That popular theory about Clovis points? I think we're wrong about the timeline.

I was at the annual archaeology meetup in Santa Fe last fall. A professor from UNM laid out the evidence that Clovis sites in the Southwest are actually 2,000 years younger than most textbooks say. I sat through three talks that contradicted each other. Then I went back to my field notes from a dig near Albuquerque and realized my site had the same issue - we dated it based on assumptions about a layer that was probably mixed up. Has anyone else questioned the standard Clovis dates after looking at their own data?

2 comments

2 Comments

ivanross9d ago

You know, I used to think the dates were basically settled science. But I went back and looked at some of my old site reports, and yeah, there's a lot of wiggle room in those strata that nobody wants to talk about. It's making me wonder how many other "facts" we're just agreeing on because it's easier.

the_william8d ago

@ivanross, have you tried re-dating the charcoal samples from your site using the newer purification methods? I hit the same wall with my own data from a dig near the Gila River. What worked for me was going back to the original field notebooks and looking at the soil descriptions again. Turns out the layer I thought was undisturbed had rodent burrows all through it. Once I accounted for that, my dates shifted by almost 1,500 years. It's a pain to re-examine old work, but sometimes the answer is right there in the dirt you already moved.