Archæological Survey of Colorado

Abstract

IN America the distribution of a physically homogeneous population over a wide and geographically diversified area has given a special significance to the study and determination of cultural similarities and differences and their distribution, for which in archological studies, survey work is the first essential. The value of the intensive local survey in this connexion is illustrated by the third report of the Archological Survey of Eastern Colorado, covering the work done in 1932, which is issued by the Department of Anthropology in the University of Denver. Dr. E. B. Renaud, professor of anthropology and director of the Survey, with his assistants and the help of residents, covered 4,071 miles, in which much previously archologicaly unknown country was visited and more than a hundred new sites recorded. A journey of reconnaissance was also made in Nebraska. The point of special interest is that Prof. Renaud records the discovery of basketry and other remains in caves south-west of Fowler and north-east of Beulah. It now becomes known for the first time, through the systematic work of the Survey, that the Basket-Maker culture, previously recorded in Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, south-west Colorado and western Oklahoma, also extended so far north as the Arkansas basin in north-eastern Colorado. A second addition made in this season's work to the distribution map of prehistoric culture is the record from many new districts in Colorado and also Nebraska of Yuma and Folsom artefacts, the flaked points believed by many to have been used by hunting peoples of the Upper Pleistocene. On the other hand, the study of the pottery which appears in this report inculcates the necessity for caution in generalisation while the work of the survey is still incomplete. In the previous season the number of sites on which undecorated pottery and pottery decorated with the impressed cord pattern were found was about equaltwenty-three to twenty-fivebut this year the decorated pottery sites outnumbered the undecorated by more than three to one.