Clovis Technology Nub Theory

[Arrowheadology Staff]

Clovis Technology Nub Theory



What are your thoughts?

[Mojave]

Sometimes you feel like a nub, sometimes you don't.

Who made the video? An interesting subject but I'm not sure why 15 minutes is needed to say the nub is a platform intentionally left for future re-working. I'd love to see more but I always thought it was just a result of the way they made tools.
Here is a small one of mine...

[joshuaream]

Originally Posted by Mojave

An interesting subject but I'm not sure why 15 minutes is needed to say the nub is a platform intentionally left for future re-working.

Click the link, it should open in a new window. The author has 3 more videos covering his nub theory. A full hour of video to say that nubs are outrepasse platforms.

[Mojave]

Ok, I'll watch the rest if I get time. It would be interesting to look at other artifacts with outre passe flaking to see if the same pattern exists.

[uniface]

I would take it as a personal favor if someone would watch these and post what the videos say.

I'm too deaf to hear the words over the computer.

Thank You in Advance.

[Mojave]

I just watched the first 15 minute one. Lots of rambling but talked about "nubs" on the sides of Clovis points and how they are at the ends of ridges. The obvious implication is that the "nubs" were platforms for further percussion overshot flakes.
I guess the other videos went further into this. Not exactly an earth shattering theory but it is interesting.

[rokdok]

I watched them all, and the guy makes some very good points. When the huge Clovis bifaces from the Wenatchee cache are viewed carefully, the fact that many of them are not as refined as smaller Clovis points supports his theory that they were not hafted tools. Many of the bases and sides were not ground. He takes this as an indication that the larger forms were used as knives until the edges dulled, and only as they lost length and width with use and were of appropriate size for use as hafted tools or points were they then ground.Another view, could be that the very large Clovis's were ceremonial and thus not ground for that reason.The overshot flakes would indeed have made razor sharp tools, and his assertions that they used the bifaces as flake cores is in my opinion a valid one.The fact that he believes that the overshot flaking technique of Clovis knappers evolved from their blade core technology , i strongly agree with. It is also supported by the fact that early Solutreans used a core and blade technology as well as Levallois techniques and they evolved the same overshot techniques 6000 years before Clovis.Levallois technique and the blade core technology which evolved out of it use the same principles as overshot flaking except that the unifacial "overshot flake" (Levallois point or core blade) was the desired end-product as opposed to the bifacial core (Clovis point).

[meetmaker]

Great synopsis.

[uniface]

1) Thank you ! That's essentially what bob Patten says (Peoples of the Flute).

2) The nub, though, still has me scratching my head. The one on the Dalton point would only be accessible via a punch -- same basic deal as re-fitting a step-terminated flake and using it as a punch to take the rest of the flake off. (Waldorf, way back when).

(?)

[joshuaream]

I watched a couple of the videos (after a while on mute) and his knapping demonstration was quite interesting. He was using a hard hammer to remove outrepasse flakes at early stages in the biface reduction, and some of his results are quite similar to what I see on the clovis sites I hunt. The resulting flakes are thick and study. Here is an example of a broken biface I found last year that shows a similar pattern of taking a large outrepasse flake at a very early stage (probaby to remove the cortex on the raw material.) The flake failed by taking off too much of the other edge and the piece was discarded. The otherside of this piece is essentially unworked.

Sometimes it seems like knappers (even Archaeologists that are knappers) use softer hammer outrepasse flaking as a later stage thinning flake or finishing flake to make a point look like a clovis. That takes off thin outrepasse flakes which I also find, but it doesn't explain some of the beefier flakes found on many sites.

What I'm not really sure about is why he's trying to rename what is already kind of a well known and documented process with early fluted points... They made big bifaces that were both knives and cores. Clovis people used flake tools both from prepared cores as well as outrepasse flakes. And nubs appear to be the same as a platform.

From what I remember about handling casts of the Rutz clovis, those large barbs or spurs on the side weren't significantly above or below the edge of the biface and were kind of thin, which tells me that they weren't direct platforms for an outrepasse strike. I could be wrong, but it seemed to me the barbs are just a way of getting an extra inch of cutting edge out of an already big knife.




The flake start on the left side of the piece right above the spot of cortex,


Here is some of the lithic scatter I picked up that day. The bottom four on the left side are broken bifaces along with the point in the center, the rest are core blades, outrepasse flakes and debitage flakes.