Skip to main content

Clovis

The term Clovis refers to the earliest widespread archaeological culture to have occupied North and Central America, ca. 13,250–12,800 years ago. Since the discovery of the first Clovis artifacts in the 1930s, debate has raged over such fundamental…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Jones-Miller Bison Kill Site

Located in a shallow draw near the Arikaree River in eastern Colorado, the Jones-Miller Bison Kill Site was discovered in 1972 by the rancher Robert B. Jones Jr. and excavated over the next three years by Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian…

Jurgens Archaeological Site

The Jurgens Archaeological Site is a Paleo-Indian period (before 6000 BCE) bison processing site that dates to about 7120 BCE and includes the remains of at least sixty-eight bison spread across three separate camps. Located about nine miles east of…

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…

Olsen-Chubbuck Bison Kill Site

Dating to roughly 8200 BCE, the Olsen-Chubbuck Bison Kill Site in Cheyenne County preserves evidence of a Paleo-Indian kill of more than 190 bison. The site was named for the amateur archaeologists Jerry Chubbuck and Sigurd Olsen, who discovered 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…

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…

Wilbur Thomas Shelter Archaeological Site

The Wilbur Thomas Shelter Archaeological Site is a rockshelter in northwest Weld County featuring evidence of at least six intermittent occupations stretching over 8,500 years. David A. Breternitz and graduate students from the University of Colorado…