Llano Culture

Llano culture refers to late Pleistocene North American people on the Llano Estacado, or Southern High Plains, who used distinctive stone projectile points, known as Clovis points, to hunt mammoths. Formal description of the Llano culture during the 1950s established it as the oldest known prehistoric archaeological culture in North America and reinforced the notion that Paleoindians were specialized big game hunters. The term “Clovis culture” replaced “Llano culture” by the late 1960s, so Llano culture is primarily a historical concept important for its role in Paleoindian studies.

Elias H. Sellards proposed the term “Llano complex” in his1952 book Early Man in America for assemblages of artifacts associated with mammoth (Mammuthus columbi) bones at archaeological sites on and near the Llano Estacado (Spanish for “staked plains”) of western Texas and eastern New Mexico. The artifacts of the Llano complex consisted of distinctive stone projectile points, stone hide scrapers, hammer-stones, and bone tools. Sellards used the terms “Llano culture” and “Llano man” to refer to the people who made and used the artifacts. Sellards included in his Llano complex sites throughout much of North America that contained Clovis points, regardless of whether they also contained mammoth remains.

Sellards was a geologist by training, but since 1915 he had pursued an interest in the antiquity of humans in North America. Not until the discovery in 1927 at Folsom, New Mexico, of distinctive stone projectile points (Folsom points) found in unambiguous association with bones of extinct bison (Bison antiquus) did it become generally accepted that humans had [Page 1495]been on the continent for more than a few thousand years. B. antiquuswas thought to have gone extinct by the end of the Pleistocene, although the exact age of that event was not known until the 1950s when radio-carbon dating placed it at around 10,000 years ago.

Folsom points were lanceolate in shape, very finely made, and distinctive in having a long flake removed from each face running from the base nearly to the tip, giving them a “fluted” appearance. Folsom points immediately set the standard against which all future finds of early points would be compared. As archaeologists searched for additional evidence of early human occupation, they found points that were obviously the same as Folsom points as well as points that were larger, were less finely made, and had shorter flutes. Names for these latter points included generalized Folsom, Folsom-like, and Folsomoid.

During the mid-1930s, Edgar B. Howard and John L. Cotter of the University of Pennsylvania and the Academy of Sciences of Philadelphia conducted excavations at the site of an ancient spring-fed pond on the edge of Blackwater Draw near Clovis, New Mexico, where they found Folsom-like points and beveled bone artifacts associated with remains of mammoths and other extinct mammals.

At the Clovis site, they also found Folsom points with bones of B. antiquus stratigraphically above the Folsom-like points. In 1941, the Folsom-like points were named Clovis fluted points. Acceptance of the temporal relationship between Clovis and Folsom points demonstrated here did not occur until Sellards's definition of the Llano complex.

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