The Clovis First Paradigm And The Challenge From The West

To understand why the Buhl burial mattered to archaeologists studying early Americans, you have to understand the state of the field in 1989 and the years immediately following the discovery.

For most of the twentieth century, the dominant framework for understanding the peopling of the Americas was known as the Clovis First model.

The basic argument was straightforward: the first humans to enter the Americas came across the Bering land bridge from Siberia, moved south through an ice-free corridor between the retreating Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets, and spread across the continent relatively rapidly.

The evidence for this first wave was the distinctive fluted Clovis projectile point — a lanceolate, fluted stone tool found at dozens of sites across North America — dated to approximately 13,000 to 12,800 calibrated years ago.