Lawn Lake, a high montane hunting camp in the Colorado (USA) rocky mountains: Insights into early Holocene Late Paleoindian hunter-gatherer adaptations and paleo-landscapes

Abstract

The Lawn Lake site is a stratified hunting camp situated on a glacial lake outlet river terrace in Rocky Mountain National Park’s upper subalpine forest zone. Its archaeological assemblage represents 9,000 years of hunter-gatherer use as a summer game and plant processing camp for subalpine forest and nearby alpine tundra resource areas. This article’s focus is on the site’s earliest camp levels which contain artifacts and AMS radiocarbon dated hearth charcoal between 8,900 and 7,900 cal yr BP, placing them among the region’s earliest high montane (3,353 m ASL) Paleoindian hunting camps, once part of a network of such sites designed to support systematic high altitude procurement of summer migratory game animals and plant foods in Southern Rocky Mountain subalpine forest and tundra ecosystems. Lawn Lake paleoclimate and paleoecology studies produced long-term pollen records and climate-proxy sediment data for modeling the site’s prehistoric climate and ecology history, useful for interpreting its high-altitude Late Paleoindian hunter-gatherer adaptations.