North America: Rocky Mountains (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenneth Cannon. Ethan Ryan. Houston Martin.

This is an abstract from the "A Further Discussion on the Role of Archaeology in Resource and Public Land Management" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Light and heavy isotopic studies have become an integral tool in understanding the ecology of humans and vertebrates. In migration and mobility studies, strontium isotopes are used to determine if the individual is local to a particular area by comparing the isotopic values from bone and dental enamel...

DOCUMENT Citation Only A. Dudley Gardner.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the last twenty years extensive pedestrian surveys have been conducted along the Targavatai and Burgastai Valleys in northern Mongolia and in Weatherman Draw in south central Montana. What is clear, in both cases, is that the land surfaces of these areas have been greatly altered by changes in precipitation and soil depositional patterns. In both...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shikha Misra. Bryn Sullivan.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Archaeological Work by Chronicle Heritage" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A rafting expedition covering a 17-mile stretch of the Colorado River in the McInnis Canyons Recreation Area revealed an invasive takeover of cheatgrass across adjacent canyons, once filled with bunchgrass and sagebrush during a previous survey conducted in the 1970s for cattle grazing. This presentation explores the dynamic relationship...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lawrence Loendorf.

This is an abstract from the "From the Plains to the Plateau: Papers in Honor of James D. Keyser" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Rock art researchers often claim that an oval with a vertical line through it represents an atlatl, but many of these depictions are not very convincing examples of atlatls. A better way to identify atlatls is to find examples that show anthropomorphs holding an atlatl while throwing a dart or holding an atlatl in a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jocelyn Palombo.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As universities, federal curation facilities, public museums, and private collections struggle to create space on their shelves, curators and archaeologists have to evaluate what must stay and what will have to go. Utilizing a collection housed at the University of Montana I will explore strategies for combating this issue. This collection was obtained...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Blong. Justin Holcomb. Jordan Thompson. Sonya Sobel.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Cascade Phase archaeological culture has been recognized across a broad region of the Intermountain West including the Northern Rocky Mountains, Columbia Plateau, and Great Basin. Cascade Phase sites typically date to the early to middle Holocene period and are identified by a suite of stone tool types including foliate Cascade projectile points and a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kayla Genord. Kaitlyn Davis. Olivia Sage Grunewald. Breeanna Charolla. Alan Salacain.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Archaeological Research by PaleoWest" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this poster, we present the findings of PaleoWest’s Class III survey of Island Mesa in Montrose and San Miguel Counties of Colorado at the end of the 2021 field season. This project posed challenges in access and interpretation because the survey area was located on a steep, rugged mesa and the project area was considered a lithic landscape...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michele Hoferitza.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Research on Glass Beads and Ornaments in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. n 1864, a factory in Briare, France, began producing Prosser Molded beads for African and North American trade. The beads were made using a novel process combining milk as a binding agent to powdered feldspar, calcium fluoride, silica sand, and coloring elements to create a paste that was pressed into molds, then fired in a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Horton. Jen Harrington. Dean Nicolai.

This is an abstract from the "Digging Deeper: Pushing Ourselves to Engage the Public in Our Shared Heritage through Outreach and Education" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster highlights the unique partnerships between the Archeology Program, Yellowstone National Park, and the Native American Natural Resource Program, University of Montana, Missoula, and the Native American Studies Department, Salish Kootenai College. Consisting of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Troy Lovata.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Wickiups—sometimes labeled as lean-tos or even misidentified as tipis—are relatively ephemeral, petite wooden structures with a clear presence in the American Intermountain West. Extensive archaeological research has been conducted into wickiups created by Numic peoples and Utes and Apaches in the protohistoric and historic periods. Yet, as with artifacts and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Todd McMahon.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Colorado was for many years the center of a curation crisis. In response, Colorado relied on the establishment of somewhat informal partnership institutions such as (Universities, small local museums and local regional repositories) that have now been strengthened by creating rules and procedures that have allowed turnkey, scalable, politically neutral,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marcel Kornfeld.

This is an abstract from the "Developing Paleolithic Excavation Methods for the Twenty-First Century" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although not the Paleolithic in the classic sense of the word, prehistory of North American western Plains and Rocky Mountains is a study of stone tool–using hunter-gatherers. Excavation techniques changed radically over the past 70 years perhaps stimulated by theoretical concerns and questions. In this presentation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Lynch. Mary Lou Larson. Marcel Kornfeld.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2019, we began a three-year project to digitize the collections from the Hell Gap National Historic Landmark. The site is well-known for its archaeological integrity and preservation of some of the earliest human activities in the Plains and the Rocky Mountains. The goal of the Hell Gap Archaeological Records Digital Archive Project (HGARDA) is to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michelle Slaughter.

This is an abstract from the "Democratizing Heritage Creation: How-To and When" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Dry, an early twentieth-century Black homesteading community, offers a long-lasting example of collaborative public archaeology. Thanks to generous grant funding, we practiced inclusive teaming with the descendant population, from project conception through every stage of our work, even beyond completion of the project. The extent and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Dersam. Sari Dersam.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The use of high-elevation ecosystems by Early Paleoindian cultures using a Clovis-Techno complex has been known for decades. The earliest uses of North American mountain ecosystems have been hypothesized as transient forays by small groups focused on raw material acquisition and limited supplemental hunting. Between 2021 and 2023, the BEAAR Project...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Burnett. Kristin Barker. Lawrence Todd.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since 2009, we have been modeling archaeological probability in the Shoshone National Forest. These have been continually refined as new data become available. Now, using newly available elk collar data, we compare patterns in the archaeological record with those of elk movements to evaluate correlations. We compare elk locations with archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dalyn Grindle.

This is an abstract from the "A Further Discussion on the Role of Archaeology in Resource and Public Land Management" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Modern land management in the North American West, including issues like species conservation and cultural resource preservation, is difficult to navigate. Even though both are pillars of land management, the worlds of species conservation and archaeology do not often overlap—though both fields could...

DOCUMENT Citation Only A. Dudley Gardner.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We were commissioned to restore a granary constructed circa 900 AD south of the White River in Northwest Colorado. Restoration involved removing cliff fall debris, excavating the granary, and then restoring the walls that had collapsed. In the process of excavating, we learned how the granary was built, what went into its construction, and how it was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Buckser. Karissa Hughes. William Taylor. Fernando Villanea. Courtney Hofman.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Between the 16th and 17th century, Indigenous cultures of North America began utilizing domestic animals brought to the Americas by Spanish colonists, creating profound social, cultural, and ecological change. In the northern Rocky Mountains, domestic horses provided new opportunities for transport and travel—but our understanding of how new human-horse...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sasha Buckser. William Taylor. Karissa Hughes. Fernando Villanea. Courtney Hoffman.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Relationships among people, dogs, and wild canid taxa played important cultural and functional roles in the early Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. However, the complexity of human-canid relationships in precolonial America and morphological similarities among wild and domestic canids make tracing human-canid interaction through the archaeological record...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pamela Pascali. John Dudgeon. Kateea Peterson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Many tool-quality obsidian sources can be found across the Snake River Plain (SRP) in southern Idaho and adjacent geologic areas. This material was widely used in prehistory, with some artifacts discovered as far away as the Ohio River Valley. In order to better understand the selection and use of regional obsidian sources, we undertook experiments to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacob Arnzen.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Multiple fluted projectile points recovered from La Prele, a Clovis-age site in Wyoming, share attributes of both Folsom and Clovis projectile point types. This raises a question of how much morphological overlap exists between these widely recognized fluted point types? In this project I explore the degree of morphological overlap between Folsom and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rolfe Mandel.

This is an abstract from the "American Foragers: Human-Environmental Interactions across the Continents" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Magic Mountain site (5JF223) in Golden, Colorado, has long been recognized as one the most important stratified archaeological sites on the Front Range of the Southern Rocky Mountains. Although Archaic artifacts have been recorded there, the site’s richest and most extensive cultural deposits represent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Lou Larson. Marcel Kornfeld.

This is an abstract from the "Paleo Lithics to Legacy Management: Ruthann Knudson—Inawa’sioskitsipaki" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Hell Gap site excavations began in 1959; however, the bulk of the investigations occurred between 1962 and 1966. This was early in Ruthann Knudson's archaeological career, but the site left a lasting impression on her, as it did on others, and she returned to write a chapter in the first monograph on Hell Gap. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chris Widga. Darian Bouvier. Lawrence Todd. Amy Phillips. Kenneth Cannon.

This is an abstract from the "A Tribute to the Contributions of Lawrence C. Todd to World Prehistory" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the late Holocene, large bison herds occurred in grass-dominated ecological zones across much of the North American mid-continent. However, in situ fossils and historic accounts illustrate the adaptability of bison to a broad ecological niche space, from grassy prairies and plains to eastern forests. Yet,...