The Clovis culture (sometimes referred to as the Llano culture) is a prehistoric Paleo-Indian culture that first appears 11,500 RCYBP (radiocarbon years before the present, at the end of the last glacial period, characterized by the manufacture of "Clovis points" and distinctive bone and ivory tools.

The Clovis culture was replaced by several more localized regional cultures from the time of the Younger Dryas cold climate period onward.

Post-Clovis cultures include the Folsom tradition, Gainey, Suwannee-Simpson, Plainview-Goshen, Cumberland, and Redstone.

Each of these is commonly thought to derive directly from Clovis, in some cases apparently differing only in the length of the fluting on their projectile points.

Although this is generally held to be the result of normal cultural change through time, numerous other reasons have been suggested to be the driving force for the observed changes in the archaeological record, such as an extraterrestrial impact event or post-glacial climate change with numerous faunal extinctions.After the discovery of several Clovis sites in western North America in the 1930s, the Clovis people came to be regarded as the first human inhabitants of the New World.

Clovis people were considered to be the ancestors of all the indigenous cultures of North and South America.

However, this majority view has been contested over the last thirty years by several archaeological discoveries, including possible sites like Cactus Hill in Virginia, Paisley Caves in the Summer Lake Basin of Oregon, the Topper site in Allendale County, South Carolina, Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania, and the Monte Verde and Cueva Fell sites in Chile.

The claim to the oldest human archaeological site known in the Americas belongs to the Pedra Furada human remains and hearths, a site that precedes the Clovis culture and the other sites already mentioned by 19,000 to 30,000 years, but this discovery has become an issue of contention between North American archaeologists and their South American and European counterparts.

In American archaeology most dates older than 10,000 are controversial.

They are under intense scrutiny and may change as new dating technologies are developed and existing ones refined.