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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…

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…

Flattop Butte

Located northwest of Sterling, Flattop Butte is a rock outcrop that was used extensively by prehistoric peoples as a source of stone for tools. The butte has a Chadron Formation capstone that is the only major bedrock source of high-quality stone between…

Fluted Points

Fluted projectile points represent the earliest North American stone tool technology, although they comprise a small portion of the overall stone technology observed in the New World. These easily recognized spear points represent one form of technology…

Gordon Creek Burial Site

Discovered in 1963, the Gordon Creek Burial Site is a Paleo-Indian burial in the Roosevelt National Forest in north-central Colorado. The site, which dates to about 7700 BCE, contained the skeleton of a young woman and several artifacts apparently buried…

Lamb Spring Archaeological Site

Located in Douglas County southeast of Chatfield State Park, the Lamb Spring Archaeological Site is the only major site with Paleo-Indian (before 6000 BCE) deposits in the metropolitan Denver area. First excavated in 1961–62, the site contains bison and…

Paleo-Indian Period

The Paleo-Indian period is the era from the end of the Pleistocene (the last Ice Age) to about 9,000 years ago (7000 BC), during which the first people migrated to North and South America. This period is seen through a glass darkly: Paleo-Indian sites…