The Clovis culture and its fluted points
- Date
- c. 13,000 years ago
- Category
- Science, technology & invention
- Region
- North America
- Era
- Prehistory
- Significance
Between roughly 13,500 and 12,700 years ago, a distinctive tool tradition spread rapidly across much of North America: the Clovis culture, named for finds near Clovis, New Mexico.
Its hallmark is the Clovis point, a finely worked lanceolate spearhead with a 'flute' — a channel flake removed from each face of the base — that aided hafting onto a shaft. More than 10,000 such points have been recovered from some 1,500 locations, reaching as far south as Central and northern South America. Clovis groups were highly mobile hunter-gatherers who, among other prey, killed mammoths, mastodons, and bison, leaving butchery sites with points embedded in megafaunal bone. For decades Clovis was thought to represent the first Americans, but the recognition of older pre-Clovis sites has reframed it as an influential and archaeologically visible tradition rather than the founding population. Its near-continental spread within a few centuries remains a striking episode in the human settlement of the New World.
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Further reading
The wider story
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