Ancient Clovis hunters drawn to Ohio flint
ABradley Lepper
rchaeologists disagree on when the first humans arrived in America, but we all pretty much agree that the Clovis culture represents the earliest large-scale occupation of North America. The culture is named for Clovis, New Mexico, where the highly distinctive Clovis spear point was first found in direct association with the bones of the extinct mammoth.
More than 1,000 Clovis points have been recorded in Ohio, many more than most other states, so this must have been a paradise for Ice Age hunters. Most of Ohio’s Clovis points are made of Upper Mercer flint, which can be found in abundance in Coshocton County, so it’s not surprising that more Clovis points have been found there than in any other Ohio county.
The Welling site, located along the Walhonding River about 12 miles west of Coshocton, was studied by the late Olaf Prufer of Kent State University back in the 1960s. From this single site, he documented 54 Clovis points in various stages of manufacture, along with numerous other flint tools.
Prufer believed that Welling was a workshop where small groups of Clovis people would periodically come to make flint tools before heading off to hunt mammoths and mastodons in the flatlands of central Ohio. A new study of the tools found at Welling suggests that Welling was much more than just a workshop.
Metin Eren of Kent State, along with Logan Miller of Illinois State University and seven other team members, examined a sample of 81 flint tools from the Welling site in looking for microscopic traces of how the tools were used. They presented their results in a paper recently published online in the journal World Archaeology.
They determined that the stone tools at Welling had been used for a variety of jobs, including “dry- and fresh-hide scraping, hide cutting, meat butchering, sawing and scraping bone/ antler, sawing and scraping wood and plant scraping.” They concluded that far from being just a workshop, the Welling site was a base camp where “Clovis foragers carried out a variety of activities and regularly traveled to and from the site.”
Upper Mercer flint was a vital resource for Clovis groups living throughout Ohio and, more than that, the Coshocton County quarries were “predictable and immovable places on an emerging map of a landscape for a thinly scattered colonizing population needing to find one another.” Small groups would come here, probably every spring, to quarry the flint and make the tools they’d need for the coming months, but also to meet up with other groups to socialize.
Eren and his colleagues suggest sites such as Welling played an important role in the initial colonization of North America. Base camps established near high-quality flint sources would make good jumpingoff points for expeditions into unexplored territory. They propose that Clovis groups geared up with lots of Upper Mercer flint and then set off to look for the next important flint outcrop, which would become their next base camp.
One of these groups may have ended up at the Gainey site near Flint, Michigan, where many of the Clovis tools are made from Ohio’s Upper Mercer flint.