On Fluted Point Morphometrics, Cladistics, and the Origins of the Clovis Culture

Abstract

Nine decades after the discovery of the Clovis type site, Blackwater Draw Locality No. 1, we are getting closer to solving the perplexing mystery of Clovis origins. Working together, geneticists and archeologists are closing in on the ancestral Northeast Asian and Beringian homelands. We can anticipate that future archaeology will fill in the details about the emergence of Clovis lithic technology, south of the ice sheets, from its Beringian precursors. Morphometric analysis of fluted points is increasingly used to address the origins of Clovis and the “mutation” of the Clovis form into other fluted point types. Since the early 2000s, cladistics, a technique borrowed from biology, has been employed in such analyses; the results are computer-constructed cladograms that purport to illustrate pseudo-genetic phylogenies of fluted points. Here, I critically examine the utility of cladistics for addressing the issue of Clovis origins and the stylistic or functional evolution of fluted points.

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