Clovis First held that there was nothing before Clovis.

The first Americans were Clovis hunters, and everything that came after derived from or replaced the Clovis tradition.

This was the consensus view through the 1970s and into the 1980s, defended vigorously and accepted by most working archaeologists in North America.

The Western Stemmed Tradition was a complication.

The Western Stemmed Tradition is a set of stone tool technologies found throughout the Great Basin, the Snake River Plain, the Columbia Plateau, and adjacent areas of western North America.

Its characteristic artifacts are stemmed projectile points — tools with a distinct stem at the base that would have been hafted into a split handle or shaft.