*A New Look at the Southern Rocky Mountains: Crossroads of Western North America

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "*A New Look at the Southern Rocky Mountains: Crossroads of Western North America" at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Southern Rocky Mountains, stretching across the length of Colorado and into bordering states, form an impressive wall across the continent. Yet, the region contains resource rich high-altitude basins and massive snowcapped mountain ranges, made accessible by dozens of passes and divides. Once conceptualized as a cultural barrier and a marginal environment, we now know that Indigenous peoples intensively occupied these basins and peaks since at least the last Pleistocene. The Southern Rockies contain a diversity of cultures and lifeways, with groups occupying the mountains on a seasonal basis, in some cases living there year-round, and others migrating into the region from every direction. Given our conference’s presence in Denver, we aim to honor this region’s ancient Native peoples and their descendants by bringing together scholars conceptualizing the Southern Rockies in new ways. This includes new narratives of early Paleoindian occupations, discussions of rock walled game drives found above the clouds, stories of cultures migrating across the Rockies during the Holocene, arguments for long-time connections between the mountains and surrounding lowlands, and collaborative scholarship with the many stakeholders and descendant communities found here today.