excavated campsite in North America this site is in southern Arizona it's called Murray Springs and they found a campsite associated with both mammoth

24:42and bison butchering a Clovis mammoth and bison butchering down in those spaces and that site was the campsite was also found by accident when someone was kind of I think it was their parking area if I remember correctly it's been a while since I've looked at that report but it makes sense when we think about kind of how foragers use landscapes right and this is also something we see in subsequent time periods when other communities acquire lots of resources they often move to them right there's some there's some analogies we can make to ethnographic accounts of elephant hunters in central Africa today where those foraging

25:12communities will move to butcher to butcher the elephant remains for a short period of time and use them now what's really amazing about the camp at Leprel is that by finding that it opens up this avenue to ask and answer questions that go just beyond were they using this animal right it lets us ask questions about where were they coming from where are the stone tools coming from what does social organization look like or how are people cooperating what else are people doing and my other favorite part about this is it also

25:42really drives home that this is a community right we're gonna have everyone here we're gonna have adults we're gonna have kids we're gonna have elderly we're gonna have men we're gonna have women we're gonna have everyone kind of participating in this event and we get a much more complete picture of what is going on in the past and it lets us kind of address these things that are often really hard to get at in the archaeological record unless you kind of have a circumstance like this and everyone has to play their part as well in these communities isn't it I mean kids from a young age will have to learn to hunt and to butcher and to do all

26:13those other things and people until they're quite old will also have to be involved in it as well because it's all about kind of the sustaining of the community in these small groups at that time yeah exactly we should expect everyone to be participating we also you know like there's a good reason that when you have a group project everyone does slightly different things right and so we also expect that different kind of portions of the population are probably going to be doing different things and so this is also a way for us to try to get at some of that right like what are all the tasks that are going on instead of just you know like a

26:44photo of people hunting a mammoth with tip spears right which is that image we so focus on and forget about all the other context that has to go on to allow that to happen and one thing i'd like to ask straight away then in regards to this is is a bit more on the location

27:16is laperell quite a suitable location for a campsite i mean is there fresh water nearby for instance you've got to think if they're going to be staying there for so long they need continual access to water as well as the food that they've got nearby so this site is located on a pretty small well for the area not super small but pretty small stream but it's actually only a mile away from the plat river which is one of the major waterways throughout the region in fact it's probably the plat that helps contribute to the site being preserved as far as if this is like a super remarkable place on the landscape i

27:47would not say there's anything that makes it like incredibly notable and so you know what makes it notable is the fact that we have the old dirt preserved and the old space preserved that lets that kind of archaeology be in a pretty good space where we can start asking and answering these questions right but it is you know good access to water we also know that there are certainly mammoth populations in that portion of wyoming at that time period actually i know of at least four other mammoth sites within a short

28:18drive from that site so it seems like there's a pretty hardy mammoth population in that area and that probably also contributes and you know these are some of the questions we're starting to get at now that we're in kind of our big analysis phase of laprell is like how did this get you know how did this space become that place what is it in the greater context of ice age you know what becomes wyoming and other sites in the region right how does this kind of place in all those spaces well let's kind of delve into what you guys have found out over the years so as you did more and

28:49more excavations before focusing on the artifacts themselves i mean do we have more of a sense then of the layout of this campsite maddie do we have an idea of dare we say the buildings or the tents or what life was like so the bit one thing that's really notable about laprell is the spatial dynamics we have going on so how the artifacts are outlaid and what the maps look like when we when we map all of these different artifacts and what we think we have is for hearth what we call hearth centered areas so hearth being a fire feature right and just

29:22like today when you go camping and you know you go out to go camping if you're with your friends or your family like one of the first things lots of people want to do is light a fire right because it's heat and warmth but it's also community and cooking and all the fun stuff of kind of being outside right and and hearts are really important for foragers right like the amazing part about finding a hearth is it is a center point of activity right and so we the first kind of area that we excavated we call

29:52block B and it's right next to where that chopper was found and there's no very obvious hearth that we see there's no sediment indicator of a hearth so we don't see like a big ash stain or oxidation which is when sediments get hot they turn a little red but instead what we what we realized once we finished excavating it we started plotting the artifacts was that we had a number of burned artifacts like little pieces of burnt bone little pieces of burned stone tool or particularly flakes so what's made when you manufacture a stone tool and they

30:22all concentrated in one little portion of this area and that told us that well maybe we didn't find the remains of the hearth there was a hearth present there in the past and we can use that to do an analysis and I think the coolest analysis that comes out of this is we can basically use that to identify if this used to be an inside space or an outside space please continue

Inside the Tent Spaces

30:43what did you then find out basically the way this works is like if you think about how you interact with space it's very different if you're you know let's say at a campsite inside your tent versus outside right and basically tent walls or structure walls act as a barrier because artifacts can't be transported to them so we find in the archaeological record is that walls to structures tend to accrue artifacts they're a barrier to artifacts so you can kind of think of this like a bullseye if you think you're looking top down on a tent right

31:13you have your hearth in the center and there's a lot of stuff going on right around there people are using the light people are warming up people are cooking people are shuffling stuff when they're walking around stuff gets shuffled into that hearth and then there's that kind of dead space where people are walking around doing activities sitting themselves right and then when you get near a wall of a tent you know that's your storage spot right or that's a spot where you can't sit yourself the walls too close and things kind of accrue there so we basically took our

31:44spatial dynamics and said do we see a pattern like that where we have this barrier effect does it look like there's walls that are holding in artifacts or is it something much more dispersed and what we found in block B is that it definitely looks like there is that kind of bullseye barrier effect aspect going on and this is probably an inside space it also amazingly was our second kind of line of evidence for this is that this area also has a lot of ochre so ochre is hematite a red

32:15it's iron yes iron yeah and it's often used as a pigment and we had this big ochre scene about a meter and a half by two meters and that basically lined up with where we're seeing this barrier as well and our thought is well that you know there's probably something going on with ochre inside an interior space so they're doing some sort of painting by the fire as well as you know maybe making these stone tools telling stories butchering animal cooking and stuff like that you get that I love the fact that you've got oh I'll say again paint

32:46you've got color surviving as well yeah and it was I mean it was a wild experience like there was so much ochre that the the sediments turned pink and in the screens but it was just we didn't have big chunks of it it was just teeny tiny really nice and we've done a little bit of chemical analysis and we we the stone tool from that area is probably coming from the heart belt uplift which is about 50 miles away down the plot river and we also think that that might be where the ochre is coming from as well which is really amazing and talking

33:16about kind of transporting materials the other thing that's really interesting is that was also the first space where we found bone needles so needles for sewing made out of bone so definitely kind of leans towards maybe some high processing etc going on there could be other meanings certainly behind that ochre use that are much harder to get it when we're looking at materials but this kind of picture starts emerging in your brain of how people are using those spaces and reinforcing something that's all off so often so invisible in the surviving

33:47archaeological record which is textiles which is clothing and the fact that that must have happened in these societies there must have been people making these clothes may you're taking all parts of the animal that they're butchering and eating and they said the bone decorations as well the needles as well you all those resources and you know starting to get a picture you've got the needles you've got this color you've got what seems to be a hearth and inside this tent that's no longer there like are they decorating their clothes with color that haven't survived and things like that yeah it offers some

34:18amazing questions and so we found that area first and then that really prompted us to start kind of testing other portions of the same you know around the mammoth remains and we ended up finding two more or so three right around the mammoth we have three heart centered areas and then another one about 30 meters away further up the terrace and one thing that was also kind of amazing that we found so just when we excavated block B we did not have any diagnostics on site yet we knew that the site dated to the Clovis time period but we didn't

34:49have anything that clearly looks like Clovis and actually in a when we were doing some of that testing we happened to find a Clovis a fragment of a Clovis point another about five meters 10 meters south of that block B area which offered this kind of idea that this is associated with Clovis we excavated all around it and interestingly enough it is kind of all on its lonesome there's not much around it for a couple meters but we continued to test and found another large concentration of artifacts further into the terrace from that and so have the dates

35:20come back have they have they revealed that yes this this activity happened some 13,000 years ago yeah so we think the date the site dates to about 12,950 calendar years ago we do have so I always joke actually all the copias and I joke that the site is kind of a roller coaster because every time we're like oh yeah we know what's going on then something happens we're like huh well all right that's archaeology and you know finding heart centered areas was certainly one of those moments when we were kind of just looking at this this is a mammoth you know butchery kill site another

35:51one was actually some of our the heart centered area that's directly east of that Clovis point so about 10 meters away we were excavating it's our densest portion of the site we have I think it's something like 30,000 artifacts the majority of them are like little tiny chips micro micro pieces of flakes but we also have bow needles we have scrapers for processing hides we have mammoth ivory in that portion of the site we also have another diagnostic artifact and it is a Folsom point which is the

36:23subsequent kind of archaeological culture that we see on the plains the Folsom complex and so what we've recently been working on a lot is kind of what does that look like we we think of Folsom as subsequent to Clovis and a lot of spaces on the plains and it it seems like at Leprel our running hypothesis is that they're date to the same occupation coexistent they're at the same time it's not that one comes after the other okay interesting yeah and that's something we're currently working on and writing up right now so there'll be more to be out there on that very soon but I feel like if we're talking about Leprel we got to mention

36:54that there's like now multiple fluted point complexes at it no absolutely and before we delve into the kind of the bones of the animals that we know were there that they were feasting on and then using for things like needles this picture you created that you know clearly seems to be that they're pitching their tents they're creating their hearts and they're kind of scattered around the mammoth remains and kind of pitching camp there for a long period of time is that also being shown at other sites in America now on other archaeological do we have evidence elsewhere that you

37:24know that is also revealing that side of the Clovis story it's not just Leprel so there's definitely been a lot of discussion of there being sites with potential with kind of multiple households like we're seeing at Leprel and there's been a lot of theorizing about kind of where we would expect to see that and there certainly are other sites where we have multiple heart-centered areas but a lot of them also need a lot more work would be incorrect to say it is totally unique but there it's really opening up some avenues of going back to other sites and

37:54looking to see do we have kind of similar campsets etc and one thing to say we would not have probably ever found any of that if it had not been for the fortuitous chopper discovery right we were a little we were being good archaeologists but like you know there's there was some luck because archaeological tendency is you know the bone stops the artifact stops you stop excavating because you don't want to you want to use your resources as well as you can and at Leprel what we do see is there are like little spatial gaps you know a

38:25few meters so there's just not much going on because it's between kind of areas of activity that people are using so there's a lot of sites in the archaeological record from a ton of different time periods but you know let's talk about Clovis where you know there just needs to be more testing that are done over larger spatial extents and it is a little bit of a boomer bust prospect right like you know you either get something really cool or you're like I dug a lot of holes and I checked a lot of spaces but it's something that is really kind of penalizing when we

38:55think about kind of these other spaces well let's focus on the animal bones

Small Game and Bone Needles

39:00then Maddie this is very exciting parts so obviously the megafauna bones of mammoths but what did looking at these halves and looking at these other parts of the site what did they reveal about the other animals at this campsite yeah so one of the amazing techniques that has come out which is what we call zooms or so archaeology by mass but proxopi so basically what this is you can take teeny teeny tiny or non-destructive samples of bone and look at the proteins that are in them and it

39:30can tell you what group of animals that may have come from so sometimes this is down to specific species sometimes it's a little bit higher up it depends on you know biology of different animal species but what that means is that for tiny artifacts even like the needles we have we have the ability to figure out what type of animal they came from right so we were really interested in implementing this particularly on the needles and we also have a possible bead bone bead on site and so we started running zoom's analysis on a lot of those

40:02materials and what we found is that many of them are made of hair so rabbit but we also have some really unexpected animals that are in those we have one that is made of red fox so canid but not domesticated canid right red fox and then we also have one that tested to feel it so cat so I had mentioned that we see we have a number of extinct cats we also have cat you know cougars etc today and so at least some of those needles were probably also created

40:32from cat we can't get it down to specific species although we're kind of still seeing if we can but we have it narrowed down to a couple different potential cat species so that is revealing that clovis peoples they're not just hunting mammoths 24 7 not just the big beasts they're also hunting you know probably what is the more much more common you know small game like like swift rabbits and foxes and so on yeah and the one thing that I think is really interesting and I think also is really

41:05important for thinking about when we talk about the archaeological record is that one there's something really cool about the fact that all those species are fur bearing right so like if you think about the fact that those species are fur bearing themselves and being used for sewing another reason why those species may be being selected is it may be that their bone thickness is like just right for making a needle easier right on the functional side another thing is a lot of those are probably species that would have been trapped right or not like spear hunted right and so if we think about what a

41:38trapping site would leave behind and how much less likely we are to find that in the archaeological record versus something like a mammoth there's some really interesting questions about autonomy and research bias and like all those sorts of things that go in I was gonna you you read my mind for the next question which was about hunting techniques as you say with Clovis we think of the long wooden spears or maybe not the wooden part but the Clovis stone spear points but yes for a small game whether they had traps or bow and arrow technology did they have do we know anything about that so there definitely is not bow and arrow in North America that

42:10early it is much much later in pre-contact time periods that we see that so this would have been spears and it probably would have been thrusting throwing or potentially use of atlatls for spears as well there's actually kind of been a lot of debate recently in the archaeological literature particularly about Clovis and what potential technologies were used also hunting we have ideas about how mammoths may have been hunted but there is not a lot of smoking guns for how you know the actual knowledge that was used to hunt

42:41mammoths right and that's because that stuff that's really hard to preserve in the archaeological record and what we do see when we look at Clovis sites is that a lot of them do have big megafauna at them so there's about 15 sites across the continent that have Clovis diagnostics are attributed to Clovis that have megafauna at them most of them have proboscideans so mammoths mastodons gompathyrs big elephant species we also have sites with horse and camel at them so we

43:12definitely see those being hunted back to the camels back to the camels again I can't get over that I can't get over that okay that's nice age America yeah yeah we know that those are a significant number of the Clovis sites right and when we talk about Clovis and kind of classical interpretations of Clovis there's really about 30 to 40 sites that really define our understanding of them and that's not because there aren't others there's been thousands of Clovis points found across continent but a lot of them are found on the surface and we don't know much else about their context and there's a

43:43number of other Clovis sites that have been excavated but oftentimes they may not be well reported or they were excavated in a time period where methods were very different than what we use today that means some uncertainty and so they're one of the big debates that is still ongoing about Clovis and in fact there were just last week two different articles that came out about this is were they specialists for megafauna were they really focused you know was the majority of their diet made up of large game particularly proboscideans particularly elephant species

44:14and that is something that is still kind of being thought out in the archaeological community and kind of because of questions just like the ones you're asking of like are we not seeing a lot of smaller species because of how they preserve because of where we're looking because of that's not what they were eating right like is it is it absent because it's they're not doing it or is it absent because we're not looking the right way and that's something that we see a lot of research still being done and I actually think is a really interesting

44:44question particularly about Clovis it's one of the things that I think about a lot because how you structure your life if you're going after those big animals consistently is very different than if you're eating a much broader kind of generalist diet

Hunting Versus Scavenging Megafauna

44:55is it generally accepted now I mean I certainly think so and it seems to be for what you're saying as well Maddy is it generally accepted now that these people they were actively hunting megafauna rather than they were scavenging they were just scavenging the remains of of dead megafauna that is the topic of one of the articles that just came out actually exactly that is like how much is it hunting versus how much is it scavenging I think most people think there certainly is some hunting I think there is a little bit of disagreement on how much scavenging or hunting there is I will say right now I lean towards the majority of them were hunted I'm not saying they were never scavenged I also think one other question is worth considering which is thinking about

45:55regardless of regardless of if some of these animals were scavenged versus hunted they're still being used as a resource and so like just discounting the scavenging as kind of a separate case and not playing in potentially some other stuff there's a little more nuance there right that could be considered I definitely I think I would be curious to see a poll of that but I think more people kind of lean towards a large portion of them were hunted and I think we have some good evidence for that you know particularly a case that for many of these 15 widely accepted sites there's projectile points like on site or in the remains we also find lots of projectile points that have indications that they had impacts and impact fractures but we definitely still see some debate about that in the community as well

46:39I'm also really fascinated by that you know that ongoing debate about whether they were specialist megafauna hunters or whether there was much more to their diet that's just more invisible in the archaeological record because you think if they got their stone spears that they could also use them as harpoons for fishing as well and foraging which leaves much less of a signal archaeologically but I guess that's still a question that's out unless until they find lots more fish bones or a big midden heap I guess at one of these sites yeah and I mean I actually have the same thing I'm currently working on looking some at particularly thinking about plant remains and like how archaeologists often look for plant remains in very specific ways often only in hearts and like how often have we actually looked for them in the Clovis record right

47:19and I'm very I'm very curious what the results of some of that will be when we start pulling together the data set and I think you know you mentioned fishing there's fish remains also don't preserve well I think the other thing to remember is that even if they are specialists that's not saying they're never going to use those resources it's just saying that they won't use them as often potentially right and I think that is a nuance that's often kind of left out of that discussion in the sense that like you can be a megafauna specialist and still eat a fish right like that needs to be on a t-shirt somewhere

47:52there's still space for that um and so but I do think it's an interesting question and actually one of my colleagues Nathaniel Kitchell who works in the fluted point period which is a little bit after Clovis in the northeast he did this he and I did this really interesting study mostly him I should he gets the majority of the credit on this one where we looked at the hards from fluted pointed sites and which one of them had seeds in them and which didn't and which were investigated for seeds and what was found was that a lot of them had seeds but a lot of them the seeds that they have were like really easy to get stuff like berries

48:26things that didn't require a lot of processing right and didn't require like intensive grinding or any of that so while that is the use of plants that also leads towards people being hunting specialists because it's the easy to get stuff I was going to ask this later but I feel I now must ask this given that we've highlighted you know the thoughts around them being megafauna mammoths etc hunting specialists

Human Remains and Indigenous Ancestry

48:49given that they do go extinct not long after do you think that Clovis peoples play an active primary significant role in the extinction of the megafauna like the mammoths ah the classic overkill debate as it is so called right this this question of a lot of these species go extinct especially on the Americas and North America we see this bias towards big animals what is the human component versus the environmental component which I cannot I apologize I cannot remember the name of the paper

49:21I always joke this is overkill versus over chill because of a paper that was written uh it was a title on a paper um but yeah it's a really fascinating question and I will admit that I am one of those people who rides the middle ground I I think it's a little bit of both it's normally the best way to do to approach these questions to be fair which I admit is like you know not the most satisfying like you're like it's both but I do think I think it's a really nuanced question right and I think there can be contributions from both when we talk about it now I do think if we're going to talk about what species

49:55has the best case for overkill it's probably mammoths and that's for a variety of reasons right the number of sites we find them at the fact that they're really big fauna that would have really slow reproduction rates which makes them more susceptible to things like hunting we can also talk about the fact that when we talk about overkill it's not necessarily saying that humans hunted all 35 genera but that they're hunting kind of tip the scales for a lot of those so we can have things like trophic cascades right where there's when there's less mammoths on the landscape because a new predator comes in then the things that were previously eating mammoths suddenly lose their

50:26their prey right and all those circumstances but I I also think it's really interesting how that debate has developed and how we see very different opinions from very different fields of study right because overkill is something that interests archaeologists and paleoecologists and lots of other communities and we see that you know from a lot of the impressions I've gotten like the paleoecology community is very humans did it and the archaeological community I think leans more towards environment did it although there certainly are a number of people who are overkill proponents as far as where I

51:01stand I think when we talk about it's not all the species necessarily but I do think there's contributions from both I think humans probably had a helping hand if it was a touch or a shove it's a little harder to say and I think there's still a lot of research that can be done to help prove that yes what percentage yeah yeah and I also will say this I think you know one of the keys of that is still figuring out when a lot of these species went extinct some of them probably went extinct before or potentially before humans appeared but a lot of those we don't have a lot of

51:31radiocarbon dates on so there's also a lot of research to be done particularly on those species that are maybe less visible right the stuff that's just not seen as as enigmatic as propocitians or giant grounds lost. Matthew this has been brilliant I mean before we completely wrap up going back well keeping on things that are more invisible but going back to the humans themselves it's quite interesting that the one thing we haven't really talked about from the archaeology is the remains of the Clovis people themselves as of human remains of human bones is that a big anomaly we have from

52:05the Clovis culture from that period so there there is one instance of human ancestor remains or ancestors from attributed to Clovis which is Anzic which is located in Montana but apart from that we don't see it that being said everything indicates a low population density there's probably not a lot of people not a lot of Clovis spiraled we're wielding people across North America at this time period we also know the fact that this is 13,000 years ago right it's really rare for sites to be preserved from this

52:40time period and potentially you know particularly when we talk about ancestors and remains and also we probably don't see circumstances you know like these people are mobile they're moving around we don't know what those burial practices look like in those cases and those circumstances and that's probably kind of a lot of the reason why we don't see more I would also say you know in this case it's important to remember that Clovis is the ancestors to millions of indigenous people that live across the Americas

53:13today including our communities in what is today the United States and if we were to have more cases it's really important that that type of research is only done with consultation and collaboration so I do think to me it doesn't seem odd right it's something that just seems like you know this is people moving across the landscape at a really low population density 13,000 years ago I'm not sure we should expect to find it well Maddy it's still regardless it's very exciting to hear what you've done at places like Leprel because we've talked we're focusing on the lives of these people we've looked at clothing

53:47color the hearths the tents how they were spaced around you know the activities the tools the animals that they were hunting and using for different parts and so on so it sounds like from the artifacts you've found so far at the pro you're getting these tantalizing little insights into various aspects of their lives is there anything else we should mention any other key artifacts that you found that are revealing other parts of their lifestyle or is there is there still quite a lot shrouded in mystery we've covered the big ones I mean I think that definitely covers a lot of the stuff that we put

54:21out so far we certainly have more analyses that we're working on right now and I'm definitely looking forward to getting some of those out there and also finalizing some of them there's still potentially some surprises to come through the email I will say when the bone needle results came through the email I was like that's wild that's a fun email to get and also you know I think looking at the fact that we have multiple diagnostics is going to be something that's going to be really interesting coming out in the future and we might see some changes to some of our interpretations which

54:53is how good archaeology works right this is I think a lot of people think that archaeologists have like a magic archaeology wand and we just like wave it over our sights we get all these interpretations but it's really important to remember that this is all evidence-based and evidence building and sometimes you disprove yourself and sometimes you disprove other people or sometimes you put stuff out there and you're like I really think it's this and someone comes along and you're like no um so we're really looking for you know I'm really looking forward to getting everything out there continuing I have some other research projects I'm cooking on and all this coming out and seeing what other

55:25evidence comes out to support it well that's the thing Maddie with the work you're doing at Leprel like identifying of the harthers and so on and the fact that you know people are going to be going back to those other butchery sites and realizing well hang on you've got the butchery site there must be a campsite somewhere nearby and now we know generally what we should be looking out for what could be evidence of where hearths were and so on and so forth so that that that's exciting for future excavations now they have we have more an idea of what else to look for to learn more about the people alongside the butchered mammoth remains the megafauna remains yeah and it you know archaeology you never

56:00know what you're going to find until you find out and it's always just you have these ideas you come in with these research designs and they normally get shot into the sun pretty quickly um but I think Leprel certainly for me obviously my you know career has been very intertwined with it was part of my doctoral dissertation I worked on the site for you know became a co-pi on the site worked on it for a number of years and it really does form some of my view of some of the questions I'm looking at but I'm also very curious if that continues or not right and what we find when we start looking at other sites and how that's supported so for instance more recently in the last few years I've been

56:34working on a site called Colby which is another site dug by Dr. George Prison in the 1970s a little bit before he worked on Leprel this site's a little different it has seven mammoths at it at least seven mammoths along with clear Clovis points they appear to be butchered so we're taking some of the things that we learned at Leprel and trying to kind of apply it to Colby and see what comes out we didn't find some things we were hoping to find we found some other stuff we didn't expect to find so it's it's kind of always that archaeological journey when you're looking at moving forward Maddy this has

57:04been brilliant it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show yeah thank you so much for having me

Further Reading on Ice Age America

57:10well there you go there was Dr. Madeline Mackey talking all the things the Clovis culture and her work at the Leprel site in Wyoming I hope you enjoyed the episode thank you so much for listening if you'd like to hear more about Ice Age America well we've recorded a few episodes on that very topic on the ancients over the years with figures like Dr. David Meltzer and we'll put a link to those episodes the first Americans and Ice Age America in the show notes now if you've been enjoying the ancients please make sure to follow the show on Spotify or wherever

57:43you get your podcasts that really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favor if you'd be kind enough to leave us a rating as well well we'd really appreciate that finally don't forget you can also sign up to history hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week sign up at historyhit.com subscribe that's all from me I'll see you in the next episode