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Kelton Meyer will be discussing Alpine Hunting in the Southern Rocky Mountains.Abstract: Hunter-gatherers regularly made use of high elevation landscapes in the Southern Rocky Mountains. At times, the alpine tundra served as a simple corridor for regional migration, but in other instances mobile people established specific places in the tundra to carry out tasks on a semi-routine basis. Sites with stone driveline architecture on the Continental Divide in Colorado demonstrate that the tradition of communal hunting in the alpine spanned thousands of years. Artifacts collected at these sites range from Late Paleoindian to Protohistoric in age. However, the specific chronology of stone feature construction is poorly understood, due to challenging climatic effects which make absolute dating difficult. In this presentation I review the existing set of absolute dates for these driveline sites and apply ‘chronological hygiene’, which is a procedure used to account for problematic, inaccurate, and likely non-cultural dates. I focus on the utility of lichen populations for deriving realistic and numeric feature ages. I then apply Bayesian modeling to revise the chronology, making use of the most reliable sample of absolute dates. Results suggest that the tradition of driveline hunting dates primarily to the last 2000 years BP, a time of demographic expansion and flourishing technological diversity.
Author Information: Kelton (he, him, his) is currently a PhD candidate at Colorado State University and an incoming Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wyoming. He specializes in the study of ancient forager populations in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains of North America, with a focus on Folsom lithic technology, communal hunting in alpine environments, chronology of stone features, farmer-forager subsistence systems, spatial statistical modeling of lithic assemblages, and photogrammetric methods for excavation and aerial mapping. Kelton's active research projects include surveys of alpine passes and lakes in Rocky Mountain National Park, spatiotemporal analysis of Fremont corn granaries on the Colorado Plateau, spatial analysis of the Lindenmeier Folsom site, and lithic analysis of the Reddin Folsom site in the San Luis Valley.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
University Of Wyoming Anthropology Building, Laramie, Wyoming, United States
