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The First Peoples: Uncovering the Paleoindian Legacy on the Great Plains - Ep 04
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In this episode of the Great Plains Archaeology Podcast, host Carlton Shield Chief Gover explores the fascinating Paleoindian period, focusing on the earliest known peoples to inhabit the Great Plains. These pioneering groups adapted to the Ice Age environment, hunting megafauna like mammoths and bison, and leaving behind some of the most iconic archaeological sites in North America. Carlton delves into the discovery of key Paleoindian sites, including Clovis and Folsom, which provide insights into the lifeways, tools, and migration patterns of these early hunters. This episode takes listeners on a journey through time, unraveling the mysteries of the First Peoples and the lasting legacy they've left on the Great Plains landscape. Whether you're an archaeology enthusiast or curious about the ancient history of North America, this deep dive into the Paleoindian period will captivate and inform.
Youtube: https://youtu.be/uHE45rdZ0GU
Links:
- On Rehumanizing Pleistocene People of the Western Hemisphere (2021) by Bonnie L. Pitblado
- Before Folsom: The 12 Mile Creek Site and the Debate Over the Peopling of the Americas (2014) by Matthew E. Hill
- The Archaeology of the North American Great Plains by Douglas B. Bamforth (2021)
- Archaeology on the Great Plains Edited by W. Raymond Wood (1998)
- Carlton's KU Anthropology Faculty Bio
Transcripts
- For rough transcripts of this episode, go to: https://www.archpodnet.com/great-plains-archaeology/04
Contact:
- Instagram: @pawnee_archaeologist
- Email: [email protected]
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Recommended
Transcript
Welcome to Episode 4
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. You're listening to the Great Plains Archaeology Podcast. Join me as we uncover the rich histories of North America's Great Plains, exploring the latest archaeological discoveries and past cultures that shaped this storied region. Welcome to the podcast.
00:00:22
Speaker
Welcome to Episode 4 of the Great Plains Archaeology Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Carlton Schiele, Chief Gover. And i'm guys, I'm so thrilled to have you join me on this exciting journey through the rich and fascinating histories of North America's Great Plains.
The Paleo-Indian Arrival
00:00:34
Speaker
So today we're going to be talking about um the Paleo-Indian period in the Great Plains Archaeology.
00:00:38
Speaker
Last episode, we broke down in like 30 minutes the different periods of of time within the Great Plains. And I apologize if you hear my cat Laramie. I've been traveling a lot recently, and she's been needing some attention since I've gotten back, which is also why if, ah for those of you that are watching the podcast on YouTube, you see that I'm still recording out of my apartment and not in my office. And it's a Sunday morning as I'm recording this. That's why my hair's down. I'm in a t-shirt. It's just relaxing Sunday.
00:01:08
Speaker
And so today we're just going to be talking about the paleoindian period. And there's a lot to talk about because the paleoindian period is, archaeologically speaking, when humans arrive. So there's a couple of really big topics that surround paleoindian. One is what represents the first peoples.
00:01:28
Speaker
The second is what happened to all the ice age megafauna and how have archeologists written about and researched paleo-indian archeology. How does that inform our understanding of what's going on?
Human Migration Theories
00:01:42
Speaker
So there's a lot, lot to talk about, and I don't think we're going to be able to hit it all today, but I came from the university of Wyoming where I got my master's and that is a big paleo-indian department like Clovis and Folsom.
00:01:56
Speaker
and I worked at Hell Gap National Historic Landmark. I'm doing a field school there at the University of Kansas. So I really wanted to spend this episode really talking about peopling, really, to set the stage for how how the Great Plains gets occupied. And a lot of people are familiar with the Bering land bridge and walking over the ice bridge type of thing, the ice-free corridor, and that's how people get to the plains. And so under that old model, one of the places that that ice-free corridor just dumps people out is in the Great Plains. And so like a lot of
00:02:34
Speaker
you know, some of the earliest paleo-Indian sites that were recovered um in the early 20th century, Folsom, Blackwater Draw, Dent, 12 Mile Creek. They're all in the Great Plains for the most part. Folsom, not so much. It's in the Southwest.
Clovis Lithic Debate
00:02:51
Speaker
But what we know today, right, the paleo-Indian period, we know for a fact it is starting around 13,000 years ago. like that's We know people are creating the archaeological record at that time. The problem is, or the controversy that continues to, I want to say plague, paleo-Indian archaeology, but definitely is still a hot topic, is
00:03:21
Speaker
were people here before that. and so There's a couple of places on the Great Plains that would suggest otherwise if you were just to read the literature. and so In the Plains, the first accepted, widely accepted, and diagnostic archaeological signature of people involves the Clovis lithic complex. Some people call it a culture. I do not. The Clovis points are a type of projectile point that are landslide. Roughly half the time they're they're fluted or they're basally thinned. They look very different than Folsom.
00:04:03
Speaker
which comes right after Clovis at around 10,800. So Clovis, this Clovis period is roughly between confirmed 13,000 BC and 10,800 BCE. So, you know, 15,000 years ago to 12,000, basically 13,000 years ago, it's pretty quick. But when we talk about diagnostic artifacts, when you find a k Clovis point,
00:04:25
Speaker
at a site, that's how it gets assigned part of this quote-unquote Clovis culture. Now, do does technology represent cultures? Does it represent people? I, you know, not really, I don't think. But with paleo-Indian archaeology, where they don't have pottery, where they have very few diagnostic objects outside of the stone tool assemblage, that's where we get this idea that points equals people, which just isn't true. But we know Clovis, and and Clovis is all over North America. So it is it it arrives at the earliest sites about 15,000 years ago, and they're like all over North America.
Ice-Free Corridor Timeline
00:05:03
Speaker
But what we know now through work on the ice-free corridor is it doesn't look like the one, the corridor wasn't even open till after Clovis arrived. So the last glacial maximum, the extent of the last glaciers in the in the in the Pleistocene was about 24,000 years ago. And then they started receding, which it still took a long time. And and at the last glacial maximum,
00:05:33
Speaker
water levels, sea levels, were about 100 meters lower than they are today. So about 300 feet, which is extensive. So I mean, like large swaths of land were opened up, but the corridors in Canada and in ah in the Northwest US s weren't open. So the ice sheets did not open until roughly 11,000 and 13,000 years ago.
00:05:57
Speaker
So after Clovis was established, so how do people get here? And in addition to that, then we have Monteverde, which is in the south coast the southern end of Chile, which has people there
Pacific Coast Hypothesis
00:06:07
Speaker
over 14,000 years ago. So how do people get here? So people must have gotten around those ice sheets. And that's where a lot of archaeologists promote and have accepted the Pacific Coast hypothesis that people there was a maritime route.
00:06:19
Speaker
that went from Northeast Asia. They followed the coast of the Bering land bridge and went into North America that way. and That's how why people got around so quickly. That area would have been very, very dense and rich in marine resources. and We're not talking like people were Polynesians sailing around on like a boat for long periods of time. They were just following the coast.
00:06:41
Speaker
But what about the plains? And so that's when we start getting into like, well, there's the, we're going to, we're going to ignore Surruti first off the surruti man with kill site in California, which is like allegedly 130,000 years ago. We're just going to ignore that. We have the footprints at white sands at around 22,000 years ago that are still hotly debated. No diagnostic artifacts, right? Just footprints, but giant ground sloths were known to inhabit that area. So,
00:07:07
Speaker
I don't know what juvenile ground saw feet look like. They might look a little human.
Challenges of Pre-Clovis Sites
00:07:11
Speaker
That's all I'm saying. But in the Plains, we don't really have what's considered preclovis. And even that term preclovis is really I want to say toxic, but debatable because that that term means is, is there people here earlier than people that with the Clovis technology and some of these sites don't have a toolkit. So we know there's we people have said there's, well, there's a fire here or we have some stone tool, debitage, but no diagnostic artifacts. Doesn't mean it's pre Clovis or does it mean that they are people with Clovis technology that didn't leave the tech behind and therefore Clovis would be earlier. These are all the questions that we're saddled with.
00:07:49
Speaker
On the plains, we have a couple sites that were excavated by Steve Holen. Same guy who wrote about Cerruti down in California. We have Lassena in Nebraska, and we have Lovewell Lake in Kansas. And both of these sites do not include diagnostic artifacts, but they do include mammoths that have some weirdly fractured ah bones, which Steve suggests show evidence of butchering.
00:08:16
Speaker
I'll leave that up for you guys to decide. Steve is an incredible guy. I really like him. I'm very excited. He moved down to Topeka recently. Then you do have like the Galt and Deborah Friedkin site down in Texas. But when it has a, it's a multi-component site, it's both of them. They're in clay and they also have like the oldest components of every archeological culture in the paleo-Indian period.
00:08:39
Speaker
But there's no real soil stratigraphy, so it's really hard to suss it out, and they're not dating the objects. They're dating organics in the clay, and so it it becomes hard to confirm um whether those are indeed pre-Clovis. But from from my perspective as an archaeologist,
00:08:57
Speaker
I do believe based on human behavior and what, when some of the earlier sites that there is, there are people here earlier than the Clovis time range, whether they had Clovis technologies to
Clovis People and Migration
00:09:08
Speaker
be determined. Because if you look at Clovis archeology, Clovis equipped people were like knew where all the things were on the landscape. Like they are behaviorally not acting like a colonizing population or migratory population.
00:09:27
Speaker
they know where everything is. And there's a really good article by Bonnie Piblotto down in Oklahoma called On Rehumanizing Pleistocene People with the Western Hemisphere, where essentially Bonnie, really respectfully, and I really like this article, like talks about, hey, we need to bring anthropology back to paleo-Indian archaeology, because paleo-Indian archaeologists, by and large, and not they're not being racist or demeaning or malicious, but they treat paleo-Indian archaeology like they're studying animals. like when you If you read the paleo-Indian literature, it's very much prey choice analysis and caloric return rates. like They're looking at people as statistical animals rather than people with culture, but part of that is the fact that the archaeological record, the assemblages that paleo-Indian archaeologists are working with are our stones and bones. right They're not getting
00:10:19
Speaker
some of the more elaborate material culture that other archaeological assemblages in time, like when I work in the plains village period, where I do have houses and pottery and a lot more material culture to work with where we can look at things like identity and migration and warfare, paleo Indian archaeologists don't have that. but So it's a mix of what can they tell out of the record and to keep it like grounded in scientific fact or scientific analysis versus adding the anthropology on that.
00:10:52
Speaker
but But also part of Bonnie's article kind of like does talk about like, hey Clovis, these people like know the landscape really well, which does not suggest that they're colonizing populations. and It could be very clear that as people are traveling up and down the coast, they don't know where the stone tool resources are as they're traveling and migrating into the Great Plains.
00:11:13
Speaker
their tool kits are organic materials. So like maybe they're just sharpening wooden stakes or because they don't know where the stones are. And a good, I wouldn't say example, but I'm necessarily pretty clovis, but if you look at the Mahaffey cache, which is at the Boulder Museum, where it's a cache of stones that was hidden and recovered and when someone was doing landscaping,
00:11:33
Speaker
There are no diagnostic artifacts. There's these giant, like, look like old to one hand axes. And you can trace the migratory pattern of those people or their path because all the stone tools come from a pathway between Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado. And you can see them collecting stuff.
00:11:50
Speaker
on their way down and then they hid this cache to come back for later use and they and they didn't find it. And they know it's a paleoindian era site because when they did analysis, residue analysis of the stone tools, they found camel DNA, horse DNA. So DNA belonging to animals that were around during the ice ages and aren't around today. So that's how they're able to date it. Is it Clovis? Is it pre Clovis? Well, there's no diagnostic artifacts or complete stone tools, but they're not.
00:12:19
Speaker
There are no Clovis points, but that kind of behavior seems like people are collecting as they're traveling through the Rocky mountains. They are purposely collecting raw materials that they don't know if they're going to come back to and they're there to have a stash of them. And then they stash it to somewhere on the but outside of Boulder and the Rocky mountain front range. And then something happens and they never come back. I must've hit it too well. So with that, we're going to be right back in the second half, just continuing in on our conversation with Pele and so we'll be right back.
00:12:49
Speaker
And we're back here at the Great Plains Archaeology podcast. I don't know if there's even ads. We were doing that with the ruins too. We'll be right back after these ads by Chris and Rachel. And then there weren't ads and we'd listen to it later. We were like, oh, that's a little embarrassing. And I don't want to really dive into the whole Clovis first thing, just kind of throwing it out there, but on the Great Plains proper.
00:13:11
Speaker
Do we have evidence of something older than Clovis? We have the couple sites by Steve Holland in Nebraska, Kansas. There are no diagnostic artifacts, no charcoal, just some weirdly broken mammoth bones.
00:13:27
Speaker
So the jury is still out. And if people are indeed migrating, which we we believe, right, they're coming along the Pacific coast. where We do not on this podcast talk about Salutrian coming from Europe. That is wildly debunked. We all know that we're not even going to talk about it.
00:13:42
Speaker
I think we talked about it on ruins in one of the earlier episodes, but but regardless, if people are sailing along the western coast, they have to use their old their old legs to get to the Great Plains. The earlier sites that are that are most likely to be older than Clovis and have a different technological package are going to be found along the west coast of the United States, not necessarily the Great Plains.
00:14:09
Speaker
In addition to, it doesn't mean that people still, there's multiple waves of migration from Asia. We have Suburian populations, we have like Southeast Asian populations, like ancestral, right?
00:14:21
Speaker
There's some really good work by Jennifer Raff, where you can read about it, where she does the DNA work. People did, once the Bering land bridge and the ice recorder were open, people traveled that route. But the first people of the Great Plains did not. They most likely traveled along the east-west eastwest coast and either themselves traveled to the Great Plains or their descendants traveled to the Great Plains.
00:14:49
Speaker
that is That is what I think. And this is explored by um Bonnie, as well as in in the textbook, Doug's book as well. So if you read some of the older Great Plains volumes from the 90s and early 2000s, they don't talk about Preclovis at all. I think Doug does a really, really good job.
00:15:08
Speaker
Now with that being said, where are the earliest sites? So the whole idea of people being here during the Ice Age was not published or understood until the 1920s and 30s, which up until that point in the 1800s,
00:15:25
Speaker
European paleontologists and archaeologists, they were coming across Ice Age animals, dead of course, that had human stone like points and knives and blades associated with them. So they knew people in Europe had been there as old as as the Ice Age.
00:15:41
Speaker
And it was a really hot topic here in North America, right? Because you still have a lot of genocide and reservation systems and the kill the Indians, save the man. And so it was kind of convenient for some folks to be like, well, you know, we don't have any evidence that Indians are actually here during the Ice Age. So they couldn't have been here that long. So, you know, sucks to suck that, you know, they're almost gone. But the first evidence of Paleo-Indian recovered in the Great Plains is the 12-mile creek site. This is a fascinating story that I think we'll dive into. Well, we'll just dive into it now. 12-mile creek in Kansas was excavated by paleontologists from the University of Kansas in the late 1800s, like 1897, 1898. And there were 12 bison and tickwests remains that were found. So these are Pleistocene bison, later Blevitidae bisonoxantalis. It was like a
00:16:30
Speaker
It was a huge site for paleontological reasons, but they found a fluted point in 1898. Now, there's a whole story about the the point goes missing. We have photographs of it. I have them. They're under my purview at the University of Kansas, but it's never published.
00:16:49
Speaker
not until
Significance of Folsom and Clovis Points
00:16:50
Speaker
nineteen in the 1920s when some archaeologists from the university not the university sorry from the Denver Museum of Natural History come out to fulsome New Mexico on bequest of some ranchers who were buddies with a guy named George McJunkin who talked about the site in the 19 teens. He'd passed away, but when his buddies got a car in the 20s, they like drove to go check out the place that George had talked about.
00:17:15
Speaker
And they found these eroding bison, they called these archaeologists from the Denver Museum down, and they found a fulsome point, the same you know same type that was found at 12 Mile Creek. And because it's first published based on the fulsome site, that's how we get the name fulsome points, because the first published data on these points come from Folsom, New Mexico, where if the paleontologists at the University of Kansas hadn't lost this point, the main theme is that it was like shown at a fundraising event or some lectures, like the paleontologists like showed the crowd. and
00:17:51
Speaker
made its way through the crowd, never came back. Then Folsom archeology, the Folsom point would be named 12 Mile Creek. The same thing actually happens with the Clovis points, but Folsom, let me backtrack real quick. So Folsom is the second confirmed oldest Paleo-Indian technology that we have on the North America, and that's from 10,800 BCE to 9,800 BCE. And this is a time period where you have confirmed Clovis right after close Clovis is Folsom. After Folsom, that's when the so the projectile points begin to diverge and there's new types all across the country.
00:18:32
Speaker
And those get wrapped up in what we call the late Paleo-Indian period from 9,800 B.C..C.E. But Folsom, in the Folsom period, it's just Folsom points. There are a couple places where you find, you know, Clovis and Folsom together, mixed together, which makes sense because it's not like 10,800 years ago when Folsom quote-unquote starts.
00:18:55
Speaker
like a call went out across the hemisphere that's like, hey guys, we're done with the Clovis. This is Folsom. Stop what you're doing. Get rid of your Clovis points. Just do Folsom. There is a transition, right? So these these hard cutoffs in the literature about what Clovis ends here, Folsom starts here, right? They're approximate.
00:19:13
Speaker
there are transitions. It's not a a massive change that happens within a day. It takes years, if not hundreds of years for that to change. But in the Paleo-Indian period for for about a thousand or about 2000 years, you have Clovis, you have Folsom for a thousand years after, and then you have this divergence that are regional of different late Paleo-Indian points that are still large, and then we get into the archaic. And that's not the focus of today. We're talking about Paleo-Indian today.
00:19:40
Speaker
But the same thing happens with Clovis. So Folsom is the first paleo Indian thing found both 12 mile Creek and Folsom. Those Folsom points were found in C2 or direct context with hunted paleo or Pleistocene bison confirming that indigenous people were here during the ice age. And that was, that was a big deal back in the early 20th century. Cause there was that mythos of like, well, if if indian Indians weren't here that long ago, like getting rid of them is not that big of a problem.
00:20:09
Speaker
We know people were here since the Ice Age. That was a huge deal. Clovis is found um later, like a couple years later. First, you have Clovis. It's in New Mexico, named after. It's it's found at the site called Blackwater Draw. That's where the first published Clovis assemblers were talked about. I've also heard the Dent site in Colorado was found first, but I don't think the dates match up. I'll have to confirm with my source. But Dent is also another early one. And if they had published first, Clovis points would be called Dent points.
00:20:36
Speaker
right So it's all about you know who publishes first rather than who finds it first. So if everyone can get their data out the quickest, you know that they become the ones that that hold that moniker. During this time period, as we discussed in the last episode, we're really talking about hunting and gathering populations of folks that are, as part of their diet, hunting Pleistocene megafauna.
Paleo-Indian Lifestyle and Culture
00:21:04
Speaker
I don't subscribe to the overkill hypothesis, which is that the reason why Pleistocene megafauna went extinct in the Americas is because humans got here and wiped them all out. That's ridiculous in my opinion. Humans didn't help, but I think the end of the ice age and the climate getting warmer and the geography drastically changing in the Great Plains had more to contribute to these large adapted cold climate adapted mammals on this giant savanna than like a bunch of hairless monkeys running around.
00:21:34
Speaker
in a couple dozen like murder hoboing their way across North America. right people If you've listened to Life in Ruins, you know my stance on this. and't I don't want to dive into it too much, but they're definitely hunting animals. It's easier to find the elephants, like the butchered elephants and stuff, because they are elephant remains. They're huge rather than the bunny kills.
00:21:55
Speaker
um which aren't preserving the archaeological record. ah But multiple mobile hunters and gatherers, there's some really cool sites I think we'll talk about. More specifically, let's I think next episode, yeah, that's what we'll do. Next episode, we'll talk about the Halgout National Historic Landmark, which has one of the... It's it's an incredible Paleo-Indian site on top of everything else.
00:22:14
Speaker
And in it also is a good way to transition to the archaic. So we'll do that. So paleoindian, we're talking about the ice age, the end of the ice age, the megafauna are going away. In terms of what else is around, we don't have like the archaic, which we'll talk about later. That's where we start to see a little bit more monumentality and investment and landscapes and space to create bison drives.
00:22:40
Speaker
But at this point, people are just arriving. Paleontian archaeology is first peoples of the America archaeology, hunting and gathering archaeology, Ice Age archaeology. There's not much to that record other than the stones and bones. You can find bone needles and like shell beads, which are which are cool and they're and they're part of that.
Geographical Distribution of Finds
00:23:00
Speaker
But the paleo-Indian archaeological record is just not as rich in material cultural diversity as, you know, woodland and plains village period. And of course, because if it's in the ice age, you know, you're more likely to find paleo-Indian points further south in the Great Plains because like Canada is locked up in a glacier. No one's running around there. So the United States proper, the mainland US,
00:23:27
Speaker
the lower 48, that's where you're going to find more like Clovis and Folsom. Alaska has its own thing going on, but Alaska is not part of the Great Plains, so we're not going to talk about it. But that's this is kind of, you know, just paleo-Indian archaeology in a nutshell. Highly recommend folks interested in paleo-Indian archaeology to read Bonnie's article. I know it wasn't received well by some people, but it's a really good read.
00:23:51
Speaker
that that really looks at like, hey, we need to bring anthropology back into paleo-Indian archaeology.
Episode Wrap-up and Preview
00:23:55
Speaker
So with that, you know thank you guys so much for listening to episode four of the Great Plains Archaeology podcast. Next episode, we're going to be talking about Hell Gap National Historic Landmark. We'll talk about a full site. We're starting to get into it. Four episodes in, let's talk about some like actual archaeology. Thank you all very much, and I'll see you next time.
00:24:15
Speaker
Thank you for listening to the Great Plains archaeology podcast. You can follow me on Instagram at Pawnee underscore archaeologist, and you can also email me at Great Plains Ark Podcast at gmail dot.com. And remember, anybody can love the mountains, but it takes a soul to love the prairie. American author Willa Cather.
00:24:40
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his ah RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at ww www.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.