Cactus Hill is an archaeological site in southeastern Virginia, United States, located on sand dunes above the Nottoway River about 45 miles south of Richmond.
Many archaeologists, including Dennis Stanford and Joseph and Lynn McAvoy of Nottoway River Survey, consider the Cactus Hill site to furnish evidence of a pre-Clovis population in North America.
"[5] Another Pre-Clovis site, Page-Ladson, has since been discovered in Florida and many scientists now believe that first Americans probably arrived by boat, long before the Bering land bridge became ice free.
This lower level, attributed to a pre-Clovis time period, includes: A 2022 research paper suggested that Cactus Hill might have "a stratigraphically discrete occupation below Clovis".
Dr. Carol Mandryk of Harvard University performed tests for the area that produced the 15,000-year-old date that showed relative stratigraphic integrity.
[11] Research done by Richard I. Macphail of the Institute of Archaeology in London and Joseph M. McAvoy of The Nottoway River Survey contributed to the integrity discussion using a micromorphological analysis of the stratigraphy of the site.
Similarly, animals were present, which added to the dispersal and mixing of fine soil into sand dunes through their burrowing practices.
According to Dr. Bruce Bradley, "the Cactus Hill flint was a technological midpoint between the French Solutrean style and the Clovis points dating five millennia later.
In their journal article, Lawrence Guy Straus, David J. Meltzer, and Ted Goebel claim, "We believe that the many differences between Solutrean and Clovis are far more significant than the few similarities, the latter being readily explained by the well-known phenomenon of technological convergence or parallelism.