The author constructs a novelistic account of the life of Clovis, King of the Franks (ca. 466-511), based on the historical writings of Gregory of Tours, Fredegar, and the anonymous writer of the Liber Historiae Francorum. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Clovis used to struggle with his temper, but ever since he took over his late grandmother’s china shop, he’s been learning how to manage it. He pours tea, listens to soothing music, and always keeps Granny’s words in mind: “Grace, grace, nothing broken to replace.” But when rivals from his football days come to heckle him at the shop, Clovis faces a big challenge that even Granny’s words and deep breaths might not be enough for. Readers will fall in love with Clovis’s gentle soul in this heartwarming and entertaining story about finding inner peace and second chances.

Some 13,000 years ago, humans were drawn repeatedly to a small valley in what is now Central Texas, near the banks of Buttermilk Creek. These early hunter-gatherers camped, collected stone, and shaped it into a variety of tools they needed to hunt game, process food, and subsist in the Texas wilderness. Their toolkit included bifaces, blades, and deadly spear points. Where they worked, they left thousands of pieces of debris, which have allowed archaeologists to reconstruct their methods of tool production. Along with the faunal material that was also discarded in their prehistoric campsite, these stone, or lithic, artifacts afford a glimpse of human life at the end of the last ice age during an era referred to as Clovis. The area where these people roamed and camped, called the Gault site, is one of the most important Clovis sites in North America. A decade ago a team from Texas A&M University excavated a single area of the site—formally named Excavation Area 8, but informally dubbed the Lindsey Pit—which features the densest concentration of Clovis artifacts and the clearest stratigraphy at the Gault site. Some 67,000 lithic artifacts were recovered during fieldwork, along with 5,700 pieces of faunal material. In a thorough synthesis of the evidence from this prehistoric “workshop,” Michael R. Waters and his coauthors provide the technical data needed to interpret and compare this site with other sites from the same period, illuminating the story of Clovis people in the Buttermilk Creek Valley.

Who were the first humans to inhabit North America? According to the now familiar story, mammal hunters entered the continent some 12,000 years ago via a land bridge that spanned the Bering Sea. Distinctive stone tools belonging to the Clovis culture established the presence of these early New World people. But are the Clovis tools Asian in origin? Drawing from original archaeological analysis, paleoclimatic research, and genetic studies, noted archaeologists Dennis J. Stanford and Bruce A. Bradley challenge the old narrative and, in the process, counter traditional—and often subjective—approaches to archaeological testing for historical relatedness. The authors apply rigorous scholarship to a hypothesis that places the technological antecedents of Clovis in Europe and posits that the first Americans crossed the Atlantic by boat and arrived earlier than previously thought. Supplying archaeological and oceanographic evidence to support this assertion, the book dismantles the old paradigm while persuasively linking Clovis technology with the culture of the Solutrean people who occupied France and Spain more than 20,000 years ago.

In 481 CE, the salian Franks crowned Clovis I their king. At the age of fifteen, the young monarch set about uniting all the Franks-barbarian tribes that inhabited much of the region that became modern-day France and Germany. A fierce warrior and an astute administrator, he expanded his originally modest kingdom in northeast Gaul (France) by all possible means, including conquest, marriage, diplomacy, and deception. When he married Clotilda, a devout Roman Catholic, he converted to Catholicism and became instrumental in spreading his new religion across Europe. By the time Clovis died in 511, his domain covered most of Western Europe, from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, and from the Atlantic Ocean to the source of the Danube River. The French regard him as the founder of their monarchy. Book jacket.

New research and the discovery of multiple archaeological sites predating the established age of Clovis (13,000 years ago) provide evidence that the Americas were first colonized at least one thousand to two thousand years before Clovis. These revelations indicate to researchers that the peopling of the Americas was perhaps a more complex process than previously thought. The Clovis culture remains the benchmark for chronological, technological, and adaptive comparisons in research on peopling of the Americas. In Clovis: On the Edge of a New Understanding, volume editors Ashley Smallwood and Thomas Jennings bring together the work of many researchers actively studying the Clovis complex. The contributing authors presented earlier versions of these chapters at the Clovis: Current Perspectives on Chronology, Technology, and Adaptations symposium held at the 2011 Society for American Archaeology meetings in Sacramento, California. In seventeen chapters, the researchers provide their current perspectives of the Clovis archaeological record as they address the question: What is and what is not Clovis?