ORIGINAL PAPER The small-world topology of Clovis lithic networks Briggs Buchanan 1 & Marcus J. Hamilton 2 & J. David Kilby 3 Received: 24 September 2018 /Accepted: 11 December 2018 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2019 Abstract North America was first settled in the late Pleistocene by Paleoindian peoples, Clovis is the best documented archeological complex associated with this settlement. Undoubtedly, Clovis groups faced adaptive challenges in the novel environments of a sparsely populated New World. In this paper, we ask whether Clovis had small-world networks to help them create and maintain connections across the vast landscape of western North America. Small worlds are properties of many real networks and are characterized by high clustering and short path lengths. To investigate this, we examined the topology of Clovis lithic networks in western North America. We employed two commonly used measures of network topology in our analyses of regional Clovis lithic networks and show that stone raw material was transported and exchanged with the characteristics of a small world. We also show that caching and the long-distance movement of stone was an important part of creating small worlds. Clovis small-world lithic networks may have mapped onto Clovis social networks or may have been independent of other networks, but either way, lithic exchange networks were far from random and served an important role in connecting local populations. Keywords Clovis . Lithic network . Small world . Caches Introduction The Americas were initially settled by foragers during the final stages of the Pleistocene. This process likely started with small numbers of people, perhaps at the leading edge of a larger population diffusion, or as one of multiple pulses of population movements into the uninhabited landscape of the Americas. Archeological evidence of the first widespread cul- ture in the Americas appears by about 13,500 calBP (calendar years before present) in western North America and lasts until approximately 12,500 calBP in eastern North America (Haynes et al. 1984; Haynes et al. 2007; Prasciunas and Surovell 2015; Sanchez et al. 2014; Waters and Stafford 2007, 2014). This culture, known as Clovis, represents the best documented evidence of the settlement and adaptive pro- cesses of the first peoples in North America (Ellis 2008; Eren and Buchanan 2016; Hamilton and Buchanan 2010; Kelly and Todd 1988 ; Meltzer 2004 , 2009 ; Miller et al. 2013 ; Smallwood and Jennings 2015). A problem faced by the first groups of hunter-gatherers in North America was maintaining a viable population (Anderson and Gillam 2001; Bocquet-Appel 1985; Meltzer 2002; Moore and Moseley 2001; Whallon 2006; Wobst 1974). The Clovis population needed to be robust enough to retain traditions, exchange mates and information, and endure an unpredictable environment. For small and scattered groups of people, this entailed exploring and learning new landscapes while keeping contact with dispersed peoples through net- works. To approximate the structure of the Clovis social net- work, we use shared lithic materials among sites as a proxy for the interaction among Clovis groups. We show that within broad regions, local Clovis populations formed small worlds and suggest that aspects of the Clovis social network may have also been a small world that allowed Clovis people to solve the problem of having a dispersed population in an un- known land. Small-world networks are ubiquitous in nature and have properties that are well-studied (Telesford et al. 2011; Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-018-0767-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Briggs Buchanan briggs-buchanan@utulsa.edu 1 Department of Anthropology, University of Tulsa, Tulsa, OK, USA 2 Department of Anthropology, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA 3 Department of Anthropology, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX, USA Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-018-0767-7