Pro-Solutrean vs Anti-Solutrean Essay Example

with surviving the cold weather by making waterproof clothes, migrating to hunt, etc. Also, with their art they have found that nowhere in Clovis (or pre-Clovis) is there rock art like Solutreans and that most of the art found is Solutrean. They conclude that is it obvious that Upper Paleolithic Solutrean peoples practiced non-perishable art in many forms and contexts, while Clovis peoples did not.

Exploitation of marine resources

“They have collections from Solutrean sites in northern Spain that contain abundant evidence that people were utilizing coastal and estuarian resources and there was an increasing dependence on marine resources.” They have evidence that they transported quantities of limpets from the shore. They also have found that they camps were built closer to where the ‘catcher’ beaches were.

All in all they have study this area for years and have learned that they have had to follow where the food goes (animals in the sea) in order to survive, such as the seal migrations. Also in order to survive the severe cold weather they made clothes that kept them warm during the horrible winter seasons. Now they question whether or not they were able to make boats. They have discovered that they made these boats out of seal skin and blubber.

Some of the evidence that they found was from their artwork as well. They find that seals and fish were being represented in cave art during this time. They conclude that this is hard evidence for them hunting seals.

Ethnographic evidence

“Solutrean is the only Old World archaeological culture that meets our criteria for an ancestral Clovis candidate.” Archaeologists have discovered the different types of culture activities they had to do

such as the way they had to migrate in order to get food. This was a huge part of their culture I am sure. Understanding the way the seal migrated had them go from one place to another or some of them would just stay in one place waiting for the next wave of seals to come in. They based much of their food off the marine resources because they were available year round while upland hunting sites were periodically used to hunt red-deer.

Because the sea was such a huge source of their food and fuel throughout the year they had to adapt to the economy. They did this by making tool kits for exploiting the sea more efficiently, waterproof clothing, nets, harpoon gear and watercrafts. They have also found similar hunting patterns in northern Spain, where they were wedged between mountains with glaciers and heavy snow pack and an ice-covered ocean for most of the year.

Connecting pre-Clovis technologies

They have found in the three sites in Eastern North America with artifacts that have dated to pre-Clovis. Such as thinned bifaces, indented base projectile points, blades, and overshot flaking. They therefore suggest that “the pre-Clovis technologies are transitional between Solutrean and Clovis because they fill in the time gap and are located near the Atlantic Coasts of Europe and North America. As they have dug through these sites they have found that all of it fits because they found Solutrean, Cactus hill, and then Clovis point. This connects the time together and therefore makes it all make sense.

The archaeological data that they have found support this hypothesis of the pre-Clovis idea. Also, the location of having

sites on both the west and east side of the Americas doesn’t make sense without having something in between them to connect them. It’s confusing to have Clovis on both sides of America with showing no evidence of how they got to both sides. They need to somehow fill this 5,000 year gap across America and the evidence of Pre-Clovis fixes this.Anti-Solutrean Argument1. Technological dissimilarities There is no clear evidence as to how Solutrean blade technology is identical to Clovis blade technology.

Going throughout the continent they have found that these large blades are extremely rare. Bradley and Stanford didn’t quite get all of their evidence right. Most of the blades they have found can’t really relate because they are so rare. They explain that even if you have the appearance of small blades it is hardly necessary evidence of a historical relationship because they appear in the prehistoric record all over the world at different times. Bradley and Stanford also say that flaked points take under half of the Solutrean concave base points. However, they are completely absent from the large sample of Texas Clovis points and are rare everywhere else on North America.

Anti-Solutreans best argument I feel is when they say, “The almost-universal bifacial nature of Clovis points highlights an obvious technological difference in primary reduction between them and Solutrean forms.”

Loss of Cultural traits

They explain that the concave base points aren’t limited to these two cultures because there are many other industries in Eastern Europe that have a variety of artifact forms, such as Russia, and Middle and Upper Paleolithic. Anti-Solutreans are saying that Clovis could’ve descended from any one of these, being scattered

across Europe. To go along with the dissimilarities between their weapons and the different kinds of blades, there are dissimilarities in the art.

They say, “Nowhere in Clovis (or pre-Clovis) is there rock art like this.” Archaeologists have been trying to find art comparable to that of Paleolithic Europe. But they have found nothing, and they conclude that it has been lost. Some other behaviors that the Clovis people had were caching large bifaces and a preference for exotic raw materials tools. Clovis is also well known for caching, but almost all of them are restricted to western North America and are only in south-west France.

Therefore we see that caching has been lost as well. And although they would rarely resort to heat treating tool-stone, they would sometimes heat raw material to improve its flaking quality.

Lack of evidence for marine resources

About 9-10km from the shore archaeologists found some sites where these people stayed at. They found edible mollusks that were carried back to these sites but no ocean fish or marine mammal remains. Also, there is no evidence of seafaring, boat images, art, marine mammal hunting or deep-sea fishing at these sites.

They did not hunt seals for there was no evidence of seal hunting or deep-sea fishing there. They also recall how that “during the Last Glacial Maximum the human range in Western Europe had contracted to southern France and the Iberian Peninsula. People were then forced to abandon Wales, southern England, Belgium, Germany and northern France. So where on the ice-free shores of the southern British Isles is the evidence of supposed marine mammal-hunting Solutreans navigating the eastern waters of the North Atlantic?”

Lack of boat/marine

technology

They examined the remains in the Clovis and found that there was no evidence from any of the Clovis sites nearer the coast of the use of marine resources. They have found no evidence of if they carried on the tradition of Solutrean marine mammal hunters and fisherman. Along with no evidence being found, they also have found no evidence of seafaring (including no boat images in rock or portable art), marine mammal hunting, or deep-sea fishing. This suggests that these people were aware of seals and whales but there is no evidence that they hunted them. Also the subject of Bradley and Stanford’s idea that these people traveled across the North Atlantic is very debatable.

As they searched they have found no evidence of boats that they would have traveled across the North Atlantic in. All in all, the Pro-Solutreans are lacking major evidence.

Chronological problems

The first main point they have is that there was a huge spatial and temporal gap between Solutrean and Clovis. At which the earliest Clovis sites are recorded to be on the Eastern side of North America.

Stanford and Bradley just said that these two groups were like one another and would not accept the pre-Clovis assemblages. This is because the pre-Clovis sample is small. There are no shouldered points, the burins, the large blades, and the parietal art. After forgetting about the pre-Clovis for a minute anti-Solutrean still discusses that Bradley and Stanford’s dating matters are not very tidy.

However, they realize that the “sites are few in number, their assemblages are largely undocumented and not described, and are scattered over several thousand years of time and hundreds of miles across the

North American landscape. That is why pro-Solutrean should accept the argument of pre-Clovis because their assemblages fill in the missing links in the dates.