Low and Slow: Landscape Taphonomy of High-Altitude Landscapes within the Southern Rocky Mountains of Colorado

Summary

This is an abstract from the "A Tribute to the Contributions of Lawrence C. Todd to World Prehistory" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Over the past 10 years, survey crews from CSU’s Center for Mountain and Plains Archaeology examined the alpine ecosystem of the Colorado Front Range, recording a variety of sites such as game drives, lithic and ceramic scatters, and ice patches within Rocky Mountain National Park and adjacent wilderness areas. We take a “low and slow” survey approach—often finding more artifacts with such methods but also examining how these sites came to be used and reused, buried, and exposed over past millennia. Taking this site-less approach, we better view these as cumulative landscapes registering the ebb and flow of human occupation, with some locales showing near continuous use for millennia and others, short-term and perhaps one-time use. One of LC Todd’s greatest lessons is in freeing oneself of long held assumptions—to claim yourself as ignorant and then taking the necessary steps to build germane knowledge to better inform the question at hand. In this presentation, we highlight some of the ignorance we have sought to overcome in this work, and lesson’s inspired by Todd to better improve our knowledge production and interpretation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• A Tribute to the Contributions of Lawrence C. Todd to World Prehistory   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37034.0