Clovis People Created Seasonal Hunting Camp in Michigan 13,000 Years Ago

Recent archaeological excavations produced evidence showing that the first humans to live in the Great Lakes region of North America built a summer hunting camp in southwestern Michigan, approximately 13,000 years ago during the Late Pleistocene epoch.

In an article about their research published in the journal PLOS ONE, a team of archaeologists from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor introduce proof that the legendary Clovis people built a temporary encampment at what is now known as the Belson site, overlooking a river where Pleistocene herbivores would have congregated in large numbers during the summer.

The most recent excavations at Belson indicate that Clovis hunting and gathering groups returned to this location annually for between three and five years, looking to take advantage of the opportunities for easy hunting provided by the nearby water source. The archaeologists know the visits were temporary and seasonal, based on the distribution of the Clovis artifacts in different layers of soil.

Traces of animal proteins recovered from the surfaces of tools and weapons found at Belson show the Clovis people had hunted and consumed a wide variety of animals there, including rabbits, musk ox, deer, and peccary, an ancient relative of the pig.

“Taken together, the ancient protein data suggests that these people had a broad spectrum diet, eating a wide variety of animals,” study lead author Brendan Nash said in a University of Michigan press release.

“Our findings are contrary to the popular notion that Clovis people were strictly big game hunters, most often subsisting on mammoths and mastodons.”

Uncovering Evidence of a Vast Clovis Trading Network

In the past no one suspected that the Clovis people had migrated to the Great Lakes region. These ancient ancestors of modern-day Native Americans were named after the city in New Mexico where the first-ever Clovis artifacts were discovered, and at one time it was thought the people may have mostly lived in that area.

In 2021, University of Michigan researchers unearthed the encampment at the Belson site, which is located in St. Joseph County near the Michigan-Indiana border. They recovered an impressive collection of stone tools and weapons during their excavations, which they were able to definitively link to the Clovis people. This is because the weapons feature the distinctively-shaped Clovis points, which were not used by any other ancient North American people.

The Belson site in Southwestern MI where Clovis tools have been found. (Great Lakes Archaeology)

This discovery is consistent with what has been found at other locations in North America, that show that Clovis groups were distributed all across the country, instead of being confined to one specific area.

The tool and weapons found at the encampment are made from a stone called chert. While much of the chert came from central Indiana, some of it was imported from western Kentucky, from a location that is approximately 400 miles (645 kilometers) distant from Belson.

More recently, Thomas Talbot, an independent scientist who has been working with the University of Michigan researchers, found that some of the stone tools were made from Paoli chert, which comes from northeastern Kentucky. This reveals the presence of an active network of stone tool exchange in the region during the Pleistocene epoch.

“It took me a year to identify it, and when I did, it was very surprising,” Talbot explained.

“Then we found a broken base, which we call a diagnostic. The broken base was made from that Paoli material. Once you read the paper and look at the data and maps, there are some patterns that are starting to emerge that are pretty cool.”

Independent researcher Thomas Talbot and University of Michigan archaeologists have found more than 20 Clovis tools and hundreds of pieces of manufacturing and refurbishment debris at the Belson Clovis Site in St. Joseph County. (Daryl Marshke/Michigan Photography/University of Michigan)

The research team has put together a scenario that explains how this chert arrived in southwestern Michigan 13,000 years ago. They say that the tools from Kentucky were traded to Clovis people who lived primarily in central Indiana, and it would have been these people that migrated to Belson in the summer before returning to Indiana in the winter. The researchers believe that professional traders were moving between Indiana and Kentucky and other places on regular schedules, ensuring that valuable goods could be moved long distances across the continent.

“In this way, people formed ‘links in a chain’ with yearly routes that likely connected the whole continent, from Michigan to Mexico,” Brendan Nash said. “This is likely why technology from the Clovis period is so similar throughout most of North America.”

Tracking the Great Clovis Migration Across Space and Time

While the official discovery of the Belson site is credited to the 2021 excavations, Thomas Talbot found the first Clovis point in southwestern Michigan in a field on the family farm in 2008.

This artifact was made from Attica chert, which came from a western Indiana site about 145 miles (235 kilometers) away from the field. Talbot consulted with University of Michigan archaeologist Henry Wright about his find, which led to a later visit to the site by the two in 2017.

Talbot and Wright found finished tools and small pieces of Attica chert during their surface explorations, which led them to suspect that Clovis settlers had actually lived there. It wasn’t until 2021 that large-scale excavations were finally carried out at the Belson site, and the newest finds proved conclusively that the site was a seasonal encampment rather than a permanent settlement.

“This site teaches us about a way of life lost to time,” Nash stated. “Through the sourcing of stone and the styles of tools, we are tracking a group of people as they live and travel across the Pleistocene landscape of the American Midwest.”

Top image: 20 Clovis tools and hundreds of pieces of manufacturing and refurbishment debris at the Belson Clovis Site in St. Joseph County.          Source: Daryl Marshke/Michigan Photography/University of Michigan

By Nathan Falde