Bill wrote:
Jack I don't believe the Volcanic ash covered it up the Clovis stuff at all and here's what I think.
In the Pacific Northwest, Cascade point type dates to around 11,500 years ago. That would make the Cascade people contemporaneous with Clovis. It is very likely that the Cascade point makers and users were folks from Northeastern Asia who were exploring the area for possible habitation and perhaps even had begun to live there.
Not all early people got along with different groups and some may have been downright hostile to others. I don’t believe Clovis in that area that was covered with volcanic ash but there never was Clovis there at all and why was that?
I believe the Cascade and Clovis people just didn’t get along. The Clovis folks avoided the Pacific Northwest to avoid the messy fights that would have been inevitable.
By the way, I apologize in advance because I don't believe that your beautiful agate point is Clovis at all. It isn’t even a close call, sorry.
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Bill
I disagree with your comment that there was no Clovis in the NW, there are some Clovis sites there but not much. I agree that there a lot more Cascade artifacts found in the area than Clovis, far more. See information below that backs up what I am saying.
Jack
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Dietz Site Clovis:
This report was done by Judy Willig, Mel Aikens and John Fagan.
The Dietz Site is the only Clovis campsite on record in Oregon. Five areas along the floor of a dry lake basin were identified as Clovis based on the presence of fluted points and point fragments, fluting flakes and blanks broken during fluting. The Clovis areas did not contain stemmed points that were found along the edge of the lake basin at a slightly higher elevation. The site was investigated by the BLM, University of Oregon and University of Washington.
The data indicated that small groups of Clovis people stopped at this location several times to rework broken dart points. The people had collected the foreshaft with their broken stone points, and then camped near an obsidian source so they could remove the broken points and either rework them, or discard them and make a replacement point. They saved up many broken points and came to this location just to repair their hunting and processing tools. For example, six of the twenty-eight tools were broken Clovis point bases. Each of the bases had been manufactured at a different location (made from obsidian not found locally), and had been removed from the haft and tossed away. The flaking debris from making the replacement points was from local obsidian cobbles. This suggests that the group had a large territory with quarries scattered around. Which ever quarry was nearby when they decided to repair was then used to make replacement points. The Clovis occupants brought a greater number of artifacts made from other quarries to this area than the stemmed sites contained.
Twenty-two of the tools were unfinished items or manufacturing failures or flute flakes from successful points removed from the area when they were put onto the foreshaft. Two scrapers were found, one a side scraper made on a flake and the other an end scraper on another flake. In addition, long obsidian blade-like flakes were removed form the local cobbles, probably as knives. I speculate that they may have been used to cut meat from larger pieces similar to the methods used by Eskimo when they are eating.
The sites were located along the margins of a small shallow lake or pond. Since this basin is dry today, conditions were wetter than today. The period of occupation was probably between 11,500 and 11,000 years ago. Later, the lake increased in size and depth, and stemmed points are found in campsites in greater numbers and density. During this time, the lake probably had an 80 meter wide marsh habitat around its edge, providing a great deal of food. The stemmed tradition is dated between 10,800 and 7,000 years ago. The two separate shorelines clearly separated the groups in time and space. The later higher lake level appears to have been stable for quite some time and supported hunters and gatherers in a seasonally productive micro-environment... as the late Judy Willig put it: "a well-watered 'sweet-spot' of food and water resources which would have made it ecologically attractive to these early people"
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Long Tom Basin Clovis:
The Long Tom River is a 25-mile (40 km) tributary of the Willamette River in western Oregon in the United States. It drains an area at the south end of the Willamette Valley between Eugene and Corvallis.
A Clovis point was discovered near the banks of the Long Tom and noted in Freidel (el al. 1989: 99). The Noti-Veneta project stimulated a SHPO funded project to study the alluvial stratigraphy of the Veneta area (Freidel el al. 1989). A dates of 9660 ±140 and 9130 ±200 were obtained from a feature (35LA658), just above the time used to differentiate between Early Archaic and PaleoAmerican. 35LA861 gave a date of 9485 ±90 and 35LA860 a date of 7690 ±80. The data indicated that groups were gathering hazel nuts, acorns and camas and roasting them between 9700-9500 years ago. The Long Tom excavations indicated that beginning about 9500 years ago and ended about 7700 years ago, the soils stabilized after a period of deposition and groups camped on the levees and flood plain . The study blurs the Archaic and PaleoAmerican traditions, suggesting plant gathering was an early and important aspect of the economy.
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McKenzie Basin Clovis:
The McKenzie river starts on the western slope of the Cascade Range, starts on the east at the volcanic Three Sisters and extends approximately ninety miles to the west. The main McKenzie River is joined by the South Fork below the town of McKenzie Bridge, the Blue River at the town of Blue River, and the Mohawk River just north of Springfield. The McKenzie joins the Willamette River just southwest of Coburg.
A Clovis point was found on the Mohawk River in 1959 in the surface gravel near Springfield was reported by Allely (1975). It had been rolled and scoured down the river from an unknown source.
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In Texas the Gault Site is "a well-watered 'sweet-spot' of food and water.
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You are not the first to say it is not Clovis - but Dwain Rogers and Bill Jackson say it is, so that is what I will go on.
