Connecting Camps and Kills: A Least Cost Path Analysis of the Rollins Pass Game Drive Complex, Colorado Front Range, USA

Summary

This is an abstract from the "*A New Look at the Southern Rocky Mountains: Crossroads of Western North America" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Mountain passes were central to high elevation land use in the Southern Rocky Mountains. Rollins Pass, known for its extensive complex of alpine game drives, represents an especially notable example of an accumulated record of precontact occupation. Game drives at Rollins Pass are significant because their use implies considerable coordination, group aggregation, and long-term planning within a fundamentally marginal environment. Communal hunting at the pass was likely expedited from lower elevation camps in the timberline ecotone, however our understanding of these camp-kill settlement dynamics is relatively poor. This paper examines the spatial relationships between kill areas and camps at Rollins Pass by applying a least cost path analysis linking game drives with high elevation lakes. Using lakes as a proxy for suitable camp locations, I identify the least cost path to each game drive to define a range in movement cost and discriminate the travel corridors that connected this constructed landscape. Research on these camp-kill settlement dynamics is important because movement over alpine terrain imposed inherent constraints on forager mobility, and these constraints likely factored into subsequent decision-making pertaining to high elevation settlement, field processing versus transport decisions, and hunting strategies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• *A New Look at the Southern Rocky Mountains: Crossroads of Western North America

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51984