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PaleoIndian Site at Barger Gulch (Image 6)
PaleoIndian Site at Barger Gulch (Image 6)
A base of Folsom point recovered from Barger Gulch Locality B, located in Middle Park, Colo., during the 2005 field season. Broken projectile point bases are commonly recovered at the site. Projectile point tips are typically found at the location where they were used and broken, while the bases are often returned to camp still in the spear. At camp, they are removed, discarded and replaced. The Barger Gulch site contains deposits that document the diversity of behaviors that occurred at a 10,500 year old hunter-gatherer residential site.
Middle Park is a high-altitude basin in the Southern Rocky Mountains of north-central Colorado that contains at least fifty-nine known Folsom PaleoIndian sites. In particular, Barger Gulch, a heavily incised tributary system of the Colorado River in the western portion of Middle Park, contains several Folsom (10,900 to around 10,200 years ago) sites. Of these sites, Locality B has been the subject of survey and excavation since 1995, yielding an extensive number of Folsom stone artifacts.
This research was performed as part of a National Science Foundation-supported grant (BCS 04-50759) awarded to researchers from the University of Wyoming Anthropology Department to investigate late Pleistocene social organization and economic relationships among Folsom peoples, as expressed through the spatial configuration of artifacts and site features. Spatial data has proved a valuable component for discerning forager social and economic relationships in both ethnographic and archaeological contexts. Detailed analysis and documentation of spatial trends at Barger Gulch provides a unique opportunity to examine the social context of prehistoric hunter-gatherer behavior. (Date of Image: July 4, 2005) [One of 8 related images. See Next Image.]
Credit: Photo courtesy Todd Surovell and Nicole Waguespack
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