New eyes on old Native American digs - Stone Foundations in Colorado

Submitted by coldrum on Sunday, 19 July 2009 Page Views: 1193

Long before Colorado 114 took drivers over the gentle Cochetopa Pass between Saguache and Gunnison, the corridor of rolling hills and lush stream bottoms provided a haven for travelers on foot for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
Evidence of their passage sits in the foothills above the highway in the form of wobbly, stone foundations and long-buried campfire sites, along with the stray arrowhead or pottery shard.

The indications of repeated, if temporary, community sites from 200 A.D. to 900 A.D. drew a group of federal, nonprofit and volunteer archaeologists to the area earlier this month.
The stone foundations — often full or half circles of vertically laced stones that once supported wood huts — have drawn the attention of researchers for their similarity to others found as far east as the Apishapa and Purgatoire rivers and as far south as Cimarron, N.M.
Mark Mitchell, the research director for the PaleoCultural Research Group, said there is more documentation to do before the huts can be verified to have been built by the same people. But should his suspicions prove correct, he thinks the far-flung huts could dispel the idea that native peoples were singularly tied to certain areas.

"I think it's becoming clear that the kind of mobility you saw, say in the 1900s and the 19th century and 18th century, where people were moving all around the plains and the Rocky Mountains — that's a phenomenon that has been the case forever," he said.
The succession of Native Americans who passed through the region include the Utes, Pueblo Indians and Athabaskan-speaking tribes, such as the Apache and Navajo.

But Mitchell and Angie Krall, heritage program manager for the Bureau of Land Management in the San Luis Valley, said specifically identifying who built the huts or who came before those groups is harder. Krall said doing so would be much easier if researchers came across the stories, world views and basketry of the earliest groups.
"We're only seeing the hard rock," she said.
[The work of volunteers at the sites] will also allow the professional archaeologists to make more headway with the site's puzzles, such as figuring out what time of year the site was most commonly used, Mitchell said.
They also hope to get a better idea of the natural resources in the area that would have been a draw, and to document more details about the stone foundations.

For more, see the Vail Daily.

Note: Early Americans were wide ranging travelers.

Contributor Bio for coldrum: Based in Milkyway, contributing since 2002. Favourite site: Avebury.

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