The solutrean-clovis connection: Another look
Across Atlantic Ice: The Origins of America's Clovis Culture By and (2012) Berkeley: University of California Press. 336 pages. $34.95 (hardback). ISBN: 978-0-520-22783-5.
That the indigenous populations of the Americas are descended from Asians who dispersed here after about 13,000 years ago from Beringia (those parts of Northeast Asia and Alaska conjoined by lowered sea levels) is as close a consensus as any in archeology. Archeological, physical anthropological, linguistic, and molecular evidence converge on this conclusion.1-4 And yet, the atmosphere of research on “early man in the New World,” as it is sometimes known, is almost uniquely toxic. This subject has it all: accusations of racism, hucksterism, slander, fraud, conspiracy.5-8 Having watched one of my early mentors in archeology spend his final years futilely seeking “pre-Clovis” remains at Pendejo Cave, New Mexico,9 I resolved to keep as much distance between myself and this issue as possible.
I recently changed my mind about this. At the 2012 Society for American Archaeology Meetings, Dennis Stanford, Bruce Bradley, and their colleague Michael Collins had an exhibit advertising their new book, Across Atlantic Ice, and presenting casts of North American artifacts in which they saw similarities to stone tools from the European Upper Paleolithic Solutrean culture. Across Atlantic Ice contends that Late Pleistocene Europeans dispersed along the southern edge of the North Atlantic ice fields to the eastern coast of North America. There, their descendants created the Clovis culture, the oldest uniquely American stone tool industry. It was a very popular exhibit. In talking about it with colleagues, however, many of them rejected this hypothesis outright, even though few had yet read the book. (Perhaps understandably, however, since it had been published only two months before.)
One could understand such preemptive rejection of a hypothesis if it proposed a scenario with no parallels in other areas of prehistory, used unconventional analytical methods to arrive at its conclusions, or its authors lacked appropriate scientific credentials. But none of these is the case with Across Atlantic Ice. Later Pleistocene Homo sapiens populations dispersed rapidly across much of the Old World, crossing landscapes that required oceanic and river crossings aided by substantial watercraft. Hypotheses about these Pleistocene and Holocene human dispersals routinely cite similarities among stone tools from distant regions as evidence linking dispersing populations to particular geographic origins. Stanford and Bradley are professional archeologists and experts in lithic analysis who have published extensively in refereed journals. The problem was that Bradley and Stanford had proposed this Solutrean-Clovis connection hypothesis about a decade before.10 Back then it was criticized by experts on both sides of the Atlantic and rejected by most researchers.11
One of the strongest facts cited against the Solutrean-Clovis connection was a chronological gap of 5,000 years separating Solutrean assemblages in Europe (ca. 25-18 ka) from Clovis assemblages in the New World (ca. 13.2-12.5 ka). One suspects that colleagues today are judging Across Atlantic Ice on the basis of that earlier proposal. This would be a mistake. Much new evidence has come to light about the peopling of the Americas,12, 13 and Across Atlantic Ice does an impressive job of presenting it. In science, hypotheses that are wrong rarely improve with age or with the addition of new facts. However, the evidence of a pre-Clovis occupation of the Americas is much stronger now than it was a decade ago, and the hypothesis of a Solutrean-Clovis connection deserves a second look. If it is wrong, it should be more convincingly wrong. If it is right, we may need to rethink long-held notions about the prehistory of human dispersal and the capacities of our Ice Age ancestors.
Across Atlantic Ice is divided into two major sections. The first (chapters 1-5) develops the premise of a connection between the New World Paleoindian Clovis and the European Upper Paleolithic Solutrean cultures. Much of the case for a Solutrean-Clovis connection involves stone tool typology and technology. Chapter 1 is an essential overview of the basics of these subjects. Chapter 2 summarizes the lithic and other evidence of the Clovis culture. Clovis-affiliated lithic assemblages are found in Eastern North America, the Great Plains, and the American Southwest, and as far south as Costa Rica. Many aspects of stone tool technology unite Clovis lithic assemblages, but the most distinctive is “fluting,” a method for thinning the basal ends of lanceolate points. Fluting is a uniquely New World technique. Chapter 3 reviews the Late Pleistocene and early Holocene archeological record for Beringia. In Beringia, the principal stone tool technology emphasized the production of microlithic blade tools set into the slots of bone, antler, and wood handles. Chapter 4 reviews evidence of pre-Clovis archeological sites in North America (Cactus Hill and Meadowcroft Rockshelter) as well as newly discovered coastal sites and artifacts recovered by offshore dredging (Oyster Cove, Miles Point, Jefferson Island, and Cinmar). None of these sites are uncontroversial, but Stanford and Bradley argue that their radiocarbon dates close the gap of 18-13 ka between youngest Solutrean and oldest Clovis. Chapter 5 reviews the archeological record for the Solutrean culture in Europe, a uniquely innovative and artistically expressive group of assemblages known mainly from sites in Portugal, northern Spain, and southern France.
The second half of the book compares the archeology of Solutrean and Clovis cultures and lays out the case for a North Atlantic connection linking them. The comparison is both quantitative (Chapter 5) and qualitative (Chapter 6). The quantitative comparison looks at the representation of eighteen artifact types and twenty technological attributes among groups of Beringian, pre-Clovis, Solutrean, and Fluted Point (Clovis) assemblages. The comparison of artifact types yielded ambiguous results, possibly due to small sample sizes (as the authors contend), or alternatively, because of morphological convergence among resharpened stone tools. The technological comparison was more telling, grouping the pre-Clovis, Fluted Point, and Solutrean assemblages together. There are no fluted points in Solutrean assemblages, but these share with Clovis assemblages a method of biface thinning by the use of “overshot” flakes to thin large bifaces, as well as systematic production of large prismatic blades. Solutrean assemblages also contain bone or antler points with beveled bases and caches of large, thin bifaces, features also seen in Clovis contexts, but they lack the microblade technology seen in Beringian assemblages. The qualitative comparison also notes Solutrean-Clovis parallels such as caching of large bifaces and the production of bone points and needles.
Chapters 7 and 8 consider whether Upper Paleolithic Europeans have possessed the knowledge and motivation to make sustained crossings of the North Atlantic at the peak of the Last Glaciation. Chapter 8 examines evidence of Solutrean exploitation of marine resources. There is little such evidence because the Late Glacial coastline is now underwater. Much of what we know about Solutrean subsistence is based on excavations at cave and rockshelter sites in upland valleys. Even there, however, there are depictions of marine mammals, birds, and fish, which suggest a consciousness of marine resources. The coast would doubtless have been attractive as a source of food, but would also have been a source for driftwood. Timber and firewood would have been crucial resources in a tree-impoverished European glacial landscape, much as they recently have been in deforested parts of Ireland. Wouldn't it have been suicidal for Solutrean hunters to venture out onto ice packs in search of food or wood? Chapters 7 and 8 make the case that it would not. During the Last Glacial Maximum, ice fields extended much farther south than they have in recent times. The southern margin of these ice fields would have been unstable, but it probably supported communities of birds, marine mammals, and fish, on which human groups could have sustained themselves. Chapter 10 draws on ethnographic accounts of human adaptation to marine ice-edge environments to suggest that such adaptation could have been done using technologies not all that different from those that can be reasonably attributed to Upper Paleolithic Europeans. In proposing this hypothesis, Stanford and Bradley are not proposing deliberate expeditionary explorations like those of historic times. Rather, they are proposing the kind of incremental move into a new habitat for which there are countless parallels in recent times.
The conflation of first with most important is a common point of (sometimes deliberate) confusion among archeologists. In arguing for a Solutrean-Clovis connection, Stanford and Bradley are not challenging the wealth of other scientific evidence tracing Native American origins to Asia. They speculate that the Clovis populations may have merged with other populations dispersing from Asia through Beringia southward, either overland or along the Pacific Coast. They also are not challenging traditional Native Americans' accounts of their origins. But, if Stanford and Bradley are correct about the Solutrean-Clovis connection and its aftermath in the New World, then the cultural syncretism we think so recent an American innovation was part of our heritage from the very start.
Across Atlantic Ice is accessible to specialist and nonspecialist audiences. The more complex aspects of stone tool technology are presented clearly enough that a nonexpert can judge the arguments made from this evidence. The book is well illustrated, and the depictions of lithic artifacts are of uniformly high quality. Maps showing coastlines portray the coastal shelves of North America and Western Europe as solid shaded areas. Bathymetric imagery would show these now-flooded landscapes in all their actual topographic complexity. Figure 9.4, which plots hypothetical routes for human dispersals along the southern edge of North Atlantic glaciers, would have benefited from a scale.
Across Atlantic Ice is an excellent example of hypothesis-building in the best tradition of processual archeology. It challenges American archeology in a way that will require serious research by its opponents. It also challenges European Paleolithic archeologists to think a bit more optimistically about Ice Age Europeans. Modern-day Europeans may no longer look west and wonder what is on the other side of the ocean, but their recent ancestors did, and they did something about it.15 Can we imagine our distant ancestors were any less curious about their world? As Stanford and Bradley aptly put it, “We are convinced that researchers continually underestimate the abilities, the vision, and the intelligence of our ancient cousins, whether in the east or the west.”
Finally, for professional prehistorians, Across Atlantic Ice raises the important issue of how we deal with drowned landscapes. Our models of past human behavior have to be grounded in observations of present-day human behavior, and all present-day humans who live near coasts exploit coastal and marine resources. Yet our models of past human behavior also have to yield testable predictions about what we should expect to find in our archeological excavations. We can't infer that a specific coastal adaptation played a crucial role in prehistory without being able to search for supporting or contrary evidence in the archeological record. Archeologists are going to have to figure out how to investigate the archeology of now-flooded coastlines, or, failing this, how to incorporate multiple working hypotheses about coastal and marine adaptations into our accounts of human prehistory.
