Platter Chatter Along the Shadows on the Trail

 

Platter Chatter

By John Bradford Branney

Figure 1 – a trio of Clovis platters cached in southeastern Wyoming and discovered by a highway department employee in the late 1950s or early 1960s. For scale, the middle artifact is 7.9 inches long. John Bradford Branney photograph and collection.

Figure one is a photograph of a cache of three Clovis platters surface found in the late 1950s or early 1960s by a gentleman who worked for the Wyoming Highway Department. The exact location of the find is unknown, but according to his niece, he found the cache while working on a highway in southeastern Wyoming. Based on that information, I assume he was in either Goshen or Laramie County. When the finder died, much of the information about the Clovis platter cache died with him.

The finder’s niece ended up with the collection. She knew little about artifacts and placed the cache into storage where it lay for approximately twenty-five years. Approximately fourteen years ago, a collector and hunter of Paleoindian artifacts named Frank Parrish met the niece at a rock and gem show in Tucson, Arizona. Long story short, Mr. Parrish made an offer for the cache and she accepted. Mr. Parrish saved this cache from a lifetime stuck in a storage locker and/or eternal obscurity. Mr. Parrish sold the cache to me in 2021.

In the literature, authors refer to this type of artifact as platters (Patten 1999; 2005) or ovate bifaces (Waters and Jennings 2015), or discoidal cores (Bradley, Collins, and Hemmings 2010). I will refer to them as Clovis platters since I believe that best describes them. These platters have features that are distinctive to Clovis biface thinning such as wide flakes and spacing, overshot and over-the-face flake scars, alternate flake sequencing, end thinning, and finally on at least one of the platters, Clovis biface platforms as shown in figure two (Bradley, Collins, and Hemming 2010: p 67).

Figure 2 – Clovis biface platform characteristics from page 67 in 

Clovis Technology by Bradley, Collins, and Hemming.

In Clovis Technology, Bradley et. al. pointed out that overshot flaking was not a common feature, and that in most cases it resulted from knapping errors. The same authors noted that overshot flaking had become a marker for defining Clovis biface technology. The authors proclaimed that investigators have yet to find discoidal cores (platters) in Clovis camp or kill site settings, prehistoric quarries, or near the sources of the same raw material.

What did Clovis people use platters for? I like to think of them as portable rock supplies. They either cached them as a backup plan or used them on their wandering to make tools and projectile points. Tankersley (2002: p. 115) described how eight of the nine pieces in the Crook County Clovis Cache were a rock type called Tiger Chert, and the source for Tiger Chert was more than three hundred miles southwest of where Harold Erickson discovered the Clovis cache in Crook County, Wyoming. A Clovis individual, or perhaps a beast of burden such as a dog, hauled these Clovis platters and stone tools from southwestern Wyoming for three hundred miles before caching them within a thin lens of red ochre in the Fox Hills Formation in northeastern Wyoming. Obviously, the Clovis individual never returned to retrieve his or her cache.

The maker of the Clovis platters in figure one used what appears to be orthoquartzite material from the Spanish Diggings prehistoric rock quarry in southwestern Niobrara County, Wyoming. For thousands and thousands of years, prehistoric people mined the orthoquartzite and chert from the Cloverly Formation of Mesozoic age at Spanish Diggings. The orthoquartzite from the quarry ranges in color from bright yellow to gold, tan, brown, 

Figure 3 – Looking in a westerly direction at the prehistoric rock quarry called 

Spanish Diggings in Niobrara County, Wyoming. On the horizon is Laramie Peak.

Photograph by Neil A. Waring.

gray, pink, lavender, and purplish hues. Based on what we know about the provenance of the cache, the highway worker who found them was working on some road in southeastern Wyoming. If that were the case, the finder could have been anywhere from ten to one hundred or so miles from Spanish Diggings when he discovered the cache.

Figure 4 – Side A of Clovis platter A 321 made from Spanish Diggings orthoquartzite. This platter
is 6.9 inches long (176 mm). John Bradford Branney photograph and collection.

Clovis platter A 321 (figure 4) is an oval-shaped biface that is 176 millimeters long, 102 millimeters wide, and approximately 19 millimeters thick near the center of the biface. It has a width to thickness ratio of 5.4. The rock type is a moderate orange-pink orthoquartzite with hues of gray throughout the matrix and scattered manganese dendrites. Clovis knappers’ special skill was percussion flaking, and this platter reflects that expertise. The flaking scars are classic Clovis technology: thin, straight, wide, and long. The marginal edges have a minor amount of secondary sharpening. There is no visual evidence of red ochre on the surface or within the cracks or hinges of the platter.

Figure 5 - Hillside made of red ochre.   

Oftentimes, Clovis people covered or buried their caches in a mineral called red ochre. Ochre is an earthy pigment consisting of ferric oxide and clay minerals. It varies from shades of light yellow to brown to red. There is archaeological evidence that prehistoric people in both the Old and New Worlds used red ochre as a paint pigment, a preservative, an abrasive, and a packing material. Neanderthal people in Europe used ochre as early as 250,000 years ago and investigators have found ochre in Upper Paleolithic graves in Europe and in one Clovis grave in North America.

Investigators have found red ochre in a variety of contexts within North America from occupation floors to burials to stone tool caches to a prehistoric mine. Investigators have found red ochre on a Paleoindian grinding slab and on stone artifacts, foreshafts, main shafts, atlatl fragments, and cave walls. Although it appears red ochre had ritualistic uses, it also served several practical applications.

Figure 6 – Clovis platter A 321 A made from a moderate brown Spanish Diggings 

orthoquartzite. This platter is 7.9 inches long (201 mm). 

John Bradford Branney photograph and collection.

Clovis platter A 321 A (figure 6) is a leaf-shaped biface that is 201 millimeters long, 119 millimeters wide, and approximately 30 millimeters thick near the center of the biface. It has a width to thickness ratio of 4. The rock type is a moderate brown orthoquartzite with scattered blotches of pale yellowish-brown. The flaking scars are typical Clovis; wide, long, and traveling a good distance across both faces of the biface. The marginal edges show little secondary sharpening. There is evidence of battering and crushing along the edges.

Master flintknapper Bob Patten (1999: p 93-94) wrote that although platters were many times larger and heavier than ultrathin knife forms, the production process was similar. As a master flintknapper, Patten opined that Clovis platter technology was as sophisticated as any knapping technology used by later cultures. Patten proposed that Clovis people might have carried these platters in a leather sling or pouch, and when the timing was right, they would either cache them or split and convert them into projectile point preforms or knives. Tankersley (2002: p. 116) found a diagonal pattern of red ochre on two of the Crook County bifaces which suggests the owner of the bifaces might have wrapped them in sinew or leather.

To replicate Clovis platters via his own knapping, Patten described that he beveled, battered, and abraded the edges to ease large flake removal via percussion. Then, he spaced each blow with his hammer wide enough so that the flake scars overlapped ever so slightly.

Figure 7 – Side A of Clovis platter A 321 B. This platter is 8 inches long (203 mm). 

On one edge, the knapper intentionally notched the platter 

and on the other edge, the knapper had prepared to notch it with 

Clovis biface platforms (see figures 2 and 8). 

John Bradford Branney photograph and collection.

Clovis platter A 321 B (figures 7 and 8). This is the most interesting platter of the trio in my opinion. The platter shape lies somewhere between oval and leaf-shaped. It is 203 millimeters long, 130 millimeters wide, and approximately 26 millimeters thick for width to thickness ratio of 5. The knapper used a grayish orange pink orthoquartzite in the making of the artifact.

The knapper intentionally notched one side of Platter A 321 B in the middle of the edge. He or she was preparing to notch the other edge when the knapper cached it with the other two platters. The opposite edge (figure 8) shows at least two Clovis biface platforms which the knapper would have used to strike and detach flakes with the intention of notching into the body of the biface. Notches weaken the biface body enough to split the platter into sections which the knapper would use for Clovis projectile points or other stone tools.

Figure 8 – "A" marks the beaten and the battered edge of side B of A 321 B. 

"P" marks typical Clovis biface platforms. The Clovis knapper was starting to notch this edge. 

Compare the characteristics of the platform with figure 2 above. 

John Bradford Branney photograph and collection. 

So, why did Clovis people cache these platters and other tools? Archaeologists and collectors have discovered Clovis-type artifacts in forty-eight states, Mexico, and Canada. Clovis people got around, and they did it in a relatively short time period. Based on thirty-two radiocarbon ages, Waters, Stafford, and Carlson (2020) proposed that Clovis technology was around for approximately three hundred years from around 13,050 to 12,750 calendar years ago. Clovis people were explorers and when they reached unexplored areas where they were unsure of the supply chain for tool stone, they left behind a cache of stone tools and raw material in case they needed it later.

 Time for me to get a little “preachy”. One big lesson learned from this cache is to fully document the details and location of every artifact find or acquisition as accurately and completely as possible to ensure relevant information about the artifacts is available after we are no longer above ground! Without provenance, artifacts are just rocks or works of art.

It is unfortunate that when the finder of this important discovery died, the provenance details died with him. I have a dozen or so questions about this cache, but the answers left the earth with its finder. We will never know where he exactly found the cache, or under what circumstances. Was the cache found on the surface or buried? Did the road-building equipment unearth it? Did the finder investigate whether there were other pieces in the cache? My list of questions goes on and on. Unfortunately, I can ask all the questions I want until I am blue in the face, but will never get an answer.

References Cited

Bradley, Bruce A., Michael B. Collins, and Andrew Hemmings
2010     Clovis Technology. International Monographs in Prehistory. Archaeological Series                 17. Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Patten, Bob
1999     Old Tools – New Eyes. Stone Dagger Publications. Denver.

2005     People of the Flute. Stone Dagger Publications. Denver.

Tankersley, Kenneth
2002     In Search of Ice Age Americans. Gibbs Smith, Publisher. Layton, Utah.

Waters, Michael R. and Thomas A. Jennings
2015     The Hogeye Clovis Cache. Texas A & M University. College Station.

Waters, Michael R., Thomas W. Stafford Jr., and David L. Carlson
2020     The Age of Clovis – 13,050 to 12,750 cal yr B.P. in Science Advances, Vol. 6, No.                 43.

About the Author

John Bradford Branney is a Wyoming native, an author, a geologist, a prehistorian, and an associate editor of Prehistoric AMERICAN. He has written ten books and many magazine articles on Prehistoric America and life in general. Branney is currently writing the fifth and final book in the prehistoric adventure series the SHADOWS on the TRAIL Pentalogy. He lives on forty acres in the northern Colorado mountains with his wife Theresa, three German Shepherds, and a feral cat.

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