The Clovis culture (also Llano culture) is a prehistoric Native American culture that first appears in the archaeological record of North America around 11,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age.
The culture is named for artifacts found near Clovis, New Mexico. Clovis sites have since been identified throughout all of the contiguous United States, as well as Mexico and Central America.
The Clovis people, also known as Paleo-Indians, are generally regarded as the first human inhabitants of the New World, and ancestors of all the indigenous cultures of North and South America. However, this view has been recently contested by various archaeological finds which are claimed to be much older.
A hallmark of Clovis culture is the use of a distinctively-shaped fluted rock spear point, known as the Clovis point. The Clovis point is distinctively bifacial and fluted on both sides, a feature that possibly allowed the point to be mounted onto a spear in a way so that the point would snap off on impact. Archaeologists do not agree on whether the widespread presence of these artifacts indicates the proliferation of a single people, or the adoption of a superior technology by non-Clovis people. It is generally accepted that Clovis people hunted mammoth: sites abound where Clovis points are found mixed in with mammoth remains. Yet this is only part of the Clovis story. More than 125 species of plants and animals are known to have been used by Clovis People throughout the Western Hemisphere. Whether they drove the mammoth, and other species, to extinction via over hunting--the so-called Pleistocene overkill hypothesis--is still an open, and controversial, question. The greater likelihood is that a combination of climate change, human predation, disease, and additional pressures from newly arrived herbivores (competition) and carnivores (predation)isolated populations and made it impossible for them to reproduce and survive.