Kill, Camp, and Repeat: A Return to the Lindenmeier Folsom Site of Northern Colorado

Summary

Paleoindians of the Great Plains are often generalized as highly mobile bison hunters that moved in response to migrating bison. This view is certainly shaped by many well-known single component bison kills which form the basis for the argument. The Lindenmeier (5LR13) Folsom site of northern Colorado might be a notable exception to the high mobility model, as it contains hundreds of Folsom tools, animal bone, chipping debris, and decorated artifacts spread over 800 meters of buried deposits. Approximately 9 to 12 dense artifact concentrations are documented across the site, and questions remain as to what these clusters represent – discrete living floors, middens, or palimpsests? Resolving the nature of these deposits is key to integrating Lindenmeier into broader land use models. This presentation summarizes the poorly known locales in the eastern portion of the site. The first discoveries were made here in the 1920s, and the Smithsonian excavated a bison bone bed nearby shortly thereafter. Backed by 10 years of recent systematic artifact mapping, our paper examines what these eastern clusters represent in terms of function, and how these particular occupations mirrored or were instead quite different from the many other Folsom visits to the site.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21535