Archaeologists announced on Wednesday that research confirmed the Clovis people, believed to be the first human civilization to reach the Great Lakes region, came back to a campsite in southwest Michigan year after year for centuries, revealing new details about their nomadic lives and food practices.
Revealing the Clovis Campsite
The hunter-gatherers known as Clovis people were long believed to have avoided the Great Lakes region because of punishing Pleistocene conditions. But a University of Michigan study just confirmed that they did, in fact set up camp at what today is the Belson site in southwest Michigan.
Among the artifacts unearthed by the researchers were a plethora of tools and stone flakes, which included examples fashioned from chert — a type of lint rock sourced from around 400 miles west in western Kentucky. These tools were later resharpened at the Belson site which gave rise to small pieces that could be examined for analysis by researchers. This, in turn, implies that the Clovis people travelled to this site each year for at least three and perhaps up to five succession years which coincides with lunar months averaged across eight annual seasons [f,f].
In days of yore: What the Clovis people ate
The tools uncovered from the Belson site also offer clues about the types of food the Clovis people were eating. The researchers analyzed three of the recovered stone tools and discovered traces of more than 30 animals, among them musk ox, caribou or deer, hare, and peccary (a Pleistocene cousin to the pig) apparent on one biface.
This discovery call into question the widely held idea that the Clovis were solely big-game hunters stalking mammoths and mastodons, at least in western North America. Instead, the researchers argue for the Clovis people eating a wide range of animals similar to the diverse diet of something like driving through McDonalds. They probably ate some plant material too, but that is less likely to have been preserved over 13,000 years.
The ability for the Clovis people to eat such a variety of foods helps to fill out our picture of these ancient hunters and how they managed in the Pleistocene world.
Conclusion
The Clovis people’s yearly trek to the Belson site in south west Michigan and their broad range of dietary selections provided researchers with fresh insight into how biologically adaptable, creative and tenacious these itinerants were. That find will alter perceptions about the Clovis and create a more complete history of their place in America’s past. The results of this research will furthermore impact the understanding of early human peoples living in adjacent areas of Great Lakes region and how they related to the larger Clovis Culture.
