The Solutrean-Clovis connection is one theory of the peopling of the American continents that suggests that Upper Paleolithic Solutrean culture is ancestral to Clovis. This idea has its roots in the 19th century, when archaeologists such as CC Abbott postulated that the Americas had been colonized by Paleolithic Europeans. After the Radiocarbon Revolution, however, this idea fell into disuse, only to be revived in the late 1990s by archaeologists Bruce Bradley and Dennis Stanford.
Bradley and Stanford argue that at the time of the Last Glacial Maximum, ca 25,000-15,000 radiocarbon years ago, the Iberian peninsula of Europe became a steppe-tundra, forcing Solutrean populations to the coasts. Maritime hunters then traveled northward along the ice margin up the European coast and around the North Atlantic Sea. They point out that the perennial Arctic ice at the time would have formed an ice bridge connecting Europe and North America. Ice margins have intense biological productivity, and would have provided a major food source.
Cultural Similarities
Bradley and Stanford further point out that there are similarities in the stone tools. Bifaces are systematically thinned with an overshot flaking method in both Solutrean and Clovis cultures. Solutrean leaf-shaped points are similar in outline and share some (but not all) Clovis construction techniques. Further, Clovis assemblages often include a cylindrical ivory shaft or point made from a mammoth tusk or the long bones of bison. Other bone tools were often included in both assemblages, such as needles and bone shaft straighteners.
Problems with Solutrean/Clovis
The most prominent opponent of the Solutrean connection is Lawrence Guy Straus. Straus points out that the LGM forced people out of western Europe into southern France and the Iberian peninsula by about 25,000 radiocarbon years ago. There were no people at all living north of the Loire Valley of France during the Last Glacial Maximum, and no people in the southern part of England until after about 12,500 BP. The similarities between Clovis and Solutrean cultural assemblages are far outweighed by the differences. Clovis hunters were not users of marine resources, either fish or mammal; the Solutrean hunter-gatherers used land-based hunting supplemented by littoral and riverine but not oceanic resources.
Most essentially, the Solutreans of the Iberian peninsula lived 5,000 radiocarbon years earlier and 5,000 kilometers directly across the Atlantic from the Clovis hunter-gatherers.
PreClovis and Solutrean
Since the discovery of credible Preclovis sites, Bradley and Stanford now argue for a Solutrean origin of Preclovis culture. The diet of Preclovis is definitely more maritime-oriented, and the dates are closer in time to Solutrean. However, the stone technology is not the same as Clovis, and the discovery of an ivory rhinoceros horn tool at the Yana RHS site in Western Beringia has somewhat lessened the strength of the technology argument.
Sources
This glossary entry is part of the Guide to the Population of America and the Dictionary of Archaeology.
Bradley, Bruce and Dennis Stanford 2004 The North Atlantic ice-edge corridor: a possible Palaeolithic route to the New World. World Archaeology 36(4):459-478.
Bradley, Bruce and Dennis Stanford 2006 The Solutrean-Clovis connection: reply to Straus, Meltzer and Goebel. World Archaeology 38(4):704-714.
Cotter, John L. 1981 The Upper Paleolithic. However It Got Here, It's Here: (Can the Middle Paleolithic Be far behind?). American Antiquity 46(4):926-928.
Straus, Lawrence G. 2000 Solutrean settlement of North America? A review of reality. American Antiquity 65(2):219-226.
Straus, Lawrence G., David Meltzer, and Ted Goebel 2005 Ice Age Atlantis? Exploring the Solutrean-Clovis ‘connection’. World Archaeology 37(4):507-532.
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