El Fin del Mundo

A Clovis Site in Sonora, Mexico

Edited by Vance Holliday, Guadalupe Sánchez, and Ismael Sánchez-Morales

SERIES:

The University of Arizona Press

In a remote desert corner of Sonora, Mexico, the site of El Fin del Mundo offers the first recorded evidence of Paleoindian interactions with gomphotheres, an extinct species related to elephants. The Clovis occupation of North America is the oldest generally accepted and well-documented archaeological assemblage on the continent. This site in Sonora, Mexico, is the northernmost dated late Pleistocene gomphothere and the youngest in North America. It is the first documented intact buried Clovis site outside of the United States, the first in situ Paleoindian site in northwestern Mexico, and the first documented evidence of Clovis gomphothere hunting in North America. The site also includes an associated upland Clovis campsite. This volume also describes a paleontological bone bed below the Clovis level, which includes a rare association of mastodon, mammoth, and gomphothere.

El Fin del Mundo presents and synthesizes the archaeological, geological, paleontological, and paleoenvironmental records of an important Clovis site.

Contributors
Joaquín Arroyo-Cabrales
Jordan Bright
James K. Feathers
Edmund P. Gaines
Thanairi Gamez
Gregory W. L. Hodgins
Vance T. Holliday
Susan M. Mentzer
Carmen Isela Ortega-Rosas
Manuel R. Palacios-Fest
Guadalupe Sánchez
Ismael Sánchez-Morales
Kayla B. Worthey
Kristen Wroth

Reviews
Editor

‘Remarkably preserved in a remote desert corner of Sonora, Mexico, El Fin del Mundo records evidence of the first Americans’ interactions with gomphotheres, an extinct species of elephant. In this volume, Holliday et al. present detailed analyses of archaeological finds and the geological and paleoenvironmental contexts from which they were recovered, adding new dimensions to our understanding of the first peoples to colonize the Americas.’—Todd Surovell, author of Barger Gulch: A Folsom Campsite in the Rocky Mountains
‘This volume presents detailed archaeological and paleontological research from Sonora, Mexico. With chapters on chronology, geomorphology, artifacts, pollen, phytoliths, and diatoms, this volume offers readers an in-depth glimpse into how many lines of evidence are needed to try to reconstruct North America’s past at the end of the Ice Age. As the oldest dated Clovis site and the youngest dated gomphothere site in North America, perhaps El Fin del Mundo is where Clovis culture was born and gomphotheres came to die.’—Ashley Smallwood, University of Louisville

Vance T. Holliday was faculty member of the Department of Geography at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1986 to 2002. Since 2002 he has been affiliated with both the School of Anthropology and Department of Geosciences at the University of Arizona. He is executive director of the Argonaut Archaeological Research Fund, which is devoted to exploring the early peopling of the greater Southwest. His interests include Paleoindian archaeology and geoarchaeology, as well as Quaternary soils and paleoenvironments, and Paleolithic geoarchaeology of eastern Europe.

Guadalupe Sánchez is at the National Institute of Anthropology and History and a member of the Mexican National System of Researchers. She has studied the geoarchaeology and lithic technology of sites in northern Mexico together with hunter-gather prehistory, paleoethnobotany, and paleoecology of Northern Mexico. Her research has led to over fifty articles in international journals and books. Her 2016 book Los Primeros Mexicanos: Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene People of Sonora, received honorable mention for Best Archaeological Investigation in Mexico.

Ismael Sánchez-Morales is the curator of anthropology at the Arizona Museum of Natural History. He specializes in the study of lithic technologies of archaeological hunter-gatherers and the interactions between foraging societies and the landscapes they occupy. His research focuses on the Paleoindian and Archaic occupations of northwest Mexico and the American Southwest and on the Middle Stone Age of North Africa.

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