The Ancients - Ice Age America: The Clovis Culture

Episode Date: September 17, 2026

Before the mammoths disappeared, people hunted them across Ice Age America. Armed with distinctive stone spear points, the mysterious Clovis culture left behind traces of a world filled with giant beasts and landscapes now lost to time.Tristan Hughes is joined by archaeologist Dr Madelaine Mackie to explore the latest discoveries surrounding America’s prehistoric history. Who were these remarkable hunter-gatherers? How did they hunt some of the largest animals ever to walk the continent? And what mysteries still surround one of the most fascinating cultures of Ice Age America?MORE:Ice Age AmericaListen on AppleListen on Spotify The First AmericansListen on AppleListen on Spotify Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. They'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 spear tips, and the great megafauna carcasses they butchered at sites across America, from 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. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is the latest on America's mammoth-hunting Clovis culture. Our guest is Dr. Madeline Mackie, adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of Wyoming. Maddie, it is such a pleasure to have you on the show.

It's great to be here. Thank you for having me. More than welcome. I love talking about these topics from prehistoric America. And the Clovis culture, Maddie, they've gained this intriguing reputation as America's prehistoric mammoth hunters. That's true. That is, I think most people, when they think of Clovis, what they think of is that iconic image of a small group of humans kind of stalking this. giant multi-ton animal. And it's just so different than how we think of, you know, I think of how

a lot of us experience the world today. And 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, 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 for 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. You've anticipated my next question, which is the date. When talking about the Clovis culture, these people, I mean, how far back are we going? Yeah, so Clovis, we tend to think of, or what we know, based off radio carbon 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 narrow 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. It could go a little bit further back than that, depending on what sites you're looking at and how you're looking at radio carbon 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.

And 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 faces. Then things kind of start changing after that. So understanding how that all works is really interesting. And you mentioned there 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 Lancelot, 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. And 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 density is varied depending on where you are on the continent. So from coast to coast, and I know, it is such a large landmass, 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 is where 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 spears that are used. But of course, we say Ice Age. We say this is the late Ice Age, but 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 Cordillian. And, you know, that comes down to a little bit, depends on the time period, a little bit lower than the Canadian U.S. border today, although it does move depending on what's going on in Ice Agee weather. And south of that, what we see are landscapes that 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 spaces 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 are mammoths, along with a number of other proboscideans or like the elephant order family. So mastodons and we have gonfitheers, which 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 shelves, right? Yes. Yeah.

We can also think of horses, camels, bison antiquists 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, in 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. Yeah. 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 genres. 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, particularly species like mammoth, which actually is 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 moly 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, but I'll always think with prehistoric America, I'll also think like saber-tooth cats and die wolves. But have they gone by this time? still also around? They are still also around. I admit, I don't know the date of saber-tooth 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. And 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? 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 mammoth remains, which is the site of Blackwater Draw, which is located in New Mexico. And this was in the 1930s. Now, kind of important for understanding the context of this story is that this is only a few years after the discovery is 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 Antiquis, what are extinct species of bison. And that was also the site where their 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, we 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, especially 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 in 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 as a number of sites have been proposed, I would say this is probably one of the most acrimonious debates in American archaeology. It gets pretty heated among 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 place to scene 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, Rupert's Ferry, in Idaho, Page Blatson. in 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. No, I want 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, seems to be a few thousand years. Humans have reached the Americas, North America, and then you get the emergence in the archaeological record of these stunning Clovis points and these key sites. And Maddie, 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 they're 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 a 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 that 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, Maddie. 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 into 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 investment. investigator on the LaPrell site, which is located in 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 to look at the map just before starting, you mentioned that 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 La Perel is in, why, And it's like over a thousand kilometers north of 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. You 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 spear 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, LaCrell is, you know, very far away from the Blackwater Draw site. And there's, 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 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 fishes, you know, kind of moving through the landscape, going after the herds, hunting these great beasts or small beasts or scavenging, and then going to 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 I think when people think of archaeology, they think of these massive, you know, tombs and temples and Indiana Jones and, like, that stuff is amazing. But 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 chip, maybe a few thousand pieces, of chip 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 because of how these people live. 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 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 Le Proul, I mean, how was this site discovered in rural Wyoming? So actually, this site, like many of the Clovis sites that 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, we're walking along the Pearl 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. When you see a mammoth, you're like, that's big. It's weird. What is that? So the find eventually got reported to the University of Wyoming in a very well-known Plains archaeologist, Dr. George Prison, 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 that this may be culturally associated. There may have been humans involved. He knew that. 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-Pi's, Todd Serval, Bob Kelly, Spencer Peltin, Matt O'Brien, we got the opportunity to go back and start working on 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 that 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 also 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, 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 about 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 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 of flakes taken off.

Yes, an old one tool. So that's like what they were using early humans or Australopithecus were using 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 is a really, probably something was made right on site. Someone picked up a cobble from a river nearby. I 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 port. And we also found 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 kind 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, preserving them, whatever they're kind of interested in doing with that animal.

Yeah, I mean, 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, guess. Exactly. So think of it this way. If you take down a multi-ton mammal like a mammoth and you're already what we call residentially mobile, you move your house or 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 and bison butchering, a Clovis mammoth and bison butering 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 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 analogies we can make to ethnographic accounts of elephant hunters in Central Africa today,

where those foraging communities will move to butcher the elephant remains for a short period of time and use them. Now, what's really amazing about the camp at LaPrel is that by finding that, it opens up this avenue to ask and answer questions that go just beyond were they using this animal. It lets us ask questions about where were they coming from? Where are the stone tools coming from? What does social organization look like? How are people cooperating? What else are people doing? And my other favorite part about this is it also really drives home that this is a community, right? We're going to have everyone here. We're going to have adults. We're going to have kids. We're going to have elderly. We're going to have men. We're going to have women. We're going to have everyone kind of participating in this event. And we get a much more complete picture of what is going on in the past.

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 those other things. And people want to they're quite old, we'll 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 photo of people hunting a mammoth with tip spears, right? Which is that image we so focus on and forget about all the other contexts 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 a bit more on the location.

Is La Preel 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 the 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 Platte 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 would 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 drive from that site. So it seems like there's a pretty hardy mammoth population in that area.

And that probably also contributes. And 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 more excavations, before focusing on the artefacts 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 La Prella is the spatial dynamics we have going on. So how the artifacts are outlaid and what the maps look like when we map all of these different artifacts. And what we think we have is at four hearth, what we call hearth centered areas. So hearth being a fire feature, right? And just like 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 of 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 hards 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 called Block 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 hearse. 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 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 burn stone tool, or particularly flakes, so what's made when you manufacture a stone tool. And they all 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. What 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? You 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 wall's too close, and things kind of accrue there. So we basically took our spatial 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. It's originally iron. Iron. Yeah. And it's often used as a pigment. And we had this big ochre saying it's 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 can say again, paint, you've got color surviving as well. Yeah. And it was, I mean, it was a wild experience. There was so much ochre that the sediments turned pink in the strains. 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 the stone tool from that area is probably coming from the heartbell uplift, which is about 50 miles away down the Platte River. And we also think that that might be where the ochre is coming from as well, which is really amazing in talking about 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 hide processing, et cetera, going on. There could be other meanings, certainly behind that ochre use that are much harder to get at 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 so often so invisible in the surviving archaeological record, which is textiles, which is clothing. And the fact that that must have happened in these societies, there must have people making these clothes, taking all parts of the animal that they're butchering and eating, and they say the bone decorations as well, the needles as well, all those resources. And, you know, starting now to get a picture. You've got the needles. You've got this color. You've got what seems to be a half 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 amazing 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 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 did. didn't have 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 come back, have they revealed that, yes, this activity happened some 13,000 years ago? Yeah, so we think the site dates to about 12,950 calendar years ago.

We do have, so I always joke, actually all the COPI's 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 and we're like, huh, well, all right, that's archaeology. And, you know, finding Hars centered areas was certainly one of those. moments when we were kind of just looking at this as a mammoth, you know, butchery kill site. Another one 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 of like little tiny chips, micro pieces of flakes. But we also have bone needles. We have scrapers for processing hides. We have mammoth ivory. And, portion of the site. We also have another diagnostic artifact and it is a fulsome point, which is the subsequent kind of archaeological culture that we see on the plains, the fulsome complex. And so what we've recently been working on a lot is kind of what does that look like? We think of fulsome as subsequent to Clovis and a lot of spaces on the planes. And it seems like at LaPrel 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 LaProl, we've got to mention that there's like now multiple fluted point complexes at it. No, absolutely. And before we delve into 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've 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 their for a prolonged period of time. Is that also being shown at other sites in America now on other

archaeological? Do we have evidence elsewhere that is also revealing that side of the Clovis story? It's not just Le Pratt? 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 La Pralle. 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. It would be incorrect to say it is totally unique. But it's really opening up some avenues of going back to other sites and looking to see,

do we have kind of similar campsets, et cetera. 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 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 LaPro, what we do see is there are like little spatial gaps, you know, a few meters or 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 boom or 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 canalizing when we think about kind of these other spaces. Well, let's focus on the animal bones then, Maddie. This is a very exciting part. So obviously, the megafauna bones of mammoths. But what did looking at these hathes 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 zoology my mastiproxopee. So basically what this is, is you can take teeny, teeny tiny, or non-destructive samples of bone and look at the proteins that are in them, and it can 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 materials. 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 caned, but not domesticated canaan, 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 from 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 much more common, you know, small game, 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 important 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 furbearing 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 trapping 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 aphonomy and research bias and like all those sorts of things that go in. 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 early. 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 atlottles 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 mammoths, right? And that's because that's 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, gompathir, big elephant species. We also have sites with horse and camel at them.

So we definitely 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 great. In our Ice Age America. 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 number 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 leads some uncertainty. And so they're one of the big debates that is still ongoing about Clovis.

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 per busidians, particularly elephant species? And that is something that is still kind of being fought 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 absent because 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 question, particularly about Lovis. 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. Is it generally accepted now? I mean, I certainly think so, and it seems to be what you're saying as well, Maddie. 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 dead megafauna. That's 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 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 in 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. I'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? And I'm very, I'm very curious what the results of some of that will be when we start pulling it 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? That needs to be on a T-shirt somewhere. There's still space for that. 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 and I did this really interesting study, mostly him. He gets the majority of the credit on this one, where we looked at the hars 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. Things that didn't require a lot of processing, right? It didn't require like intensive branding 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 like now must ask this, given that we've highlighted the thoughts around them being megafauna, mammoths, etc., hunting specialists. Given 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 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. I always joke, this is overkill versus overchill because of a paper that was written. it was a title on a paper. 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 think it's a little bit of both. That'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 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 has 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 tipped the scales for a lot of those. So we can have things like trophic cascades, right? 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 prey, right, and all those circumstances. But 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 paleoacologists 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,

means more towards environment did it, although there certainly are a number of people who are overkill proponents. As far as where I stand, 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 radiocarbon 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 enigmatic as probesidians or trying grounds loss. Maggi, this has been brilliant to me. Before we completely wrap up, going back, well, keeping on things that are more in. visible, 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 the Clovis culture from that period? So 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 as 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 have the fact that this is 13,000 years ago, right? It's really rare for sites to be preserved from this time 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 today, 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 a landscape

at a really low population density 13,000 years ago. I'm not sure we should expect to find it. Well, Maddie, it's still, regardless, it's very exciting to hear what you've done at places like La Préle, because we've talked, we're focusing on their lives of these people, we've looked at clothing, colour, the haths, 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 artefacts you've found so far at the pro,

you're getting these tantalising little insights into various aspects of their lives. Is there anything else? We should mention any other key artefacts that you found that are revealing other parts of their lifestyle or 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 out 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 is 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 sites. We get all these interpretations. But it's really important to remember that this is all evidence-based and evidence building. And sometimes you 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. 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 evidence comes out to support it. Well, that's the thing, Maddie, with the work you're doing at La Prere, like identifying of the Harthers and so on. 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 hathes were and so on and so forth. So that's exciting for future excavations.

Now we have more an idea of what else to look for to learn more about the people alongside the butchered mammoth remains and the megafauna remains. Yeah. And, you know, archaeology, you never know 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. But I think LaPrel, certainly for me, obviously my career has been very intertwined with it. It was part of my doctoral dissertation. I worked on the site for, you know,

became a copi eye on the site. I 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 working on a site called Colby, which is another site dug by Dr. George Prison in the 1970s, a little bit before he worked on LaPrel. This site's a little different, and it has seven mammoths at it, at least seven mammoths, along with clear clobus points. They appear to be butchered. So we're taking some of the things that we learned at LaPrel 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 kind of always that archaeological journey when you're looking at moving forward. Maddie, this has been brilliant. It just goes to me to say, thank you, so much for taking the time to come on the show. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Well, there you go. There was Dr. Maslin Mackey talking all the things the Clovis culture and her work at the La Préle 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, where 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 you get your podcasts.

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