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Early hunter-gatherers in the Americas: perspectives from central Brazil

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Renato Kipnis
Renato Kipnis*
Affiliation:
Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor MI 48109-1079, USA. rkipnis@umich.edu
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Extract

There is a preconception among American archaeologists that the late Pleistocene (c. 12,000-10,000 hap.) and early Holocene human occupation of the Americas would have had highly formalized and diagnostic technologies (Bryan 1986), as seen in bifacial fluted projectiles (Clovis and/or Folsom points) or Palaeoarctic microblades. This bias carries with it two presumptions which have no reason to exist:

• Clovis and related industries had to be diffused throughout the Americas; and

• there should be a ‘big-game hunting’ horizon in South America.

Keywords

hunter-gathererlate Pleistocene/early Holocene adaptationsubsistence patternCentral Brazil
Type
Special section: Issues in Brazilian archaeology
Information
Antiquity , Volume 72 , Issue 277 , September 1998 , pp. 581 - 592
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd. 1998

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