The First Americans Used More Fiber Than Flint

By J.M. Adovasio and D.C. Hyland

This article has been reprinted with the written permission of  Discovering Archaeology. All rights reserved. 

Introduction: The Puzzle of the First Americans

   The Clovis Hunters  
 
The Need to Weave

The New World Climate

Panhandle Prehistory Series:  11,000 Years 
of Panhandle History

Introduction to Panhandle Prehistory

The Paleo-Indian Period

Beyond Clovis: Bridging the Gap

The Antelope Creek Phase

Notes, Sources and Citations

     We are bombarded with images of spear-wielding, fur-clad manly hunters ranging over the Ice Age landscape dispatching all sorts of huge and dangerous animals in brutal combat. This macho view of first Americans may appeal to the predominantly male scholars who still constitute most Paleoindian and Upper Paleolithic specialists - but it is almost certainly wrong.

    We interpret whole cultures almost entirely on the basis of the stone tools and weapons they leave behind.

     Yet these lithic artifacts likely constitute no more than 5 percent of the material culture of the time. The other 95 percent - the tools and clothes made of wood, plants, and fibers - is perishable. In most cases, they decay into dust as the millennia pass, leaving little for archaeologists to find and interpret. But the stone survives.

     For more than half a century, the label of "Clovis Culture" has been synonymous with its signature artifact: the Clovis fluted projectile point. Likewise, singular lithic artifacts are used to represent Folsom, the Plano cultural complexes, and the many complexes of Eurasia during the Upper Paleolithic period of 40,000 to 12,000 years ago.

     This disproportionate emphasis on stone tools obscures rather than illuminates the character of Paleoindian or Upper Paleolithic lifeways. It maintains the myth that stone was the key element in the technologies of most, if not all, late Ice Age populations. And since the most dramatic elements of lithic toolkits are often components of offensive weaponry, the emphasis on stone tools perpetuates the image of "man the big-game hunter."

     Yet conclusive evidence now exists that products based on plant fiber - cordage, basketry, netting, even bona fide textiles - were being produced in central Europe by at least 25,000 years ago. Elsewhere in Europe, the Near Fast, and the Far East, similar materials are in evidence only a few thousand years later.

     Though long suspected, the actual recovery of a diverse suite of perishable artifacts from so long ago paints a very different picture of the people who made them than the conventional portrait that is based almost entirely on stone tools. For example, what appear to be hunting nets, which presumably would have been used by both sexes and most age groups, have been documented in central Europe. This is a much more parsimonious explanation for the thousands of small-mammal bones found at Upper Paleolithic sites in the region than the traditional view of marauding groups of male hunters armed with small spears.

     Additionally, due to their traditional association with females, such perishable, fiber artifacts reveal - in a way few other artifacts can - the heretofore virtually unknown realm of female-based Ice Age technology.

     Just as perishables are changing our views of Ice Age hunter-gatherer adaptations and behaviors in Europe and Asia, so also are these elements of what Bob Bettinger of the University of California at Davis calls "soft technology" modifying our image of Paleoindians in the New World.

     Given their antiquity in Europe and Asia perishable artifacts must have been part and parcel of the armamentarium of the first colonists to the New World, just as they were doubtless included in the technological suite of the sea voyagers to Australia even earlier. In fact, perishable fiber artifacts in North and South America are at least as old as virtually any well-dated stone tool in the New World, as evidenced by knotted and unknotted cordage from Monte Verde, simple plaited basketry from Meadowcroft, and very early twined basketry, bags, cordage, sandals, and netting from both the Great Basin of the western United States and from South America.

     In all sites from the early Holocene (beginning some 10,000 years ago) where preservation is complete, fiber artifacts are 20 times as common as stone, and wood tools outnumber lithics fourfold. These ratios are typical of virtually all ethnographically documented hunter-gatherers and, we believe, may be confidently extended into Clovis and pre-Clovis times.

     Tantalizing hints of the ubiquity of perishable artifacts in the early New World archaeological record appear almost monthly: an impression of carefully made, diagonally twined fabric from a Clovis site in New York; netting fragments from the Peruvian coast; very early sandals from Missouri and the California coast. These attest not only to the widespread distribution of fiber-based technologies, but also highlight their myriad roles and fundamental importance in the initial colonization and subsequent penetration of the New World.

     Though the evidence is still too fragmentary to assert that Clovis or pre-Clovis foragers were dressed in the equivalent of an Armani suit woven from Apocyum, or shod in the finest Juncus direct from Bally's, we stress without qualification that it is highly likely that perishable artifacts were far more vital to the ultimate success of human populations in the Americas than all of the durable-artifact classes combined.