A Place to Pause: Investigations at the St. Mary Bridge Site (24GL203), Glacier County, Montana

Summary

Two field seasons of archaeological excavations along the banks of the St. Mary River in Glacier National Park, Montana have resulted in the recovery of artifacts ranging in age from late Paleoindian to historic times. In partnership with the National Park Service, archaeologists from the University of Arizona and tribal students, preliminarily interpret this site as an area for temporary winter encampments as well as a staging area for residentially mobile groups in the past. Staging areas are transitional places on the landscape where people evaluate the resource potential of their surrounding environment as they move, leaving behind a variety of tools and materials. The significance of staging area sites across a vast and altitudinally rugged landscape is evidenced in the consistent return of groups to these areas, even into the ethnographic present. A continuous record of archaeological activity is now documented at the St. Mary Bridge Site. What remains to be explicated is the nature of activities at the site specifically. Drawing from our analyses of artifacts, namely a number of projectile points, and site formation processes, we build a site chronology and document those behaviors associated with the transient populations that occupied the St. Mary Bridge Site.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage