Todd Surovell

University of Wyoming

Toward the end of the last Ice Age, Colorado was home to highly mobile bison hunters, the Folsom people. Folsom sites are found throughout the Rocky Mountain west from northern Mexico to Canada, and while they are generally associated with the Great Plains, Folsom sites are also common in the Rocky Mountains. In this presentation, Dr. Surovell will talk about an intensively occupied Folsom winter campsite in Middle Park, Colorado that provides glimpses into rarely explored aspects of Folsom lifeways. Because the Barger Gulch site is shallowly buried, they were able to excavate large contiguous excavation areas, which allowed them to examine aspects of the spatial organization of the site and the social organization of the people who lived there. Within those excavations, they were able to identify multiple household features, and comparing artifact assemblages among those households provides some insight into the individuals who lived there, more than 12,8000 years ago.