This Clovis point from Indiana is made from white Burlington chert which has patinated to a yellow colour.  The Clovis phase of the Paleoindian period in North America dates to ca. 12,750-13,400 BP.

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The basal ears have broken from this point, exposing white chert under the orange patina. The point was fluted on one face by the ‘Enterline technique’, which involved striking two guide flakes prior to striking the central flute.  The Enterline technique was first described by the archaeologist John Witthoft based on Clovis points found near Enterline, Pennsylvania.

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Clovis points are the hallmark of the Paleoindian period.  It was once thought that Clovis was the technology carried by the first people to enter North America, but occupation is now known to have occurred several thousand years earlier than Clovis in both North and South America.  Clovis technology must have developed out of these earlier pre-Clovis technologies within North America, and the nature of this technological transition is the subject of ongoing research.  Clovis was contemporary with people using different technologies in North and South America.  This includes the Western Stemmed Tradition of the Great Basin, and people who manufactured Fishtail points in South America.  Clovis points were used to hunt large game—they were discovered in association with extinct mammoths and Bison antiquus in a site at Blackwater Draw in New Mexico—but they were likely used to hunt smaller game as well, and perhaps functioned as knives.  Exceptionally large versions of Clovis points have been found buried in caches, mostly in the Western United States.  One famous example is the Clovis cache from East Wenatchee, Washington.

The bifacial thinning methods used to make Clovis points are among the most technically sophisticated world-wide.  The earliest stages of flaking for some Clovis technologies involved edge-to-edge percussion flaking, called the ‘overshot’ or ‘outrepasse’ technique.  The technique used in the North American Paleoindian period has been compared to a similar technique used during the Solutrean period in Europe to make large bifaces like those seen in the Volgu cache from France.  Some archaeologists argue that this suggests a historical connection between these two populations, but overshot flaking occurs in other biface thinning technologies and was likely invented independently in various times and places world-wide.

The characteristic feature of a Clovis point is the way the base of the biface is thinned by striking a flake lengthwise up both faces.  The shape of the face created in the preceding bifacial thinning stages partly determines the length and width of these flakes.  The scars created by this are called ‘flutes’, and the flakes that result are called ‘channel flakes’.  Fluting is a tricky process because it is easy to break a biface by delivering a forceful blow at the biface’s end.  Also, if the striking platform is not positioned precisely, the resulting flake can be too shallow or, conversely, the flake can dive through the biface removing the distal end (a variant of an ‘overstruck’, ‘overshot’, or ‘plunging’ termination).  After the Clovis period, during the Late Paleoindian phase, fluting was elaborated so that the flutes extended from the base all the way through to the point’s tip.  For instance, the fluting on Folsom points eliminated most of the preceding scars on both faces, and created an exceptionally thin point.  In contrast, the full-length flutes on Cumberland points often failed to markedly thin the biface.  Fluting by this time—and perhaps during the Clovis period as well—may have been done for ritual purposes as much as functional ones, although this continues to be a hotly-debated topic.