Embedded Activities: Preliminary Analysis of Landscape Use and Mobility Patterns in Colorado National Monument

Summary

Ongoing archaeological survey of Colorado National Monument, located on the eastern edge of the Colorado Plateau, reveals that much of the area is a continuous landscape of non-discrete lithic scatters with light to dense concentrations of artifacts. The ephemerality of many of the sites, coupled with their lack of distinct boundaries, poses a challenge for understanding landscape use and mobility patterns of the hunting and gathering people who utilized the area. To circumvent this issue we draw from regional ethnographic and archaeological data, along with archaeological, hydrological, plant, and wildlife data, recently gathered from the monument, to form testable hypotheses of landscape use and mobility patterns of the locality. Our preliminary analysis of these data suggest that intensive lithic raw material procurement and early-stage reduction activities were likely embedded with other seasonal activities such as hunting and Piñon nut harvesting. Moreover, we establish that results of this study that can be used to guide the next stage of this research, which includes subsurface testing for identification of intact deposits.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Solving Archaeological Research Problems in Rocky Mountain and Plains Prehistory

Keywords

Spatial Coverage