Colorado Experience: Paleo Indians

[Music] paleo-indian people are the first human beings to arrive in the Americas Colorado is the heartland of Palin and studies there's probably more paleo-indian sites Folsom period sites in Colorado than anywhere else each of those sites gives a unique snapshot into what people were doing in that specific locality how they were living there are some strong evidence that between about 20,000 and 12,000 years ago human beings were arriving in the Americas but there's some evidence that suggests that maybe that migration was even older the Paleo Indians living here were really the first pioneers in Colorado [Music] this program was generously made possible by the history Colorado State Historical fund supporting projects throughout the state to preserve protect and interpret Colorado's architectural and archaeological treasures history Colorado State Historical fund create the future honor the past with support from the Denver Public Library history Colorado and the Colorado Office of Film television and media with additional support from these fine organizations and viewers like you thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] one of the reasons that I love archaeology is because the people that are living in those other times in other places are just like you and me what does it actually mean to be human what were their daily challenges what are the things that they stayed awake at night thinking about what did they laugh about it's all of those kinds of questions the essence of what makes us human that I think about as an archaeologist the study of peeling onions is really exciting everybody likes an origin story there's great mystery about when people first came to this continent and when they first came to Colorado paleo is Latin for old Indian comes from Columbus's mislabelling of indigenous people of North America as Indians archeologists talk about the bering land bridge and a migration from asia but that's a disputed theory if you ask many American Indian cultural leaders they'll say we've always been here there were our first people here we have evidence of them definitely here eleven and a half thousand years ago we have some indirect evidence for them here as long as 13,000 years ago we used to think that paleo Indian culture was central to the Great Plains because that's where we've discovered a lot of the big sites but now researchers are finding a paleo-indians sites throughout the United States and along with that they had really interesting material culture it's the stuff that people made that they used that were part of their everyday lives now most these sites are pretty subtle they're not like the rooms of the Southwest where you have standing walls that you can see these big rubble mounds and you have potsherds and things laying on the surface there are a lot of preservation issues with particularly archaeological sites as we have more and more people moving to Colorado there's actually a term for this the National Park Service has recognized the impact that people have on our sites we love them to death [Music] physical anthropologist dr. Alistair lishka stated early human history did not exist in the new world and instead promoted the theory that humans existed in the Americas for a relatively short period of time only three to four thousand years according to the Smithsonian's dr. Frank H H Roberts the question of early man in America became virtually taboo however Roberts was not afraid to contradict the toted theory in contrast he believed humans predated this limited time period and even hunted megafauna megafauna literally means large fauna large animals the ice age in North America as you might imagine presented us with a very very different landscape right there are glaciers coming down into North America megafauna roamed the West and throughout the world during the Late Pleistocene the last great Ice Age imagine a ground sloth as big as a hippo a musk ox looked like somebody's idea of an animal they've got horns they're kind of like a cow shaped thing but they've got this long hair that hangs all over them it's unlike anything you've ever seen and then there were horses and camels and saber-toothed Tigers and all kinds of wonderful creatures running all over North America and then human beings show up what happens then people are really small megafauna really big one of the hallmarks of their technology is Spears and getting up really close to animals for hunting the vast majority of the archaeological evidence that we have for these people is stone tools why because stone preserves well in the archaeological record doesn't mean that they weren't collecting plants and other animals and things like that no it just means that all we've got left for these people are the stone tools that's how we know humans were there there is a wide variety of artifacts and material culture that paleo-indians would have had but there's a very small portion of it that has survived for archaeologists to study and we tried to extrapolate from the climate from the kinds of animal bones that we find than from the oral traditions of American Indians today which relate back in many cases that hundreds if not thousands of the radiocarbon dating is one of the world's great gifts to archaeology carbon-14 in our systems that is in equilibrium it's in the same proportion as the air that we breathe and the water that we drink in the foods that we eat as soon as we die that equilibrium is broken and the carbon-14 that's in us begins to decay at a known rate called its half-life and from that scientists can date sites based on how much carbon is left these are great dates for archaeologists then one of the most important methods that scientists use to learn about the past is context we have fires we have tools we have seeds all of those make up a contexts and archaeologists use the context of how artifacts and features relate to each other in a site to understand the past in 1908 George McJunkin a cowboy and former slave discovered some unusual bones while riding near Folsom New Mexico McJunkin was a very seasoned cowboy who was following a herd of strays down through in Arroyo when he noticed bison bones sticking outside of the Arroyo wall but they were larger bison bones than he had ever seen before brought it to the attention of the guy that owned the ranch nothing really happened nobody got interested until some of those bones were sent to the Colorado Museum of Natural History in August of 1927 the guys that are excavating at the Folsom site find a point it is right there in the ground in the ribs of an extinct former bison it was determined that these unusual bones were actually those of an Ice Age giant bison The Smoking Gun though was the discovery of a man-made point lodged within the animal's ribs reigniting dr. Roberts belief in the coexistence of humans and megafauna these are stone points with very sharp edges but have cavities on either face that are known as fluting which we know today is fulsome points it was named after the town of Folsom New Mexico and that's the way a lot of archaeological cultures get named it's named after the site from near where they were found what does it prove how does that Arrowhead get there and this was a big debate in the nineteen were Native Americans actually present in North America during the last ice age and this isn't just a scientific question it's also a political question right if people had just gotten in before you it's not that big of a sin to take their land from them as people that have been here for 10,000 years but the Folsom site had artifacts humanly made artifacts in direct association with Pleistocene animals this was the first evidence that human beings were actually hunting giant bison during the Ice Age it really killed the controversy people accepted the fact that they had been here that long this also gave American Archaeology more clout in the world 16 years after McJunkin s discovery in new mexico claude coffin his son lynn and french CK Collins were poking around an old school near their Fort Collins ranch and made a discovery that once again transformed the paleo-indian conversation so all we had of evidence of Folsom is the projectile points is the arrowheads that they used to kill those bison we didn't have the rest of what they would carry around as a normal complement of day-to-day activities until the discovery of the Lindenmayer site up near Fort Collins well then a Meyer site was found in 1924 by the coffin family as well as a family friend CK Collins the coffins were applicational amateur archaeologists enjoyed collecting arrowheads decided to go for a walk and in doing so they discovered this really significant site they were finding these little fluted projectile points that had a big flake off of the sides the irony was that the Folsom era was not known to science in 1924 it take a couple years of work at the Folsom type site in New Mexico to make those discoveries well known the coffin brothers found their fulsome points three ish years prior to the Folsom find in New Mexico but because they sat on it and they didn't formalize their find New Mexico was able to capitalize on that first the coffin brother started inquiring more and wrote letters to the Geological Survey in Washington DC say hey we found this pretty significant site well somebody come take a look at it that letter made its way to the desk of Frank Roberts and in November 1934 he actually came out and visited the coffin brothers Frank Roberts as well as the coffin family found Folsom artifacts charcoal and bone 15 feet below the surface and this is exactly what Roberts was looking for it from 1935 until 1940 the Smithsonian excavated the site and it was amazing what they were looking for was the evidence of a Folsom campsite and sure enough they found that thousands upon thousands of chip stone flakes from making stone tools and sharpen those stone tools thousands of animal bones hundreds of Folsom points as well as fragments even bits of jewelry as well as pieces of ochre and hematite things used for paints the Lindenmayer site was the first Folsom campground known so if we're gonna have a chance of finding out something about Folsom people that moves beyond just their hunting technology it's going to be at Lindenmayer the Folsom site in New Mexico was a bison killing thousands of years ago hunters had descended upon these animals and killed them slaughter to them and then moved away what was never found at Folsom was an associative camp where the people were living what Roberts had at Linda Meyer was something very very different we actually have the remains of a campsite that was probably occupied by many different groups of people it's a place where the north-south tending Front Range of the Rocky Mountains intersects the east-west cheyenne escarpment allege a balcony from the plains of Colorado onto the plains of Wyoming we think of these groups as primitive and scattered yet research has shown us that there were a lot more people living here than we previously thought so at the Lindenmayer site we see different groups coming together probably to trade arranged marriages feast and celebrate with each other just like we do now before now people thought that paleo Indian cultures if you will just use rocks and Spears and we're very simple what we see it Lindenmayer include things like sewing needles and grinding stones but then also a lot of stone tools that were used for butchering and sewing and making hides here we have pieces of soapstone as well as bone disks about the size of a half dollar with little tick marks or etching is a lot on the exterior of them where they tools were the gaming pieces where they're just pieces of doodling we're not quite sure but we've not found them on any other folsom site Lindenmayer is famous because it is such a big site with a varied assemblage that shows extended occupation over many years people keep coming back to this place it shows that there is a memory of this place in the fall of 1932 a road crew discovered large ancient animal bones in Clovis New Mexico at the time archeology had become a competitive venture and when this news spread to the east coast a University of Pennsylvania archeologist hopped a train West to investigate the archeologist was Edgar B Howard and he commenced a dig the following summer describing his discovery as matted masses of bones but between these bones was something new slender finger long points much different than the small fluted folsom points identified only a decade earlier these points opened an entirely new window to the past a glimpse into the lives of paleo-indians roughly 13,000 years ago it wasn't long before the newly named Clovis points were discovered all over the Rocky Mountain West the Folsom and Clovis discoveries in New Mexico were very significant but certainly there were sites in Colorado that were just as comparable that were made at about the same time this is the lam spring archaeological preserve in the early 1960s a rancher in Littleton Colorado was using a natural spring to make a stock bond first cattle when they began excavating bones and the story goes is that the bulldozer just went through a field of bones and one of the operators on that bulldozer happened to be a friend of someone at the USGS so phone call was made immediately and said hey I think we got something here and lo and behold they did and from there there were excavations in 1961-1962 those were the summers of discovery as we like to call them what's been great about lam Springs is that people recognized really early what a unique site it was because of how early it is the different types of megafauna remains that are there it would have been wetter the grass would have been much taller about chest height or even taller than that and what you would have roaming initially here were mammoths and prehistoric animals Ice Age animals that no longer exist there were spring sights all up and down the Front Range human hunters were here and they were chasing down their food where there's water there's animals where there's animals there's humans but the artifacts that we're finding out here today in addition to the mammoth bones and the bones of extinct megafauna Pleistocene animals we're finding evidence of flint knapping so making them stone tools a lot of flake stone a few projectile points here and there we're talking hunters and gatherers from 8,000 years ago they're not sitting down to make pottery just yet you know they're following their seasonal rounds and hunting and gathering along the way you also would find butchering sites which are places where you find bison bones with evidence of cut marks small striations on them that were made by stone blades as Paleo hunters Flint's the skin from the bone they would leave behind cut marks our tagline at lamb spring is the past lies beneath your feet and that's because everything is still buried out here the site is owned by the Archaeological Conservancy it's a non-profit and their Charter is to actually preserve sites like this and perpetuity so that they can be used for educational purposes predominantly but also just that sometimes just to preserve them they don't develop them they don't intend to develop them it's really fascinating because you find sort of a string of discoveries up and down the Front Range of Colorado which suggests that i-25 the interstate 25 quarter that we travel today is one of the oldest migration corridors in North America that human beings been traveling up and down the Front Range of Colorado for more than 12,000 years maybe as many as 20,000 years Clovis is 13,000 13,500 years ago something like that but they're all over North America there had to have been somebody here before Clovis they're just not leaving a mark on the landscape it's the absence of evidence right each paleo-indian archaeological site reveals another layer of these fascinating early people the context and location of kill sites and caches add supporting material to this mysterious story paleo-indians continually surprised us we thought that they weren't here for very long and then Folsom and Clovis sites proved us wrong it was also a fairly commonly understood that Paleo Indians never went into the mountains or if they did they didn't stay there for very long because the mountains are of course so inhospitable in the wintertime that who would stay in the mountains for any reasonable amount of time but archaeological sites in the air ghana sun show that not only did american indians live and thrive in the mountains but they lived there for very long periods of occupation we're on the top of Tenderfoot mountain near Gunnison Colorado when you walk around up here you're walking around on the same surface that people have walked on for the last ten eleven thousand years the Mountaineer site is really fascinating because dr. Steiger is not only finding evidence for these earlier occupations he's finding habitation sites and he's finding places that people were at semi-permanently returned to and was kind of an anchor of their world in Colorado what we've found are the remnants of these pit structures where they've actually dug down 30 40 or 50 centimeters in some cases into the bedrock and built some sort of a little habitation structure which had a fire pit in the middle walls that came up on the side probably Aspen poles kind of almost teepee fashion and we actually have remnants of that mud plaster with imprints of the hands where they smoothed the mud so this is not just a simple one-night stay or a week stay most likely we're looking at months and I think that's really fascinating because it opens up our vision of these people and what their lives were like 1994 cell phone companies were putting in some facilities up here the state archaeologists office contacted the cell phone companies and told them they needed to do some archaeological work I surveyed this Mesa top with a number of our undergraduates here and we didn't find anything in the field that was all that spectacular until I actually got to do some analysis on the material that we had collected and in there I found a little fragment of a projectile point it sure looked like a fulsome point but there had been articles published just two years prior to that and the conclusion that was drawn was that Folsom folks did not occupy western Colorado certainly not southwestern Colorado I went back to the spot where that first fragment was found and I found a refitting piece that fit back together for a complete base and there's no doubt about it being a fulsome point when we first discovered how important the site was we talked about moving all the cell phone tower what we've decided to do is to leave everybody in place but keep penny from expanding this Mesa top is got literally hundreds of small occupations on it they're all over the place they seem to be a number of different early time periods represented thanks to the foresight of Marx Tiger in the archaeology department at Western State Colorado University an initiative to halt development upon this historically and culturally rich location is in place year after year dr. Steiger and his students continue to make new paleo-indian discoveries given the rapidly evolving archaeological techniques and technologies the thoughts behind preservation and archaeology have changed over the years when Lindenmayer was first excavated in the 1930s archaeologists wanted to excavate as much as they could it was very destructive people didn't even have a clear idea about how long Native Americans and human occupation had occurred in North America to be able to really understand what it was they were excavating these are stories that need to be preserved because it tells about the rich mosaic of the peoples that have lived in Colorado for thousands of years not just since the 1850s at the turn of the last century archaeology was mostly based in museums and museum people wanted to collect stuff that was exhibition quality could be put on display in about 1920 archaeology began a shift to be based in universities and have research questions guiding the excavation so it wasn't digging just for stuff it was digging to answer questions and over the last seven eight decades the pendulum has swung so far that now we won't do any digging unless there's research questions that are going to be answered through that excavation ethically it's incredibly important to make sure that you don't excavate everything so that's somebody who comes along with better questions and better technology has something that they can look at now archaeologists recognize the importance of leaving items in sit - that's a fancy word that means in place to leave it alone to preserve that context we're using things out here as drone flights 3d photogrammetry you can apply ground-penetrating radar out here to see what kind of collections are beneath the ground that's low disturbance which is nice most of the really enticing artifacts or the organic remains and as soon as you expose them to oxygen they start to break down immediately archeology is a destructive science once you've removed the evidence you destroy it in a way we've got a 3d scanner which allows you to put an artifact like a fulsome point on this little platform and then it shoots laser beams in and scans the artifact and records it and you get a three-dimensional image of whatever you're scanning we can now do blood antigen residue analysis we can test a projectile point and see what kind of animal was killed with that with this residue who knows what the new technology is going to be but we know that leaving portions of the site in place is going to preserve it for future generations to explore these are resources that cannot be replaced this story cannot be retold Andry pieced together unless it's done properly and there's something here for not just the state of Colorado but really just everyone in the America is that it is a human story the National Park Service has recognized the impact that people have on our sites that people want to experience just the presence of so many of us there is impacting these sites well there are a lot of conversations right now among agencies of finding a balance to allow the public to enjoy them scientists to study them or even for them to just exist while other recreation or other activities occur we don't have hard and fast answers about how to deal with those challenges yet but this is a state that loves its outdoors and part of loving its outdoors is respecting its archaeological sites while there is still much to learn about the early dwellers of North America what little we do know inspires modern-day humans in Colorado and beyond today in Colorado were really kind of entering a new age of paleo Indian studies families have been making their way here in Colorado for tens of thousands of years trudging through the snow making their way and creating bonds and families and it really is an example for us today of the tenacity of the people that have made Colorado home I think paleo-indians helped us think about the rugged individualists they're people just like you and I born at a different place and a different time we live in a contemporary moment where Native Americans and other descendant groups are really involved in interpreting the archaeological ethnographic and historical record that relationship with the science and the oral history is really adding a deeper and more rich understanding of what we're seeing in our excavation units are on the ground paleo-indian research really inspires me because that there's a very human side to it I can see our own humanity when I look back 10,000 years and imagine people on this landscape families moving across hundreds of miles singing songs and making camp and eating together what you see our society's evolving and changing through time and so the Palio Indian people didn't disappear they changed their technologies but all these people are related in one way or another and they never truly left Colorado there's more we don't know it's wonderful [Music]

Channel: Rocky Mountain PBS

Views: 85,293

Rating: 4.7724771 out of 5

Keywords: Colorado, History, Paleo Indian, Folsom, Clovis, Prehistoric, Archaeology, Penn Museum, Lamb Spring, Lindenmeier, Mountaineer, Fort Collins, Gunnison, Douglas County, American Experience, PBS

Id: 5ke2IegvfQM

Length: 26min 39sec (1599 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 15 2017