Around 11,000 years ago, a Paleoindian culture known to us as "Clovis" occupied much of North America. Considered to be among the continent's earliest human inhabitants, the Clovis peoples were probably nomadic hunters and gatherers whose remaining traces include camp sites and caches of goods stored for utilitarian or ritual purposes. This book offers the first comprehensive study of a little-known aspect of Clovis culture—stone blade technology. Michael Collins introduces the topic with a close look at the nature of blades and the techniques of their manufacture, followed by a discussion of the full spectrum of Clovis lithic technology and how blade production relates to the production of other stone tools. He then provides a full report of the discovery and examination of fourteen blades found in 1988 in the Keven Davis Cache in Navarro County, Texas. Collins also presents a comparative study of known and presumed Clovis blades from many sites, discusses the Clovis peoples' caching practices, and considers what lithic technology and caching behavior can add to our knowledge of Clovis lifeways. These findings will be important reading for both specialists and amateurs who are piecing together the puzzle of the peopling of the Americas, since the manufacture of blades is a trait that Clovis peoples shared with the Upper Paleolithic peoples in Europe and northern Asia.
Thirteen millennia ago, in a small creek valley in western South Dakota, two mammoths perished. The mammoths, an adult and a juvenile, likely a cow and calf pair, died at the edge of an ancient pond. The Lange/Ferguson site is the earliest dated archaeological site in South Dakota and one of the few North American sites that provides evidence of a Clovis-period mammoth butchering event. In addition to the preserved remains of the two mammoths, the site yielded diagnostic Clovis weaponry—three Clovis projectile points recovered in context and stratigraphically associated with the mammoth bonebed—and flaked bone tools. The site offers a rare snapshot in time detailing early Paleoindian interactions with now-extinct megafauna nearly 13,000 years ago. In Clovis Mammoth Butchery: The Lange/Ferguson Site and Associated Bone Tool Technology, L. Adrien Hannus provides a comprehensive look at one of the few New World Clovis-era sites with in-place buried deposits exhibiting evidence for an expedient bone tool technology. Multidisciplinary investigations include paleoenvironmental and geochronological reconstructions—pollen and phytoliths, geology and geomorphology, diatoms and ostracodes, mollusks, and vertebrate paleontology—as well as taphonomic evaluations and a microwear analysis of the chipped stone tools. Clovis Mammoth Butchery offers readers a rare glimpse into a singular moment in prehistory that captures human interaction with extinct animals during a rapidly changing world for which there is no modern comparison. This book shares great insight into hunting and procurement strategies used by big game hunters during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene.
Michael Kay and Lorin Cary illuminate new aspects of slavery in colonial America by focusing on North Carolina, which has largely been ignored by scholars in favor of the more mature slave systems in the Chesapeake and South Carolina. Kay and Cary demonstrate that North Carolina's fast-growing slave population, increasingly bound on large plantations, included many slaves born in Africa who continued to stress their African pasts to make sense of their new world. The authors illustrate this process by analyzing slave languages, naming practices, family structures, religion, and patterns of resistance. Kay and Cary clearly demonstrate that slaveowners erected a Draconian code of criminal justice for slaves. This system played a central role in the masters' attempt to achieve legal, political, and physical hegemony over their slaves, but it impeded a coherent attempt at acculturation. In fact, say Kay and Cary, slaveowners often withheld white culture from slaves rather than work to convert them to it. As a result, slaves retained significant elements of their African heritage and therefore enjoyed a degree of cultural autonomy that freed them from reliance on a worldview and value system determined by whites.
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