Under the guidance of Dr. David Meltzer, Brooke Morgan will analyze artifacts recovered during eleven seasons of archaeological excavations (2001 to 2011) from the Mountaineer Folsom-age (~11,000 to 10,000 BP) campsite near Gunnison, Colorado. Perched at 2,630 meters above sea level on Tenderfoot Mountain, the Mountaineer site is within the Upper Gunnison Basin of the Rocky Mountains, an area that experiences some of the coldest winters in the contiguous United States. This environment would have presented unique challenges for hunter-gatherers living at the end of the last ice age. Folsom residential sites, though rare, provide an exceptional opportunity to study a broad range of behaviors - and, by extension, adaptive strategies- that may be unrepresented in other Folsom contexts. The Mountaineer site is particularly important because it is a large Folsom campsite with evidence of multiple architectural structures - some of the oldest shelters in North America.
This project has broader impacts beyond contributing to research of Folsom hunter-gatherers. The Mountaineer site was occupied during the Terminal Pleistocene, a time of climate fluctuation and restructuring of natural resources. It is possible that adaptations of Folsom foragers may have operated outside the range of those of modern ethnographic foragers. If this is the case, the project will demonstrate that archaeologists must take a more critical view when comparing modern hunter-gatherers societies with those of the past.
The archaeological signature of short-term Folsom sites is well-established, due to the prevalence of kill sites and briefly occupied camps on the North American Great Plains. These sites primarily show evidence of activity specialization (namely, hunting and processing of bison), reflected by a limited tool repertoire of projectile points (i.e. spearheads) and their associated debris. Archaeological focus on these types of sites and the perceived importance of projectile point technology has resulted in the interpretation of Folsom adaptive strategies as minimally variable. However, the Mountaineer site provides an opportunity to expand current knowledge of Folsom lifeways beyond that of highly mobile bison hunters, especially due to the presence of shelters that suggest this group camped for an extended period of time. Ms. Morgan will analyze the Mountaineer stone tool assemblage and conduct spatial analysis to determine the activities carried out by its Folsom occupants. Examination of artifacts associated with the structures will provide important information on how Folsom hunter-gatherers at Mountaineer maintained their camp while surviving harsh environmental conditions. Further, Ms. Morgan will infer economic and social relationships of the site's occupants based on campsite organization. The proposed research will provide a foundation for future research of Paleoindian residential sites and the investigation of hunter-gatherer shelters in other settings.
The results will be published in peer-reviewed journals, and the raw data will be accessible both online and in tabular format as dissertation appendices. This project contributes to training Ms. Morgan to be an independent scholar and researcher so that she may acquire the necessary skills of a professional archaeologist. Ms. Morgan will also serve as a guest lecturer at Dallas-area universities to raise public awareness of archaeology.
How did a small group of hunter-gatherers survive in the Rocky Mountains during the winter at the end of the last Ice Age? The Mountaineer Folsom site near Gunnison, Colorado shows evidence of substantial architectural construction in the form of rock rings, suggesting Folsom hunter-gatherers invested in semi-permanent shelter and hunkered down in this spot for the winter. Folsom residential sites, though rare, provide an exceptional opportunity to study a broad range of behaviors – and, by extension, adaptive strategies – that may be unrepresented in other Folsom contexts such as short-term camps and kill sites. The Mountaineer site displays evidence of architectural construction and artifact densities and distributions that suggest a long or intense occupation by multiple domestic units of Folsom hunter-gatherers. Our goal is to assess how Folsom people organized their houses and associated living spaces, as well as how they interacted with each other in this community. The project outcomes indicate the people living at Mountaineer comprised a single socio-economic unit, with individuals dependent on one another for survival. There is no evidence to suggest the inhabitants of the four dwellings at Mountaineer functioned as their own socio-economic units. Instead, cooperation could have been the key to their success. The four architectural structures and their associated areas, known as Blocks A, B, C, and F, show significant differences in their stone tool assemblages. Though separated by more than 25 meters, these areas were occupied simultaneously. We know this because of tool refits: broken portions of a tool in one area can be conjoined with another broken piece in a different block. Such refits were found between blocks, indicating people moved and worked freely between living spaces. Block A, the largest of the areas, has a preponderance of hunting gear—Folsom projectile points and projectile point preforms—as well as evidence of weaponry manufacture in the form of channel flakes, which are removed during the final stages of point manufacture. Weaponry production also took place at Block B, though to a lesser extent than Block A, and Block B also shows a significant amount of equipment geared toward everyday tasks such as hide preparation, wood or bone engraving, and clothing manufacture. Such maintenance gear, including hide scrapers and flake tools, suggest a variety of tasks occurred here. Blocks C and F are the most similar, and are strongly geared toward maintenance tasks due to the predominance of stone tools such as scrapers, gravers, and retouched flakes. Clearly, the occupants of Mountaineer are not performing the same activities at each block. It is difficult to imagine an economically autonomous family inhabiting Block A that focused solely on hunting and failed to prepare hides for clothing or blankets—they would not survive the winter in the Gunnison Basin. Likewise, it is doubtful two other autonomous family units occupying Block F and Block C would focus primarily on hide preparation and camp maintenance, without manufacturing hunting equipment—they would starve without being able to hunt game. The paltry number of projectile points found at Blocks C and F could not possibly reflect the hunting gear of two autonomous families. Overall, the assemblages are significantly different in terms of tool frequency. This suggests the inhabitants of the four cultural areas functioned as one socio-economic unit, sharing tool production and maintenance tasks beyond the confines of each structure and its associated space. The intellectual merit of this research includes contributing information that will affect the current interpretation of Folsom adaptations by examining the everyday life of Paleoindians. This aspect of Paleoindian lifeways often eludes researchers, simply as an artifact of the archaeological record itself. Recovering evidence of dwellings of mobile hunter-gatherers who lived nearly 12,000 years ago is rare, but the Mountaineer site is one such case that shows Folsom people had flexible mobility strategies, over-wintering in a residential camp when necessary. Forager households are often described in the ethnographic literature but rarely addressed when considering archaeological forager societies, which is why it is so important to apply concepts of household archaeology to the Mountaineer archaeological record. The broader impacts of this research include providing a foundation for future research of Paleoindian residential sites and the investigation of structures and households in other settings, as well as how household settlement strategies were substantiated at the end of the Ice Age in a changing and challenging environment. Archaeologists often turn to ethnographies of modern hunter-gatherer groups to provide comparative information, but such groups operate in a much different environment and often have economic relationships with agriculturalists or industrialists. The outcomes of this research show this may not be a tenable analogy for Ice Age hunter-gatherers who were alone on a landscape and had no real "neighbors" to speak of, but instead had to rely on within-group cooperation for survival.
