North American hunting technologies begins with the arrival of the Paleo-Natives and continues through to modern times. This article deals exclusively with Aboriginal Canadians and Native Americans in the United States.
Paleo-Native Period
Paleo-Native Weapons Technologies The Clovis spear point is found at nearly all locations in North America. It is defined by its relatively large size and fluted morphology that allows it to be hafted onto the end of a spear. It is of some debate if this was a handheld thrusting spear, or a throwing spear, or an atlatl. It could well have been used for all three, including knives, as the bifacial Clovis point is very well made and utilitarian. Typically the points are made from high-quality silicates such as flint, or chert. Often these stone tools are found hundreds of miles from their source stone in caches of semi-complete blanks. It appears they would bury some good material they had brought with them when they traveled, and sometimes either forget where they buried it, or possibly found more high-quality materiel in the new location, and had no need to retrieve the caches.
Hunting Tests have been done on the velocity of these large bifaces, and it has been clearly shown that they are capable of wounding and killing modern elephants. The occurrence of tool marks, and bifaces found at kill sites leaves no doubt that Clovis people did in fact kill and hunt mastodons, mammoths, camel, horses, and bison. But could this hunting have caused the mass extinction that came at the end of the Pleistocene, or was it the climate change that did it? A third theory is also emerging, that the colonists and possibly domesticated dogs brought disease with them that caused this extinction. But the few species that were hunted by humans that became extinct doesn't account for the loss of so many species. The loss of some cornerstone species typically can result in an implosion of population and diversity similar to what we see during the transition from Pleistocene to Holocene. This was probably caused by some loss of major species of vegetation.
"Clovis First" There was a previously accepted idea called Clovis First. This theory does not mean that Clovis showed up and had the fluted biface technology, but assumes that over about 1,000 years the original settlers developed the technology, and Clovis was the first successful material culture in North America that became widespread. However, new dates from the Cooper's Ferry site in Idaho circa 15,600 YBP, provide clear evidence for Western Stemmed Tradition points predating evidence of Clovis by >2000 years. <Davis, Loren G. et al 2022 Dating of a large tool assemblage at the Cooper’s Ferry site (Idaho, USA) to ~15,785 cal yr B.P. extends the age of stemmed points in the Americas> As Waguespack states "Based on optimal foraging models, it is argued that selective predation on high ranked resources, specifically megafauna, is predicted in colonization settings where large game is abundant and human population densities are low." Most people that subscribe to this school of thought tend to believe in the specialized large game hunter societies. This is disputed by some as it has low ethnographic evidence, but the environment was quite different at the time, and with the right technologies and techniques this highly mobile hunter that depended on large game could be reasonable.
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