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Colorado Pre-Clovis & Folsom News
Excerpts from a Rocky mountain News piece :
Quote:
Holen and a team of about 30 archaeologists are in the final days of a two-week dig at a Plains site that has yielded ancient mammoth and camel bones that appear to have been smashed by human hunters 14,200 years ago. The Kansas findings, if confirmed, would push back the date of the earliest known occupation of the Great Plains nearly 1,000 years.
The cracked bones are tantalizing, but inconclusive, evidence that humans hunted those lumbering beasts or scavenged their bones shortly after the animals died.
The Kanorado Locality, as the three-site cluster is known, is one of several active archaeological digs in or near Colorado that are forcing
archaeologists to rethink longstanding ideas about the region's first inhabitants, the Paleoindians. Researchers are re-examining assumptions
about when the early game hunters arrived, where they lived and how they survived. In addition to the Kanorado excavation, Paleoindian digs are under way now near the town of Walden in North Park, near Kremmling in Middle Park and on a mesa overlooking Gunnison.
They've also found five stone hide scrapers, three small stone knives and about 50 "production flakes," bits of waste stone produced when spear points were fashioned or resharpened. But nearly all the bones and artifacts came out of sand, gravel and silt layers that date to Clovis times or later. Last summer, the pre-Clovis layer yielded a single stone flake, along with a few mammoth and camel bones bearing fracture patterns apparently caused by human hunters wielding hammerstones.
Three of the bones produced radiocarbon dates of 12,200 to 12,300 years. Those radiocarbon dates are equivalent to calendar dates of 14,200 to 14,300 years ago. The lone rock flake could be evidence of ancient tool-making, but natural processes such as collisions between rocks in a stream also can create flakes that resemble artifacts. So Holen and Mandel have kept digging. This week, part of a large mammoth or camel bone was exposed in the pre-Clovis layer. The team will continue uncovering it until the dig ends Sunday, hoping to find artifacts alongside the bone.
About 260 miles west-southwest of Kanorado in the Colorado Rockies, Stiger and his students are excavating a jumbled rock ring on a mesa overlooking Gunnison. Stiger suspects he has found the remains of a crude rock-walled shelter that Folsom hunters built 12,350 years ago. If he's correct, the structure is one of the oldest human dwellings in North America. The Folsom were Paleoindians who roamed the Great Plains and portions of the Rocky Mountains 13,000 to 11,500 calendar years ago. They succeeded the Clovis and became bison-hunting specialists American mammals were extinct.
Folsom hunters are usually portrayed as nomads, pursuing their quarry across the landscape. But Stiger thinks Folsom hunters may have lived
lived for months at a time atop Gunnison's Tenderfoot Mountain, possibly through the winter. The mesa-top archaeological site is called Mountaineer. If Stiger is right, the timeworn Folsom stereotype of the wandering hunter, depicted in museum dioramas across the country, must be revamped.
The circular rock pile atop Tenderfoot Mountain is about four yards across and sits in a dish-shaped depression. About 36,000 bits of waste stone, leftover from tool production and repair, have been found in and around the structure. Bison bones were unearthed in the floor of the "house." Three of the pieces were radiocarbon-dated, and the results came back this spring: All three dated to about 12,350 calendar years before present, Stiger said.
"These dates confirm that it is truly a Folsom-age structure," Stiger said this week. "It carries a lot of weight."
About 190 miles north-northeast of Gunnison, Surovell and his wife, University of Wyoming researcher Nicole Waguespack, are in the seventh year of a Folsom excavation in Middle Park, near Kremmling. For most of the 20th century, Folsom people were portrayed as Plains-based bison hunters. Most Folsom researchers ignored the mountains, largely because they assumed few bison hunters lived there. But about 20 years ago, that view started to change, Surovell said. Archaeologists began looking for Folsom sites in the Rockies, and they found some. The more they looked, the more sites they found.
"We know of some 40 Folsom localities in Middle Park alone. It probably has one of the greatest densities of Folsom archaeological localities in North America," Surovell said this week on a cell phone from his dig at Barger Gulch Locality B. "It's not that the mountains are replacing the Plains as the Folsom homeland," he said. "But we now realize that the Folsom is an incredibly widespread archaeological phenomenon that includes the Rocky Mountains." At Barger Gulch Locality B, researchers have recovered about 30,000 artifacts. As at the Mountaineer site near Gunnison, most of the objects are waste flakes produced during flint-knapping, the process of bashing rocks together to make projectile points and other tools.
The artifact density reaches 2,500 objects per square meter in some locations, Surovell said. That means the hunters remained at Barger Gulch for a while, possibly spending the winter there. "The picture we have is of a group of people down here in the valley bottom, next to a spring," he said. "Prehistorically, these mountains would have been full of bison, and they would have been in the valleys in the winter."
North Park is another locale in the Colorado Rockies that had been largely ignored by archaeologists, said Brunswig, a professor of anthropology and field school director. But recent work suggests that hunter-gatherers were living in the region year-round as early as 10,000 years ago, he said. "That's a fundamental change in our understanding of the early occupation of this region," Brunswig said. The ridge south of Walden has numerous crescent-shaped stone hunting blinds, and 10,000-year-old spear points have been found alongside the blinds. The points were left behind by Cody Complex hunters. The Cody were one of several Paleoindian groups that roamed the West after the Folsom.
They likely trailed elk up into the tundra during the summer, then followed them back down into North Park in the fall, Brunswig said. Working in groups, they drove game animals - elk, pronghorn antelope, bison and perhaps deer - toward ambushers waiting in the rock blinds. In North Park, the blinds are positioned below the ridge crest, on both sides a saddle that would have served as a funneling point for the game drivers.
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Local News : The Rocky Mountain News
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02-21-2011, 06:44 PM
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