Multidisciplinary Reconstruction of Interactive Change in Holocene Treeline, Paleoclimate,and High Altitude Hunting Systems in Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado

Summary

More than eighty high altitude game drives are known along north central Colorado’s continental divide, but until recently there has been limited understanding of the interactive effect of cyclical climate and ecosystem change on Holocene alpine tundra hunting systems. University of Northern Colorado researchers, after fifteen years of high altitude archaeological and paleoclimate research, have produced an early phase reconstruction of game drive use and elevation-specific environmental zone shifts from ca. 10,500-600 BP. The reconstruction is based on multidisciplinary data from a continental-divide centered research area of ~47 km2 in Rocky Mountain National Park. The area has 70%+ archaeological surface survey coverage, paleoclimate and paleoecology evidence from multiple sediment-cored alpine and subalpine fens, and a tundra ice patch site with 4,300 BP radiocarbon-dated tree remains, the latter showing a 70+ m increase from modern-day treeline.

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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