Clovis people used Great Lakes camp every year about 13,000 years ago, researchers confirm

The first humans to settle in the Great Lakes region likely returned to a camp in southwest Michigan for several years at a time, according to a University of Michigan study.

Until recently, there was no evidence that Clovis people had settled in the Great Lakes region. The Clovis people appeared in North America about 13,000 years ago, during a geological epoch called the Pleistocene. During that period, layers of glaciers covered much of the world, including Michigan, making the land inhospitable to human settlers. But a 2021 UM study confirmed that the Clovis people built a camp, now called the Belson Site, in southwestern Michigan.

The same researchers confirmed that Clovis people visited the site every year, likely in the summer, for at least three, if not five, years in a row, according to Brendan Nash, the study’s lead author and a doctoral student in archaeology. Tools found at the site also show that the settlers’ diet included a wide variety of animals, from rabbits to muskoxen. The team’s findings are published in the journal PLOS ONE.

At the Belson site, researchers found tools made from a type of stone called chert, which came from what is now western Kentucky, about 400 miles (640 kilometers) from the Belson site. These tools were then resharpened at the Belson site, leaving behind small pieces that the researchers were able to analyze.

Thomas Talbot, an independent researcher who discovered the first Clovis point at the Belson site in Mendon, Michigan, in 2008, is also leading the group’s chert analysis. He has found that some of these chert pieces come from the Paoli chert, which formed in northeastern Kentucky.

“It took me a year to identify it, and when I did, I was very surprised,” Talbot said. “Then we found a broken base, which we call a diagnostic. The broken base was made from this Paoli material. Once you read the paper and look at the data and the maps, some patterns start to emerge that are pretty interesting.”

Tools made in what is now Kentucky were traded with people from central Indiana, who then transported them to the Belson site. According to Nash, this suggests that the people who settled at the Belson site probably moved there during the summers and lived in central Indiana during the winter. In turn, they probably traded the tools from western Kentucky with people who moved from central Indiana to Kentucky on annual routes.

“In this way, people formed ‘links in a chain’ with annual routes that probably connected the entire continent, from Michigan to Mexico,” Nash said. “That’s probably why Clovis-era technology is so similar across much of North America.”

The Clovis period is characterized by distinctive spear points. The points have a very distinctive central channel running the length of the tool, called a flute. A Clovis would have used this channel to attach a shaft to the spear point, creating a composite hunting weapon, a spear that was used to hunt prey of all sizes. Another unique feature of the Clovis people is that they would strike large flakes of material from the stone to create their points. The large pieces that were broken off had razor-sharp edges and were themselves used as makeshift knives.

It’s not yet clear exactly where Clovis technology was invented in the Americas, but once it was invented, it spread quickly, by archaeological standards. Researchers believe it was one of the earliest groups of people to settle in the Americas, and prior to the 2021 study, Clovis technology had not been reported in the Great Lakes region.

Talbot discovered the first Clovis point on the Belson farm grounds in 2008. He recognized it as a Clovis point both because of its distinctive shape and because it was made of Attica chert, a type of stone found 120 miles (190 kilometers) from the Belson site in western Indiana and eastern Illinois. Talbot confirmed his findings with UM archaeologist Henry Wright.

Wright and Talbot visited the site in 2017 and found finished tools and small flakes of Attic chert, leading them to suspect that people had lived at the site rather than simply dropping a point or tool cache as they passed through. Talbot, Wright, and Nash’s 2021 study describes surface sampling of the site.

The current study examines excavations of buried flakes (stone flakes created when the Clovis people resharpened or created their points) and multiple tools buried in less disturbed sediments beneath the plowed surface layers of the field.

The researchers examined three of the dozens of stone tools discovered for traces of proteins. They found traces of musk ox, caribou or deer, hare and peccary, a relative of the Pleistocene pig. The hare and peccary proteins came from the same Clovis point, Nash said.

“Taken together, the ancient protein data suggest that these people had a very diverse diet, eating a wide variety of animals,” Nash said. “Our findings contradict the common idea that the Clovis people were strictly big-game hunters, most often feeding on mammoths and mastodons.”

Nash says the Clovis people also may have eaten plants, but plant matter doesn’t show up in protein tests, and unlike animal bones, their remains typically don’t last 13,000 years.

“This site teaches us about a way of life lost in time,” Nash said. “Through the origins of the stones and the styles of the tools, we follow a group of people living and traveling across the Pleistocene landscape of the American Midwest.”

In addition to Wright and Talbot, co-authors of the study include former UM graduate student Elliot Greiner and Linda Scott Cummings of the PaleoResearch Institute in Colorado.