North America: Rocky Mountains (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Codding.

This is an abstract from the "*Behavioral Ecology in the Mountain West" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Indigenous land-use decisions influenced plants and animals across North America for thousands of years. These dynamics were disrupted by settler-colonial invasions, leading to declines in ecosystem function and health. Restoring Indigenous socioenvironmental systems and the cultural keystone species they support requires first identifying how...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michelle Slaughter.

This is an abstract from the "*In the Shadow of the Rockies: Historical Bioarchaeology and Mortuary Archaeology in Colorado" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Several years ago, a colleague and I conducted an archaeological assessment of the Russell Gulch Cemetery in the mountains of Gilpin County, Colorado. This area housed a booming hard-rock mining industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but today, even though the area has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brianna Auker.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Areas with a high probability of pre-contact material are often fundamentally good campsites- this creates a large overlap between post-contact activities within Wilderness areas and archaeological artifacts, as humans are continually traversing these landscapes. The interpretive potential of surface archaeology is jeopardized when recreation traffic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Bettinger.

This is an abstract from the "*Behavioral Ecology in the Mountain West" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mountain environments, the treeless parts above 10,000 ft specifically, are traditionally viewed as less productive, more difficult of access, more physiologically challenging, and for those reasons, marginal to their subalpine counterparts. The ideal free distribution (IFD) of Fretwell and Lucas (1969) provides a means of testing this “marginal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Kinneer.

This is an abstract from the "*A New Look at the Southern Rocky Mountains: Crossroads of Western North America" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2023 Centennial Archaeology conducted data recovery excavation at the Twin Tunnels Site (5CC389) on the north side of I-70 overlooking Clear Creek. The site occupies a transitional environmental zone between the plains to the east and the high country to the west. The excavation produced a diverse...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Clifford White.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. High-resolution data detailing artifact distributions within the Folsom Cultural component of Hell Gap (48GO305) Locality I (HGI) are instrumental in investigating the lifeways of Paleoindian groups during the Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene. Analyzing artifact distributions at HGI allows researchers to identify and interpret discrete activity areas...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicole Dangerfield.

This is an abstract from the "Managing Water, Protecting Heritage: Bureau of Reclamation Undertakings in the American West" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With the establishment of the Bureau of Reclamation in 1902, the federal government endeavored to reclaim the arid American West and support historic European settler’s homesteading efforts through large scale irrigation infrastructure construction that provided a reliable water supply...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marissa King.

This is an abstract from the "From Channel Flakes to Bison Jumps: Current Investigations of the Terminal Pleistocene/Early Holocene Archaeological Record in Southern Idaho" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although the evidence suggests bison were consistently taken by indigenous hunters on the eastern Snake River Plain throughout the Holocene, quantitative faunal analyses indicate that bison were taken in modest numbers. Contrasting this pattern,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Andrews.

This is an abstract from the "*A New Look at the Southern Rocky Mountains: Crossroads of Western North America" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Studies conducted over the past few decades have demonstrated that Folsom hunter-gatherers were persistent inhabitants of the Southern Rocky Mountains at the end of the Pleistocene. Recent work at the Mountaineer site and the Black Mountain site (as well as previous work in Middle Park and other sites in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nadine Navarro.

This is an abstract from the "Papers in Celebration of Bruce B. Huckell, Part 1" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Opportunities to learn more about Clovis technological behavior at lithic material procurement and workshop sites are rare, particularly in the Southwest. The Blue Canyon site is a rare example of such a site—an artifact scatter covering some 16,000 m2 and consisting of Clovis projectile points and preforms, end scrapers, bifaces, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Kilby.

This is an abstract from the "Papers in Celebration of Bruce B. Huckell, Part 1" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The West Mesa is an expansive eolian plain atop a basalt-capped terrace of the Rio Grande in central New Mexico. Seminal work carried out in the 1960s-1970s led to the identification of an abundant Paleoindian record, and the Rio Rancho site became the first Folsom camp to be excavated in the Middle Rio Grande Valley. The West Mesa...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandra Fugitt.

This is an abstract from the "From Channel Flakes to Bison Jumps: Current Investigations of the Terminal Pleistocene/Early Holocene Archaeological Record in Southern Idaho" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study investigates whether Buffalo’s Little Brother Hill (10BT2303) functioned as a bison jump using GIS analysis. To assess whether the site could have been utilized as a jump we examined the upland topography and conducted a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Snead.

This is an abstract from the "City and Country in the American West:Post-1848 Historical Archaeologies of Denver and Los Angeles" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> <b>The development of mass transit played an integral role in the development of cities in the 19</b>^<b>th</b><b> century American West. In particular, the rapid expansion of population in 1880s Los Angeles created complex interconnections between land development,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristin Bowen.

This is an abstract from the "Managing Water, Protecting Heritage: Bureau of Reclamation Undertakings in the American West" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Reclamation constructed Navajo Dam from 1958 to 1961, creating Navajo Reservoir. Consequently, Pueblo I habitations that were formerly lining river corridors became archaeological sites situated on the 159 miles of reservoir shoreline. This paper examines current actions involved with managing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meredith Wismer.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1979 and 1980, archaeologists at Weber State University conducted excavations at the historic site of Fort Buenaventura in Ogden, Utah. Beyond a few posts, the excavations yielded few pieces of Fort Buenaventura's history but did uncover a rich archaeological legacy related to the adjacent Union Pacific railroad depot from the 1880s-1940s. Since the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robin James.

This is an abstract from the "*In the Shadow of the Rockies: Historical Bioarchaeology and Mortuary Archaeology in Colorado" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Nineteenth-century Coloradans had many beliefs about the ways that their environment influenced their health, both physical and mental. Most well-known, those suffering from tuberculosis came to Colorado seeking a cure via the clean, dry air. Less well-known is the connection between...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ted Goebel.

This is an abstract from the "Papers in Celebration of Bruce B. Huckell, Part 1" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bruce Huckell was a leader in the study of Clovis and Paleo-Indigenous technology in North America, and his research has strongly impacted our thinking on the subject, the lead author for 35 years. Here we present results of our ongoing study of the Clovis occupation of the southern Bonneville basin, Utah. First, at the Hell’n Moriah...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Dersam.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Between 2021 and 2024, two complete fluted Clovis projectile points and eight fluted point fragments were recovered from five localities in the mountains of southwest Montana. Each of these five localities exhibits formal tools and reduction sequences consistent with Clovis lithic technology. Here we present observation on the ten fluted points...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Buckner.

This is an abstract from the "*A New Look at the Southern Rocky Mountains: Crossroads of Western North America" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mountain passes were central to high elevation land use in the Southern Rocky Mountains. Rollins Pass, known for its extensive complex of alpine game drives, represents an especially notable example of an accumulated record of precontact occupation. Game drives at Rollins Pass are significant because their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Rapson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Thirteen AMS bone dates based on MNI from 9 hearth and dump features at the Bugas-Holding site establish the contemporaneity of all deposits within the main block area (mean = A.D. 1658). This chronological framework provides an opportunity to evaluate high-resolution behavioral models of social organization and land use at multiple analytical scales,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Molly Cannon.

This is an abstract from the "Managing Water, Protecting Heritage: Bureau of Reclamation Undertakings in the American West" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. After nearly six decades of American compliance archaeology, archaeologists have developed a robust toolset for addressing historic preservation, including documentation through archival research, archaeological excavation, ethnography, and National Register of Historical Places nominations....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Troy Lovata.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation examines culturally modified trees from the mountains of Northern New Mexico in order to understand historic and contemporary culture. New Mexico is home to the southern Rocky Mountains as well as host to numerous other mountain ranges and verticality and elevation begets a relative abundance of trees in it’s semi-arid climate. Yet,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Garner.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. On the outskirts of the city of Laramie, Wyoming sits a circular stone feature known as a medicine wheel. Despite being near the University of Wyoming (UW), it remained unknown until a UW archaeologist encountered it while hiking. Those who know about this medicine wheel have assumed that it was built after the 1960s as part of the new age spiritual...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Ives.

This is an abstract from the "*A New Look at the Southern Rocky Mountains: Crossroads of Western North America" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Divergence of the Pacific Coast Dene languages from other Dene languages required both significant time and distance to intervene. Yet, there are several indications that there was some degree of contact between Dene speech communities across the Rockies—especially the oral traditions surrounding Changing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin Gilmore.

This is an abstract from the "*A New Look at the Southern Rocky Mountains: Crossroads of Western North America" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Palmer Divide, an upland extending east from the foot of the Southern Rocky Mountains in central Colorado, contains a mosaic of plains and montane biomes and evidence of the people attracted to these resources. Franktown Cave contained an exceptional assemblage of perishable artifacts dated 3300-2500...