Hunter-Gatherer Archaeology of the Colorado High Country

The unique geophysics of Colorado’s Upper Gunnison Basin provides a rich archaeological document of over 8,000 years of environmental and cultural change. In Hunter-Gatherer Archaeology of the Colorado High Country, Mark Stiger presents not only an overview of past research conducted in the Basin but also the significant new findings and interpretations from his own research. Anchored in the massive body of data that was gathered by Stiger during eight years of work at Tenderfoot--a large lithic-scatter site once categorized as "insignificant"-as well as comparable data from numerous other sites in the surrounding region, this important new contribution to archaeology in the southern Rocky Mountains uses an organizational approach to describe and interpret prehistoric cultural change across a wide area of western Colorado. Stiger examines discoveries made by other archaeologists during earlier excavations in the region and critiques the dominant traditional field methods and social explanations of prehistory. By using data recovered in multi-year repetitive surface collections, he questions the direct interpretation of survey data and explores the advantages of horizontally extensive block excavations. He also investigates how dramatic environmental changes affected human adaptations by analyzing the region’s floral and faunal usage patterns and its natural history through paleoenvironmental evidence. The artifactual data from Tenderfoot and related sites show how cultural change was reflected in the houses, game drives, firepits, stone tools, and debitage over 8,000 years. Using this information, Stiger explains the cultural sequence found in the Upper Gunnison Basin and probes its connections to cultural changes in the American Southwest and West. Ultimately, he proposes the application of non-traditional theoretical and methodological approaches derived from his own work to more universal problems of archaeological research. Addressing a long-neglected area of American archaeology, Hunter-Gatherer Archaeology of the Colorado High Country is essential reading for scholars interested in the prehistoric archaeology of the West.