Prehistoric land use, site placement and an archaeological legacy along the foothills of the Colorado Northern Front Range
This research takes place in the Colorado Front Range foothills in Northern Colorado. Previous artifact collections were recovered in past decades from sixty-six prehistoric sites and isolated finds within a bounded geographical area that includes the Dakota and Lyons hogbacks west of the city of Loveland in Larimer county. The first part of this thesis presents the artifact collections used in this analysis of Edison Lohr (1947), Lauri Travis (1986; 1988), Calvin Jennings (1988), and the work of the Center for Mountain and Plains Archaeology (2015-2017). The second part of this thesis explores the cultural chronology of the region and that of the study area. The study area reflects mostly the ephemeral behavior of indigenous groups along with small diverse activity sites that date between the Folsom period and Protohistoric era, with most sites dating between the Early Archaic and the Early Ceramic periods. Environmental variables that could have played a role in indigenous settlement and mobility patterns are evaluated, such as desirable raw material used for grinding tools. Only eight sites illustrate long-term intensive reoccupation of the foothills. The data shows that this landscape is a temporary exploitation space for indigenous groups passing through to access the Southern Rocky Mountains to the west or the Great Plains to the east.
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