Colorado Experience: Paleo Indians

Paleo-Indian people are the first human beings to arrive in the Americas. Colorado is the heartland of Paleo-Indian studies. There's probably more Paleo-Indian sites, Folsom period sites, in Colorado than anywhere else. Each of those sites gives a unique snapshot into what people were doing in that specific locality, how they were living. There is some strong evidence that between about 20,000 and 12,000 years ago, human beings were arriving in the Americas, but there's some evidence that suggests that maybe that migration was even older. The Paleo-Indians living here were really the first pioneers in Colorado. This program was generously made possible by the History Colorado State Historical Fund. Supporting projects throughout the state to preserve, protect, and interpret Colorado's architectural and archaeological treasures. History Colorado State Historical Fund. Create the future, honor the past. With support from the Denver Public Library, History Colorado, and the Colorado Office of Film, Television, and Media. With additional support from these fine organizations and viewers like you. Thank you. One of the reasons that I love archaeology is because with people that are living in those other times and other places are just like you and me. What does it actually mean to be human? What were their daily challenges? What are the things that they stayed awake at night thinking about? What did they laugh about? It's all of those kinds of questions. The essence of what makes us human that I think about as an archaeologist. The study of Paleo-Indians is really exciting. Everybody likes an origin story. There's great mystery about when people first came to this continent and when they first came to Colorado. Paleo is Latin for old. Indian comes from Columbus's mislabeling of indigenous people of North America as Indians. Archaeologists talk about the Bering Land Bridge and a migration from Asia, but that's a disputed theory. If you ask many American Indian cultural leaders, they'll say we've always been here. They were our first people here. We have evidence of them definitely here 11,500 years ago. We have some indirect evidence for them here as long as 13,000 years ago. We used to think that Paleo-Indian culture was central to the Great Plains because that's where we've discovered a lot of the big sites, but now researchers are finding Paleo-Indian sites throughout the United States. And along with that, they had really interesting material culture. It's the stuff that people made, that they used, that were part of their everyday lives. Now most of these sites are pretty subtle. They're not like the ruins of the southwest where you have standing walls that you can see these big rubble mounds and you have pot sherds and things laying on the surface. There are a lot of preservation issues with particularly archaeological sites as we have more and more people moving to Colorado. There's actually a term for this. The National Park Service has recognized the impact that people have on our sites. We love them to death. Physical anthropologist Dr. Alice Hrlicka stated early human history did not exist in the New World and instead promoted the theory that humans existed in the Americas for a relatively short period of time, only three to four thousand years. According to the Smithsonian's Dr. Frank H. H. Roberts, the question of early man in America became virtually taboo. However, Roberts was not afraid to contradict the toted theory. In contrast, he believed humans predated this limited time period and even hunted megafauna. Megafauna literally means large fauna, large animals. The ice age in North America, as you might imagine, presented us with a very, very different landscape, right? There are glaciers coming down into North America. Megafauna roamed the west and throughout the world during the late Pleistocene, the last great ice age. Imagine a ground sloth as big as a hippo. Muskox look like somebody's idea of an animal. They've got horns, they're kind of like a cow-shaped thing, but they've got this long hair that hangs all over them. It's unlike anything you've ever seen. And then there were horses and camels and saber-toothed tigers and all kinds of wonderful creatures running all over North America. And then human beings show up. What happens then? People are really small. Megafauna are really big. One of the hallmarks of their technology is spears and getting up really close to animals for hunting. The vast majority of the archaeological evidence that we have for these people is stone tools. Why? Because stone preserves well in the archaeological record. Does it mean that they weren't collecting plants and other animals and things like that? No. It just means that all we've got left for these people are the stone tools. That's how we know humans were there. There is a wide variety of artifacts and material culture that Paleo-Indians would have had, but there's a very small portion of it that has survived for archaeologists to study. And we try to extrapolate from the climate and from the kinds of animal bones that we find, then from the oral traditions of American Indians today, which relate back, in many cases, hundreds if not thousands of years. Radiocarbon dating is one of the world's great gifts to archaeology. Carbon-14 in our systems, that is in equilibrium. It's in the same proportion as the air that we breathe and the water that we drink and the foods that we eat. As soon as we die, that equilibrium is broken and the carbon-14 that's in us begins to decay at a known rate called its half-life. And from that, scientists can date sites based on how much carbon is left. These are great dates for archaeologists. Then one of the most important methods that scientists use to learn about the past is context. We have fires, we have tools, we have seeds. All of those make up a context, and archaeologists use the context of how artifacts and features relate to each other in a site to understand the past. In 1908, George McJunkin, a cowboy and former slave, discovered some unusual bones while riding near Folsom, New Mexico. McJunkin was a very seasoned cowboy who was following a herd of strays down through an arroyo when he noticed bison bones sticking out the side of the arroyo wall. But they were larger bison bones than he had ever seen before. Brought it to the attention of the guy that owned the ranch. Nothing really happened. Nobody got interested until some of those bones were sent to the Colorado Museum of Natural History. In August of 1927, the guys that are excavating at the Folsom site find a point, it is right there in the ground, in the ribs of an extinct form of bison. It was determined that these unusual bones were actually those of an ice-aged giant bison. The smoking gun, though, was the discovery of a man-made point lodged within the animal's ribs, reigniting Dr. Roberts' belief in the coexistence of humans and megafauna. These are stone points with very sharp edges, but have cavities on either face that are known as fluting, which we know today as Folsom points. It was named after the town of Folsom, New Mexico, and that's the way a lot of archaeological cultures get named. It's named after the site from near where they were found. What does it prove? How does that arrowhead get there? And this was a big debate in the 1920s. Were Native Americans actually present in North America during the last ice age? And this isn't just a scientific question. It's also a political question, right? If people had just gotten in before you, it's not that big of a sin to take their land from them as people that have been here for 10,000 years. But the Folsom site had artifacts, humanly made artifacts in direct association with Pleistocene animals. This was the first evidence that human beings were actually hunting giant bison during the ice age. It really killed the controversy. People accepted the fact that they had been here that long. This also gave American archaeology more clout in the world. 16 years after McJunkin's discovery in New Mexico, Claude Coffin, his son Lynn, and friend C.K. Collins were poking around an old school near their Fort Collins ranch and made a discovery that once again transformed the Paleo-Indian conversation. So all we had of evidence of Folsom is the projectile points, is the arrowheads that they used to kill those bison. We didn't have the rest of what they would carry around as a normal complement of day-to-day activities until the discovery of the Lindenmeyer site up near Fort Collins. The Lindenmeyer site was found in 1924 by the Coffin family as well as a family friend, C.K. Collins. The Coffins were avocational amateur archaeologists, enjoyed collecting arrowheads, decided to go for a walk, and in doing so they discovered this really significant site. They were finding these little fluted projectile points that had a big flake off of the sides. The irony was that the Folsom era was not known to science in 1924. It'd take a couple years of work at the Folsom type site in New Mexico to make those discoveries well known. The Coffin brothers found their Folsom points three-ish years prior to the Folsom find in New Mexico, but because they sat on it and they didn't formalize their find, New Mexico was able to capitalize on that first. The Coffin brothers started inquiring more and wrote letters to the Geological Survey in Washington, D.C. saying, hey, we found this pretty significant site. Will somebody come take a look at it? That letter made its way to the desk of Frank Roberts, and in November 1934, he actually came out and visited the Coffin brothers. Frank Roberts, as well as the Coffin family, found Folsom artifacts, charcoal, and bone 15 feet below the surface. And this is exactly what Roberts was looking for. From 1935 until 1940, the Smithsonian excavated the site, and it was amazing. What they were looking for was the evidence of a Folsom campsite, and sure enough, they found them. Thousands upon thousands of chipstone flakes for making stone tools and sharpening those stone tools, thousands of animal bones, hundreds of Folsom points, as well as fragments, even bits of jewelry, as well as pieces of ochre and hematite, things used for paints. The Lindenmeyer site was the first Folsom campground known. So if we're going to have a chance of finding out something about Folsom people that moves beyond just their hunting technology, it's going to be at Lindenmeyer. The Folsom site in New Mexico was a bison kill. Thousands of years ago, hunters had descended upon these animals and killed them, slaughtered them, and then moved away. What was never found at Folsom was an associated camp where the people were living. What Roberts had at Lindenmeyer was something very, very different. We actually have the remains of a campsite that was probably occupied by many different groups of people. It's a place where the north-south tending front range of the Rocky Mountains intersects the east-west Cheyenne escarpment, a ledge, a balcony from the plains of Colorado onto the plains of Wyoming. We think of these groups as primitive and scattered, yet research has shown us that there were a lot more people living here than we previously thought. So at the Lindenmeyer site, we see different groups coming together probably to trade, arrange marriages, feast, and celebrate with each other, just like we do now. Before now, people thought that Paleo-Indian cultures, if you will, just used rocks and spears and were very simple. What we see at Lindenmeyer include things like sewing needles and grinding stones, but then also a lot of stone tools that were used for butchering and sewing and making hides. Here we have pieces of soapstone as well as bone discs about the size of a half dollar with little tick marks or etchings along the exterior of them. Were they tools? Were they gaming pieces? Were they just pieces of doodling? We're not quite sure, but we've not found them on any other Folsom site. Lindenmeyer is famous because it is such a big site with a varied assemblage that shows extended occupation over many years. People keep coming back to this place. It shows that there's a memory of this place. In the fall of 1932, a road crew discovered large ancient animal bones in Clovis, New Mexico. At the time, archaeology had become a competitive venture, and when this news spread to the East Coast, a University of Pennsylvania archaeologist hopped a train west to investigate. The archaeologist was Edgar B. Howard, and he commenced a dig the following summer, describing his discovery as matted masses of bones. But between these bones was something new. Slender, finger-long points, much different than the small fluted Folsom points identified only a decade earlier. These points opened an entirely new window to the past, a glimpse into the lives of Paleo-Indians roughly 13,000 years ago. It wasn't long before the newly named Clovis points were discovered all over the Rocky Mountain West. The Folsom and Clovis discoveries in New Mexico were very significant, but certainly there were sites in Colorado that were just as comparable, that were made at about the same time. This is the Lamb Spring Archaeological Preserve. In the early 1960s, a rancher in Littleton, Colorado, was using a natural spring to make a stockpile for his cattle when he began excavating bones. And the story goes is that a bulldozer just went through a field of bones, and one of the operators on that bulldozer happened to be a friend of someone at the USGS. So a phone call was made immediately and said, hey, I think we got something here. And lo and behold, they did. And from there, there were excavations in 1961, 1962. Those were the summers of discovery, as we like to call them. What's been great about Lamb Springs is that people recognized really early what a unique site it was because of how early it is, the different types of megafauna remains that are there. It would have been wetter. The grass would have been much taller, about chest height or even taller than that. And what you would have roaming initially here were mammoths and prehistoric animals, ice age animals that no longer exist. There were spring sites all up and down the Front Range. Human hunters were here, and they were chasing down their food. Where there's water, there's animals. Where there's animals, there's humans. But the artifacts that we're finding out here today, in addition to the mammoth bones and the bones of extinct megafauna and Pleistocene animals, we're finding evidence of flint knapping, so making of stone tools, a lot of flake stone, a few projectile points here and there. We're talking hunters and gatherers from 8,000 years ago. They're not sitting down to make pottery just yet. You know, they're following their seasonal rounds and hunting and gathering along the way. You also would find butchering sites, which are places where you find bison bones with evidence of cut marks, small striations on them that were made by stone blades. As paleo hunters flensed the skin from the bone, they would leave behind cut marks. Our tagline at Lamb Spring is, the past lies beneath your feet, and that's because everything is still buried out here. The site is owned by the Archaeological Conservancy. It's a non-profit, and their charter is to actually preserve sites like this in perpetuity so that they can be used for educational purposes predominantly, but also sometimes just to preserve them. They don't develop them, they don't intend to develop them. It's really fascinating because you find sort of a string of discoveries up and down the Front Range of Colorado, which suggests that I-25, the Interstate 25 corridor that we travel today, is one of the oldest migration corridors in North America. Human beings have been traveling up and down the Front Range of Colorado for more than 12,000 years, maybe as many as 20,000 years. Clovis is 13,000, 13,500 years ago, something like that, but they're all over North America. There had to have been somebody here before Clovis. They're just not leaving a mark on the landscape. It's the absence of evidence, right? Each Paleo-Indian archaeological site reveals another layer of these fascinating early people. The context and location of kill sites and caches add supporting material to this mysterious story. Paleo-Indians continually surprise us. We thought that they weren't here for very long, and then Folsom and Clovis sites proved us wrong. It was also fairly commonly understood that Paleo-Indians never went into the mountains, or if they did, they didn't stay there for very long because the mountains are, of course, so inhospitable in the wintertime that who would stay in the mountains for any reasonable amount of time? Archaeological sites near Gunnison show that not only did American Indians live and thrive in the mountains, but they lived there for very long periods of occupation. We're on the top of Tenderfoot Mountain near Gunnison, Colorado. When you walk around up here, you're walking around on the same surface that people have walked on for the last 10,000, 11,000 years. The Mountaineer site is really fascinating because Dr. Steiger is not only finding evidence for these earlier occupations, he's finding habitation sites, and he's finding places that people were at semi-permanently, returned to, and was kind of an anchor of their world in Colorado. What we've found are the remnants of these pit structures where they've actually dug down 30, 40, or 50 centimeters in some cases into the bedrock and built some sort of a little habitation structure which had a fire pit in the middle, walls that came up on the side, probably aspen poles, kind of almost teepee fashion, and we actually have remnants of that mud plaster with imprints of the hands where they smoothed the mud. So this is not just a simple one-night stay or a week stay. Most likely, we're looking at months. And I think that's really fascinating because it opens up our vision of these people and what their lives were like. 1994, cell phone companies were putting in some facilities up here. The state archaeologist's office contacted the cell phone companies and told them they needed to do some archaeological work. I surveyed this mesa top with a number of our undergraduates here, and we didn't find anything in the field that was all that spectacular until I actually got to do some analysis on the material that we had collected. And in there, I found a little fragment of a projectile point. It sure looked like a fulsome point, but there had been articles published just two years prior to that, and the conclusion that was drawn was that fulsome folks did not occupy western Colorado, certainly not southwestern Colorado. I went back to the spot where that first fragment was found, and I found a refitting piece that fit back together for a complete base, and there's no doubt about it being a fulsome point. When we first discovered how important the site was, we talked about moving all the cell phone towers. What we've decided to do is to leave everybody in place, but keep any from expanding. This mesa top has got literally hundreds of small occupations on it. They're all over the place. They seem to be a number of different early time periods represented. Thanks to the foresight of Mark Steiger and the archaeology department at Western State Colorado University, an initiative to halt development upon this historically and culturally rich location is in place. Year after year, Dr. Steiger and his students continue to make new Paleo-Indian discoveries given the rapidly evolving archaeological techniques and technologies. The thoughts behind preservation and archaeology have changed over the years. When Lindenmeyer was first excavated in the 1930s, archaeologists wanted to excavate as much as they could. It was very destructive. People didn't even have a clear idea about how long Native Americans and human occupation had occurred in North America to be able to really understand what it was they were excavating. These are stories that need to be preserved because it tells about the rich mosaic of the peoples that have lived in Colorado for thousands of years, not just since the 1850s. At the turn of the last century, archaeology was mostly based in museums, and museum people wanted to collect stuff that was exhibition quality, could be put on display. In about 1920, archaeology began a shift to be based in universities and have research questions guiding the excavation. So it wasn't digging just for stuff, it was digging to answer questions. And over the last seven, eight decades, the pendulum has swung so far that now we won't do any digging unless there's research questions that are going to be answered through that excavation. Ethically, it's incredibly important to make sure that you don't excavate everything so that somebody who comes along with better questions and better technology has something that they can look at. Now archaeologists recognize the importance of leaving items in situ. That's a fancy word that means in place, to leave it alone, to preserve that context. We're using things out here as drone flights, 3D photogrammetry. You can apply ground penetrating radar out here to see what kind of collections are beneath the ground. That's low disturbance, which is nice. Most of the really enticing artifacts are organic remains, and as soon as you expose them to oxygen, they start to break down immediately. Archaeology is a destructive science. Once you've removed the evidence, you destroy it in a way. We've got a 3D scanner, which allows you to put an artifact, like a fulsome point, on this little platform, and then it shoots laser beams in and scans the artifact and records it, and you get a three-dimensional image of whatever you're scanning. We can now do blood antigen residue analysis. We can test a projectile point and see what kind of animal was killed with that, with this residue. Who knows what the new technology is going to be, but we know that leaving portions of the site in place is going to preserve it for future generations to explore. These are resources that cannot be replaced. This story cannot be retold and re-pieced together unless it's done properly, and there's something here for not just the state of Colorado, but really just everyone in the Americas. It is a human story. The National Park Service has recognized the impact that people have on our sites, that people want to experience. Just the presence of so many of us there is impacting these sites. There are a lot of conversations right now among agencies of finding a balance to allow the public to enjoy them, scientists to study them, or even for them to just exist while other recreation or other activities occur. We don't have hard and fast answers about how to deal with those challenges yet, but this is a state that loves its outdoors, and part of loving its outdoors is respecting its archaeological sites. While there is still much to learn about the early dwellers of North America, what little we do know inspires modern-day humans in Colorado and beyond. Today in Colorado, we're really kind of entering a new age of Paleo-Indian studies. Families have been making their way here in Colorado for tens of thousands of years, trudging through the stow, making their way and creating bonds and families, and it really is an example for us today of the tenacity of the people that have made Colorado home. I think Paleo-Indians help us think about the rugged individualist. They're people just like you and I, born at a different place and a different time. We live in a contemporary moment where Native Americans and other descendant groups are really involved in interpreting the archaeological, ethnographic, and historical record. That relationship with the science and the oral history is really adding a deeper and more rich understanding of what we're seeing in our excavation units or on the ground. Paleo-Indian research really inspires me because there's a very human side to it. I can see our own humanity when I look back 10,000 years and imagine people on this landscape, families moving across hundreds of miles, singing songs and making camp and eating together. What you see are societies evolving and changing through time, and so the Paleo-Indian people didn't disappear. They changed their technologies. But all these people are related in one way or another, and they never truly left Colorado. There's more we don't know. It's wonderful.