Archaeology at 11,000 Feet!

CSU crew surveys the high country in Rocky Mountain National Park

February 15, 2023

Josh Zaffos

In Summer 2023, a crew of CSU Archaeology students and alumni, led by Professor Jason LaBelle, surveyed in Rocky Mountain National Park to record evidence of past peoples’ uses of areas within the park dating back 12,000 years. The crew’s surveys focused along high-country ridgelines and lakes, documenting evidence of stone tools, chipped flakes from resharpening tools, grinding stones, and pottery to better understand how people used these areas and natural features across millennia.

Anthropology master’s student and crew chief Aleah Kuhr (ANTH B.A./ GR B.S. ‘22), alumna Kelsy Kreikemeier (ANTH B.A. ‘23), alum Sebastian Schipman (ANTH B.A. ‘23), and Leah Burke made up the core crew, which also spent part of the summer completing archaeological surveys in eastern Colorado on a research project led by master’s student Robert Madden.

“This research opened our eyes to a whole new understanding of past peoples’ activities and movements in the Rocky Mountains, importantly contributing to the archaeological record,” says Kuhr who returned to CSU as a graduate student in Fall 2023.

Based on his work, LaBelle believes hunter-gatherer groups in Colorado were traveling, hunting, trading, and living seasonally across alpine and subalpine zones going back thousands of years – much more than archaeologists and historians have previously thought.

Surveying ridgeline “highways”

In the national park, the archaeological crew did not dig or collect materials to avoid disturbing the environment. Instead, they for artifacts on the surface walking straight-line transects, back and forth across 25-by-25-meter square areas. Crew members flagged discoveries, marked their location on a GPS unit, and recorded measurements and observations in notebooks while leaving artifacts in place to help preserve archaeological site conditions and respect Indigenous values of non-collection.

For seven weeks, the crew surveyed at 11,000-plus feet, often working near trails that have existed for thousands of years. High-country ridgelines served as “highways” for Native American hunter-gatherer groups, according to LaBelle, since they offered visibility to scout game and could be followed between mountain passes for long-distance travel.

The summer survey project is part of a three-year grant between LaBelle’s research lab, the Center for Mountain and Plains Archaeology, and the National Park Service. LaBelle has worked in the park since 2015 – part of his ongoing research at high-elevation archaeological sites across the Front Range and Southern Rockies. Based on his work, LaBelle believes hunter-gatherer groups in Colorado were traveling, hunting, trading, and living seasonally across alpine and subalpine zones going back thousands of years – much more than archaeologists and historians have previously thought.

Uncovering “hot spots”

Surveys in the national park from this summer as well as the 2022 CSU Archaeology Field School The pattern of sites – which LaBelle refers to as “a string of pearls” – suggests people frequently used or repeatedly returned to specific areas to rest or camp near trails, over the past hundreds and thousands of years. The tools and flakes are evidence of past peoples’ wide-ranging travel, with rock sourced from as far away as parts of southern Wyoming and central Colorado.

“It was exciting to find a variety of lithics in places you would not expect,” Kuhr says.

Lake getaways of past days

The summer research also surveyed for archaeological evidence near high-country lakes to better understand the frequency and types of past activities. People are typically drawn to lakes to fish for sustenance, but fish are a modern addition to most Colorado alpine and subalpine lakes since they couldn’t migrate from lower drainages past steep waterfalls in the past. That means lakes offered limited food resources to hunter-gatherers on the move beyond being rest areas.

“High-country lakes are destinations: you only go if you want to,” LaBelle says, “so we’re trying to understand how lakes were used differently than ridges.”

LaBelle, working with National Park Service colleagues, met with representatives from associated Tribal Nations, sharing survey findings, building consensus about future research topics, and discussing what the evidence suggests about native peoples’ use of the park and region.

“This is the ancient Indigenous history of the Southern Rockies,” LaBelle adds, “and so we definitely want to write this story together with the descendants of the first peoples that lived and crossed this high country.”