Early hunter-gatherers in the Americas: perspectives from central Brazil

There is a preconception among American archaeologists that the late Pleistocene ( c . 12,000-10,000 hap.) and early Holocene human occupation of the Americas would have had highly formalized and diagnostic technologies (Bryan 1986), as seen in bifacial fluted projectiles (Clovis and/or Folsom points) or Palaeoarctic microblades. This bias carries with it two presumptions which have no reason to exist: • Clovis and related industries had to be diffused throughout the Americas; and • there should be a ‘big-game hunting’ horizon in South America.