The points were unlike anything seen in later North American stone tool traditions.

They were large, often beautifully thinned to almost dangerous fragility, and they bore the distinctive fluting — the longitudinal channel flaked from the base — that became the defining characteristic of the type.

Clovis sites spread across North America with remarkable geographic breadth.

Clovis points and associated technologies have been found from the Pacific coast to the Atlantic, from the Canadian prairies to the Gulf of Mexico and into Central America.

The distribution was vast, the chronological range relatively tight — most securely dated Clovis sites fall within a window of perhaps 13,000 to 12,600 years before the present — and the technological consistency across that huge geographic area was striking.