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Walking Colorado: An Introduction to the Origins Section

Hundreds of generations of Native American ancestors are represented in Colorado by scatters of artifacts along with the less portable evidence of shelter, the warmth of hearths, storage needs, and symbolic expression. We learn about them through…

Antiquities Act

The Antiquities Act, enacted in 1906, was the United States’ first federal law recognizing the importance and value of the places and objects that represent the country’s history and prehistory. The act provided for protection of archaeological and…

Barger Gulch Site

There are few places in western North America richer in Paleo-Indian archaeology than Middle Park, the valley that forms the headwaters of the Colorado River in Grand County. Within Middle Park, the Barger Gulch area preserves an impressive amount of…

Bill Tremblay

Bill Tremblay is a poet and novelist. His work has appeared in nine full-length volumes including Crying in the Cheap Seats (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1971), The Anarchist Heart (New York: New Rivers Press, 1977). Home Front (Spokane,…

Culturally Modified Trees

Culturally Modified Trees (or CMTs) are trees that exhibit peels, ax cuts, delimbing, wood removal, and other cultural modifications. Numerous CMTs are found in the foothills and mountains of Colorado. Research has shown that these trees are artifacts…

Dent Site

Early colonists occupied Colorado’s rich and ecologically diverse landscapes in the waning millennia of our planet’s most recent major Ice Age, the Pleistocene, between 14,000 and 12,000 years. Our best-documented evidence for Colorado’s earliest hunter…

Denver Museum of Nature & Science

The Denver Museum of Nature & Science (DMNS) is the largest natural history museum between Chicago and the West Coast of the United States. Incorporated on December 6, 1900 as the Colorado Museum of Natural History, the museum was known as the Denver…

Folsom People

Folsom groups, also called Folsom peoples or Folsom culture, occupied all of Colorado between about 13,000 and 12,000 years ago. They were not the first people in these areas, although they might have been the first in some newly unglaciated portions of…

Franktown Cave

Located two and a half miles southwest of Franktown, Franktown Cave is a prehistoric archaeological site in a large rockshelter that contained artifacts from prehistoric occupations over 8,000 years. Some of the findings include rare perishable artifacts…

Hannah Marie Wormington

As a pioneering woman in a field dominated by men, Hannah Marie Wormington (1914–94) carved a scholarly niche for herself on the frontiers of American archaeology. She was a larger-than-life figure whose impact went far beyond the dozens of publications…

Lyons Sandstone

Named for the Boulder County town whose historic quarries made it famous, the Lyons Sandstone formation is a Permian age rock layer in the foothills of the Front Range from the Wyoming border to south of Colorado Springs. It is the primary formation in…

Prehistoric Stone Quarrying in Colorado

From exquisitely flaked Folsom spear points to the spectacular cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde National Park, among the most visible vestiges of Colorado’s Native American history are those crafted from naturally available rock. Archaeologists and others…

Radiocarbon Dating

Radiocarbon dating is the most common technique used in ascertaining the age of archaeological and paleontological sites during the last 45,000 years. Developed by a chemist born in Colorado, there are now commercial and academic laboratories across the…

Sand Wash Basin Tool Stone Sites

Located northwest of Craig in Moffat County, the Sand Wash Basin is an area of Bridger Formation rock outcrops that prehistoric peoples mined extensively as a source for stones to make tools with. Bridger Formation chert is typically light to dark brown,…

Shield Cave Archaeological Site

Shield Cave is a large limestone cavern in Eagle County that contains painted rock art dating to the Historic period and deposits of the iron mineral pigment material used to make ochre-color paint. This site is one of hundreds of caverns that have…

The Archaic Period in Colorado

The Archaic period is an era in the human history of Colorado dating from ca. 6500 BC–AD 200. It is one of the three prehistoric periods used by archaeologists to characterize broad cultural changes that occurred throughout the Americas. It was preceded…

Tree-Ring Dating

Tree-ring dating is formally known as “dendrochronology” (literally, the study of tree time). It is the science of assigning calendar-year dates to the growth rings of trees, and Colorado figures prominently in its development and application in…

Trout Creek Archaeological Site

Trout Creek in east Chaffee County is an extensive archaeological site exhibiting natural outcrops of colorful jaspers that were used for thousands of years as raw material for toolmaking by many different groups of Native Americans. It is one of the…

Wickiups and Other Wooden Features

Wickiups were temporary conical and domed shelters constructed by the Native American inhabitants of Colorado for millennia. Because of the perishable nature of their construction materials, a vast majority of wickiups and other prehistoric wooden…