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PALEO PERIOD

11,500 B.C. — 8,000 B.C.

Early - 11,500 - 9000 B.C.

Middle - 9000 - 8500 B.C.

Late - 8500 - 8000 B.C.

The Paleo Tradition represents one moment of time beginning with the earliest period of aboriginal culture. The Paleo were a people who learned and became successful at adapting to the environment in which they found themselves. Their landscape was pristine and quite different from the one we have today.

These people who lived off the land made beautiful spearpoints of fine grade flint to hunt game animals in order to survive. Many useful tools were also made of flint, bone, and ivory - tools needed to cut apart the prey, prepare their meals, and clothe their bodies.

The artifacts Paleoindians left behind provide evidence useful to modern man to interpret their way of life.

The Long Journey

The first peoples to come into the New World came from Siberia across the Bering Strait land bridge and into Alaska during the last ice age. The last advance of the Ice Age began about 70,000 years ago and lasted until about 10,000 years ago. Because huge quantities of water were locked up in the glaciers, the sea level fell 400-450 feet. A strip of land 1,300 miles wide connecting Siberia to Alaska became exposed. This land bridge was named Beringia by anthropologists. It was a broad, water-logged plain, broken only by low, rolling hills.

During the centuries of the Paleo time, the winters were dark, long and very cold. Small bands of hunters and their families pursued their quarry, ever moving eastward, farther and farther from their Siberia homeland, over the land bridge. Unaware that they were entering a new continent, their journey took them down ice free corridors. One followed the Brooks Range, the other the Yukon Valley, through western Canada, down into the United States, and finally, over time, into Tennessee. Their pathways were narrow and climate punishing. Their routes were uncharted as they followed their prey, their only hope for food and survival. Though the icy trek acted as a disease filter, many perished along the way because of the harsh conditions.

These ancient hunters are often called Paleo Indians because their lifestyle was a Paleolithic or Old Stone Age Culture. "Paleo" is from the Greek word for "ancient;" "lithic" is from the Greek word for "stone."

Some of the best evidence that's been retrieved so far concerning the extreme antiquities of man in the New World comes from a place called Fell's Cave in Chile. At the deepest level, artifacts dating to about 8,000 or 10,000 years ago have been uncovered. This means that peoples must have been in North America, and especially Tennessee, at a much earlier date.

The Hunt for Survival and Shelter

In the southeastern United States, heavy rainfalls nourished a thick forest cover of spruce, fir, and broadleaf trees. In the woods and grasslands mastodons could find plenty to eat, for they were browsers living off tree branches and leaves and thick grasses. Longhorn bison also grazed on luxurient grasses. Elk and deer were abundant, as well as wolves, foxes and smaller animals.

The Paleo Indians hunted on the grassy and swampy plains of North America and Tennessee. Much of their livlihood was gained from the specilized hunting of such large animals as mastodon, camel and horse, elk and longhorned bison. By hunting these particular animals, the Paleo Indians either threw their spears at these prey or thrust them at close range. The skill of most simple hunting people lies not in hitting the animal from a distance, but in getting so close to the animal that they cannot miss. These early peoples may have been partly responsible for the extinction of some of the game animals during the course of the Middle Paleo by the way they hunted them - by setting fires to scare them, and by stampeding the animals over cliffs, into swamps, or into narrow valleys. By the time the Paleos reached the Kentucky and Tennessee area, they also began to rely on small game and vegetable foods rather heavily. The earth offered turnips, ground nuts and arrowroot.

The early inhabitants primarily lived in rock shelters or dry caves which are found in our area, but they also set up their camps on ridges or slopes of hills overlooking watering spots. This allowed them to keep these places under constant surveillance.

Paleo Flint Points and Tools

Collectors and archaeologists have found innumerable projectile points and tools of the kind that the Paleoindians primarily used. Reduction of a stone nodule began with a hammerstone, a large, lemon sized stone used to break large stones into smaller, short, wide, workable stones. The ancient hunter removed a number of flakes, thus reducing the nodule to a workable shape. Then with a deer antler billet (the part of the antler that attached to the knobs on the skull), or with an ivory billet (the distal end of a mastodon tusk), long, thin flakes were removed to reduce the piece to a final shape. To finish the implement, the knapper used an antler tine, one of the antler points, or a tusk tip of a peccary (a small, piglike animal) to press off small, controlled flakes from both sides. This technique is called "pressure flaking." Some of the long, thin flakes that had been removed with the antler billet or tusk tip were also worked into tools.

Some Paleo spearpoints are distinguished by longitudinal grooves or flutings on one or both faces of the blade. The points were fluted so that the wooden shaft would be flush with the surface of the point when attached. In addition to this fluting feature, these points were also ground smooth on the edges near the base where these spear points were lashed to the shafts. The early Paleo people ground the edges of their spear points so that the sharp edges of the flint would not cut the lashings used to bind the point to the shaft. Artifacts that are chipped from flint have sharp edges just like broken glass. This is what makes flint artifacts effective as weapons or cutting tools.

Wooden shafts were split on the end, and the flint point was inserted into the slot and secured with lashes made of animal tendon. This style of hafting helped to prevent the flint point from being broken since the point was reinforced most of its length by the wood of the shaft. Spearpoints hafted in this way were also better at penetrating big game that had thick fur and/or tough hides.

The spearpoint associated with the Early Paleo Period and usually found in the eastern United States and the Tennessee region is the Clovis point, named for Clovis, New Mexico, where the first examples were found. Clovis points are found most numerously in northern Alabama and the Highland Rim area of Tennessee. The Clovis point is a medium to large size blade, 3" to 5" long, with convex sides and a concave base that is ground. Most examples are fluted on both sides about one-third the way up from the base.

Another spearpoint that is strictly Paleo and also found in Tennessee and the eastern United States is the Cumberland point, named because of its frequency of occurrence in the Cumberland River drainage. The Cumberland is a medium to large size blade, 2" to 4" long, that is thicker than the Clovis, and is usually fluted on both faces with the fluting extending most of the length of the blade. Here again bases are ground on all examples. The grinding extends one-third or more the length of the point from the base. The Cumberland, a Middle Paleo Point, occurs on the same sites that produce Clovis points. They are also associated with the typical uniface blade tool complex of the Paleo Period horizon, including spurred end scrapers, multiple spurred gravers, spoke shavers, slug- shaped side scrapers called limaces, blade knives, and other blade tools.

During the Late Paleo, fluted projectile points disppeared from the archaeological scene in favor of unfluted, lanceolate (lance shaped) forms. Quad, Beaver Lake, Dalton-Greenbrier, Dalton-Nuckolls, are Late Paleo point types. Tools of the Late Paleo were large, bipointed, alternately beveled bifaces (tools with two faces), hafted perforators, and narrow endscrapers.

Over time the Paleo hunters improved their spearpoint weaponry. Evidence suggests that Paleo points were mounted on detachable bone foreshafts. These foreshafts were then inserted into a sturdy, long, main shaft. By doing this the Paleo hunter need only to carry one heavy shaft and several replaceable heads, or foreshafts, to be well armed. With this weapon, when an animal was plunged with the point, it would naturally become detached from the main shaft. If it did not detach, the Paleo hunter could quickly jerk the main shaft off the foreshaft and reload if need be.

Information concerning the early Paleo hunters is still meager, partly because they were nomadic and never lived in any one spot for very long, and partly because their personal goods were little. A number of their stone and flint tools have been found. From these resources can be drawn inferences on the way of life of the Paleolithic peoples. Most of their tools were worked and retouched on one surface only; therefore, they are called "uniface" tools. Late Paleoindians made "biface" tools and "uniface" tools. They realized having two usable faces of a tool made them more efficient.

Some tools were merely small flakes with one or more finely chipped edges. These are called gravers. Knives were blades struck from flint cores. Flint punches were used as well as rough chopping blades. Large scrapers were used to prepare animal hides, wood, and bone.

Paleoindians and the Dead

Though the Paleoindians were practically disease free, they did not live to a very old age. The everyday activities of hunting for food and fighting the cold were hard on the Paleoindian body. Many Paleos died in their mid-twenties. Broken bones and other injuries often meant death for the Paleoindian.

When a Paleo died, some archaeologists believe they were left without burial for whatever scavenger might come. Other archaeologists believe some were cremated. Due to the dry climate in the Western United States, Paleo burials have been preserved. The Paleo was found buried in a pit. Sometimes the body was covered in red ochre and laying beside knapped flint tools.

Determining the Paleo Tradition

With the coming of the Modern Age, a new method of dating remains of once living organisms came into being. The result was the discovery that all living organisms, both plants and animals, contain different kinds of carbon - one of which is radioactive. This radioactivity, which can be detected by a Geiger Counter, begins to decay when an organism dies. Half of this radioactivity is lost after 5,568 years; three- fourths of the amount is gone after 11,136 years, and so on. The amount of radioactivity is determined by the number of counts per minute registered on a Geiger Counter. Quite a number of Paleo Indian sites have been dated this way. The dates range from 11,500- 7,900 B.P.

Maybe the final factor which led to the extinction of the mastodon, horses, camels and straight horned bison was a drastic climatic change. The later Paleos also became foragers, searching for edible plant material. Around 7,000 years ago the climate went from moist, damp and cold to being drier and warmer than at present . This change lasted till about 4,000 years ago. This warm, dry period of change is known as the Altithermal. It is characterized by a decrease in rainfall where streams, lakes and marshes became smaller or disappeared altogether. During this great drought of Al ti thermal, every permanent spring and watercourse was a concentration point for men and animals.

When this era ended, new peoples and new ideas came along to dominate the Tennessee scene. History and culture progressed forward to new arenas.

Selected Books For Further Study

of the

Paleo Tradition

Burt, Jesse and Robert Ferguson. Indians of the Southeast: Then and Now. 1973. Abingdon Press. Nashville and New York.

Fundaburk, Emma Lila, and Mary Douglass Foreman. Sun Circles and Human Hands. The Southeastern Indians - Art and Industry. 1957. Second Printing 1965.

Hudson, Charles. The Southeastern Indians. 1976. The University of Tennessee Press. Second Printing 1978. Kopper, Philip.

North American Indians. Before the Coming of the Europeans. 1986. Smithsonian Books, Washington, D.C.

Lewis, R. Barry, editor. Kentucky Archaeology. 1996. The University Press of Kentucky.