Aleah Kuhr

Summer 2024

Digging Into Porcupine Creek

Nearly 45 years after Colorado State University faculty and students excavated at a Summit County archaeological site, Anthropology master’s student Aleah Kuhr and others are revisiting the area and findings. Kuhr and fellow students working with Professor Jason LaBelle and the CSU Center for Mountain and Plains Archaeology spent Summer 2024 researching and re-digging at the Porcupine Creek site, previously excavated in 1978. The area holds artifacts from people of the Late Archaic Period (c. 1000 B.C.E.-700 A.D.) and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Kuhr (ANTH BA/ GR BS ’22) will center her master’s thesis on the Porcupine Creek site, with plans to map and closely analyze lithics — flakestones and fragments left behind from past people making stone tools and items –collected from the area this summer and in the past. Despite the previous excavation, Kuhr’s thesis will be the first, published research from the site, marking an exciting opportunity to share past and recent findings and to contribute to our understanding of how people traveled through and lived in the Colorado mountains centuries ago. Other CSU students and alumni who helped on the summer fieldwork include CSU Anthropology graduate student Robert Madden, Anthropology undergraduate Katie Calhoon, incoming graduate student Dalton Pierce, and incoming graduate student alum Riley Limbaugh (ANTH BA and HIST BA ’23).

Kuhr has also worked on other field projects with LaBelle and the center in Rocky Mountain National Park and other sites.