European and North American Mountain Archaeology and the Concept of Transhumance Applied to the Prehistory of Colorado’s Southern Rocky and Poland’s Tatra Mountains

Summary

Significant advancements have been made in mountain archaeology throughout the world in recent decades. A central and rapidly expanding research theme has been that of seasonal transhumance, movement of human groups between lower to higher mountain-foothills-piedmont environmental zones in order exploit annual economic resource variability. Emerging European mountain records suggest human transhumance, based in seasonal variability of both economic plants, migratory game species, and, much later, as pastoral nomadism, began as early as Neanderthal times, ca. 60,000 BP. The lead author, over three decades, has documented more than 12,000 years of persistent hunter-gatherer transhumance in the Colorado Rocky Mountains and, in collaboration with co-author Polish mountain archaeologist, Pawel Valde-Nowak, and co-author Michael Kimball have begun a project to investigate prehistoric hunter-gatherer and pastoral livestock transhumance in Poland’s Tatra Mountains of the western Carpathians. This paper describes background, methods, and early results of the Tatra project which draws on the investigators’ mutual and complementary experience in the Northeastern European Tatras and Colorado Rockies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20076