They prompt sniffs from hardline "Trad Guys", who like to debate the merits of centuries-old longbow designs and knap their own flint arrowheads.
They said they were collectors, and had no intention of selling the arrowheads they were looking for.
The other is to examine in detail the archaeological record just above the charcoal layer.The successor of the Clovis culture, the Folsom culture, is also defined by its arrowheads.
So far it has been impossible to decide if these arrowheads were the tools of new people from Asia who replaced their dead cousins, or of a remnant of Clovis people who changed their technology and survived.
Robert Austin, an archaeologist who has dug there often, says that some of the remains discovered date back 12,000 years.The chance of finding ancient objects draws thieves, too, to dig for arrowheads, flints and pots.
The battlefield was first swept for ferrous materials such as arrowheads.
Once that had happened, they disappeared themselves.But the Clovis people of 13,000 years ago, named after the place their characteristic arrowheads and spear-points were first found, may not be a bell-tolling example of the danger of technological progress after all.
The goods associated with these tombs are far more military in nature than those found in the earlier tombs: iron swords, arrowheads, and tools; armour; and all the trappings of a mounted warrior culture.
Their utensils and instruments were almost all of vegetable or animal origin, since in large sections of the area stones for making axes, arrowheads, and other objects were quite scarce.
Remarkably refined techniques for fastening arrowheads of flint and obsidian to shafts were well in hand long before recorded history.
When the defenses of Jericho were built, humans already had been using the weapons of the hunt for millennia; the earliest stone tools are hundreds of thousands of years old, and the first arrowheads date to more than 60,000 years ago.
