Neutron activation analysis of 12,900-year-old stone artifacts confirms 450-510+km Clovis tool-stone acquisition at Paleo Crossing (33ME274), northeast Ohio, USA

The archaeologically sudden appearance of Clovis artifacts (13,500-12,500 calibrated years ago) across Pleistocene North America documents one of the broadest and most rapid expansions of any culture known from prehistory. One long-asserted hallmark of the Clovis culture and its rapid expansion is the long-distance acquisition of "exotic" stone used for tool manufacture, given that this behavior would be consistent with geographically widespread social contact and territorial permeability among mobile hunter-gatherer populations. Here we present geochemical evidence acquired from neutron activation analysis (NAA) of stone flaking debris from the Paleo Crossing site, a 12,900-year-old Clovis camp in northeastern Ohio. These data indicate that the majority stone raw material at Paleo Crossing originates from the Wyandotte chert source area in Harrison County, Indiana, a straight-line distance of 450 -510 km. Our analyses thus geochemically confirm an extreme stone-source-to-camp-site distance of a Clovis site in eastern North America and thus provide strong inferential material evidence that the fast expansion of the Clovis culture across the continent occurred as a result of a geographically widespread hunter gatherer social network. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.