Hunter-gatherer gatherings: stone-tool microwear from the Welling Site (33-Co-2), Ohio, U.S.A. supports Clovis use of outcrop-related base camps during the Pleistocene Peopling of the Americas

Abstract

During the Pleistocene Peopling of North America, the use of stone outcrops for forager gatherings would have provided Clovis colonizing hunter-gatherers with several advantages beyond that of toolstone procurement. Stone outcrops would have been predictable and immovable places on an emerging map of a landscape for a thinly scattered colonizing population needing to find one another, as well as ideal teaching locales where novice flintknappers could learn to make the complex Clovis fluted projectile point without worrying about running out of, or transporting, raw material. For these reasons, several researchers have suggested that stone outcrops were ‘hubs’ of regional Clovis activity where Clovis people not only made tools, but also assembled in large groups at outcrop-related base camps. Once there, they exchanged information and mates, feasted, lived and explored. Here the authors test, using microwear analysis of stone tools, the hypothesis that the Welling site, located within the Upper Mercer chert source area, was an outcrop-related base camp. Their results – suggesting a variety of stone tool functions including dry- and fresh-hide scraping, hide cutting, meat butchering, sawing and scraping bone/antler, sawing and scraping wood, and plant scraping – were consistent with the idea that Welling represents an outcrop-related basecamp in which Clovis foragers assembled, carried out a variety of activities, and regularly travelled to and from the site. These results, when considered in conjunction with recent morphometric analysis of Clovis fluted projectile points, suggest that Welling was indeed a ‘hub’ of Clovis regional activity in Northeast Ohio, and permit us to propose a scenario for how the region was colonized during the terminal Pleistocene.

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