For over 100 years the earliest-dated spear points have been found and studied by archaeologists across the Americas. Some are characterized as having a fluted base (Clovis) and others a stemmed base (Western Stemmed Tradition). Throughout this time, a scholarly debate has grown as to what the relationship between fluted and stemmed points may be. Are they contemporaneous? Geographically separate? Do they represent separate cultures and lifeways? It has been a long-held assumption that the makers of Clovis points appeared first on the continent, but findings during recent excavations in the Far West are challenging the paradigm regarding what we thought we knew about the peopling of the Americas.
This volume is broken into four parts. The first and second parts review the current understandings of the technologies of stemmed and fluted points, the third considers the regional interactions between the two, and the fourth takes the previous arguments and provides a synopsis as to how far fluted and stemmed point studies have come, and where they need to go.
Inspired by a collection of papers given at the 2019 Society for American Archaeology meeting, it does not pretend to unequivocally answer the above questions. Instead, it is a peer-reviewed discussion on the history of the debate, while also presenting the current views of the country’s top archaeologists studying the late Pleistocene. They do not all agree. Despite this, long-held ideas are evaluated, reconsidered, and a road to more productive research that moves beyond stone tools is mapped and includes the earliest American diets, environmental reconstructions, genetics, and movement across the landscape.
Included in this publication are illustrations and photographs of these ancient fluted and stemmed points, as well as a compilation of tables and figures using the latest archaeological data to be found on the topic of Pleistocene sites and artifacts. That, in conjunction with the inclusion of Clovis/Western Stemmed Tradition academic histories, will make an expert out of anyone who endeavors to read it. As such, it will be the reference to be cited in any upcoming papers and publications into the future.
—Linsie Lafayette, TAC Western Field Representative
