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Dr. James B. Griffin recommended that the term Palaeo-Indian be
restricted to the users of the distinctive fluted spear head, the
hallmark artifact of Palaeo-Indian culture
(Griffin 1977: 10). Thus,
Plano culture, which developed out of late Palaeo-Indian culture in
the west, is not referred to as Late Palaeo-Indian contrary to
current practise. The Plano cultures of the west and the Archaic
cultures of the east were equivalent developments. The exclusion of
Plano cultures from the Palaeo-Indian designation and their
treatment as a western equivalent of Archaic in the east represents
a more coherent classificatory arrangement.
Despite the fact that between A.D. 1895 and 1932 there were a
number of reported associations of extinct bison remains with stone
tools on the Plains
(Rogers and Martin 1986)
the evidence was not generally accepted by archaeologists until the
advent of radiocarbon dating
(Wilmsen 1965). A number of
archaeologists began to change their minds, however, in 1925 when
stone spear heads associated with the bones of extinct bison at a
site near Folsom, New Mexico were excavated by archaeologists
(Figgins 1927). The
distinctive style of spear head uncovered at this site was
subsequently recognized as being widely distributed east of the
Rocky Mountains in the United States and Canada
(Cotter 1937). Sites producing
such points often contained evidence of geological and environmental
conditions significantly different from the present and with the
advent of radiocarbon dating were consistently dated between 11,500
and 10,500 B.P. Because this wide-spread culture has been firmly
dated and stratigraphically appears to represent the first human
occupation many archaeologists accept it as the earliest unequivocal
evidence of people in the habitable portions of North America
exclusive of Beringia. Initially defined in the central Plains, the
earliest and most wide-spread manifestation is called Clovis while
later expressions of the culture are referred to as Folsom. There is,
however, no gap between the radiocarbon dates of early (Clovis) and
late (Folsom) Palaeo-Indian culture
(Haynes et al. 1984). At
the Lindenmeier site in Colorado both early and late styles of
fluted spear points were recovered in association along with unfluted
points
(Wilmsen and Roberts 1978).
It is apparent that there is a cultural continuum from early to late
Palaeo-Indian culture marked by increasing cultural regionalism
through time. This regionalism is sufficiently pronounced in western
and eastern North America that many archaeologists believe
western-derived terms like Clovis and Folsom are being over-extended
when applied to Palaeo-Indian assemblages east of the Mississippi
River (Deller and Ellis 1992).
In this study Clovis, Folsom, and related eastern classifications, are
subsumed under the category 'Palaeo-Indian culture'. The term 'culture'
is used as a label to describe a broadly shared, predominantly
technological, cultural pattern
(Frison 1983;
Haynes 1980;
MacDonald 1983;
Wilmsen 1965;
Wormington 1957). The spread
of Palaeo-Indian culture coincided with the massive environmental
changes that accompanied the end of the Pleistocene period; changes
related to climate, vegetation, hydrology, erosional-depositional
cycles, and animal extinctions and population densities. Palaeo-Indian
people encountered unique environments, consisting of mosaics of plant
communities which have no direct parallels today, as well as glacial
ice and associated water bodies, and a range of fauna that included
species such as mammoth, horse, camel, and large extinct varieties of
bison. At the end of the Pleistocene plant communities changed rapidly
and a number of the large fauna, both prey and predator, became extinct.
The role played by Palaeo-Indians in these extinctions is still being
debated. There is evidence that Palaeo-Indian culture established the
base from which most later regional cultures developed with Archaic
cultures evolving in the east and Plano cultures in the west.
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