The Early Settlement of North America : The Clovis Era

Rating:
Summary: Attack of the establishment
Review: The info and analysis on the Clovis period is pretty good. However, the emphasis on the "authoritative" position that the Clovis people were the first settlers in the face of a tremendous quantity of mounting evidence that Homo sap. settled North and South America at least 20,000 years before Clovis, greatly detracts from the value of the book.

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Summary: Clovis Tradition, first Americans?
Review: This book is a gem. There is no other book about the first Americans that has such an even handed thoughtful analysis of the complex array of data involved in the controversy. Haynes is one of the key players in this controversy and his research has cleared up much of the confusion around what can be considered reliable archaeological evidence of human presence. His work with African elephants throws considerable light on how bones can be broken or otherwise altered by natural processes and appear as pseudoartifacts. The book provides a rich background and is written in a readable style for most scientically literate readers. It should be on the shelf of any anthropologist, archaeologist, geologist, ecologist, or enthusiast interested in the peopling of the Americas at the end of the Pleistocene.

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Summary: Human Behavior Ecology in Clovis
Review: This book was a thoughtful reinterpretation of the existing data pertaining to the nature of Clovis lifeways and settlement in the New World. Rather than concerning himself with the nature or timing of the first Americans, Haynes introduces an ecological perspective to the study of Clovis, a population movement model in which adopting a very specialized adaptive strategy would enable a 'fugitive' culture such as Clovis to spread rapidly throughout the New World.