Modeling Clovis Landscape Use and Recovery Bias in the Southeastern United States Using the Paleoindian Database of the Americas (PIDBA)

Abstract

In eastern North America, there are few stratified sites dating to the Late Pleistocene epoch (> 11,700 cal B.P.). Instead, researchers have relied on the distribution of surface sites and isolated finds to make inferences about how the early inhabitants of the region used the landscape. While proxies for modern recovery bias have been found to affect artifact recovery at a national scale, in the southeastern United States, I argue, they are poor predictors for the frequency of Clovis type bifaces (ca. 13,250–12,850 cal B.P.) from counties in the southeastern United States as reported in the Paleoindian Database of the Americas (PIDBA). Instead, counties with the highest density of Clovis bifaces are near sources of lithic raw material, and in particular the intersection of major rivers, physiographic boundaries, and lithic raw material sources. I contend that these locations could represent seasonal aggregation loci. Alternatively, they could reflect areas where lithic raw material is more readily available, which may have resulted in higher rates of artifact discard. Determining which of these hypotheses is a more accurate reflection of past human behavior requires that we untangle the degree to which the amount of time people spent at these locations was successive versus coeval.