Bridging the Gap: An Updated Overview of Clovis across Middle America and its Techno-Cultural Relation with Fluted Point Assemblages from South America

Abstract

This paper presents the results of technological and morphological analyses carried out on fluted point collections from North, Central, and South America. Technological similarities support a Clovis demic expansion at least as far as Venezuela. The presence of the fluting technique on various types of projectiles in northern South America suggests that this area may have been a zone of technological innovation/reorganization or human contact where ideas and possibly populations fused and merged. Moreover, numerous similarities between Central American lanceolate points and Clovis assemblages from the Gulf region of the United States indicate that a cultural network may have existed along the now submerged Atlantic coast.