Antelope Springs: A Folsom Site in South Park, Colorado

ABSTRACT

The Antelope Springs Folsom locality is located near Trout Creek Pass, which connects South Park, a high elevation basin in the Rocky Mountains, with the headwaters region of the Arkansas River. The pass is also the source of an eponymous jasper that dominates the small, surface collection of Folsom points, preforms, tools, and debitage we report on here. The Antelope Springs assemblage was focused on the reduction and replacement of a stone tool kit. There does not appear to have been a substantial Folsom-age presence in South Park, although based on other Folsom sites where Trout Creek jasper occurs, and least-cost paths of travel through the southern Rocky Mountains, South Park and Trout Creek Pass may well have been regularly traversed between Middle Park and San Luis Valley, areas that had a more significant Folsom presence.

KEYWORDS:

• Folsom
• mobility
• Trout Creek jasper
• southern Rocky Mountains

Acknowledgements

We thank the late Bob Patten and his wife Laurey for generously providing these and other materials from Bob’s studies in Paleoindian technology. As is our practice, private collections we receive are donated to public museums where they can be accessible to researchers and interested parties. We are pleased on behalf of Bob and Laurey to donate the Patten Antelope Springs assemblage to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, a public and federally funded institution, for permanent curation.

We are grateful to Bob Brunswig, who kindly made available the reports from the surveys made in South Park in the early 2000s; to Susan Bender, Kevin Black, and Tom Lincoln, who provided helpful information from their fieldwork in the region; and to Jack Hofman, Jason LaBelle, Todd Surovell, and Tom Westfall, who responded to various queries.

Finally, we would like to thank our three anonymous reviewers whose constructive and thoughtful comments helped us improve the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The hand samples used in the pXRF analysis are from the Tony Baker collection, Quest Archaeological Research Laboratory, SMU. Unfortunately, the precise spot where Baker collected the samples was not recorded. Although we suspect they came from 5CF84, the principal Trout Creek Quarry site, we have not been able to confirm this suspicion.

2 Black and Theis (2015) observe that lithic material macroscopically similar to Trout Creek occurs south of the principal source, indicating a potentially shorter (by ∼40 km) travel distance to the San Luis Valley, assuming groups exploited those localities.

3 Todd Surovell (personal communication, 2020) reports that while he and his colleagues have never positively identified Flattop at Barger Gulch, there are a couple of artifacts that he suspects may be made of that material. However, because of its similarity to Troublesome chert, he has not identified Flattop as the source of those specimens.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Quest Archaeological Research Program, SMU.

Notes on contributors

Matthew Boulanger

Matthew Boulanger is a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University. He holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of Missouri, and has research interests in Paleoindians, cultural evolution, and landscape ecology.

Robert J. Patten

Robert J. Patten was an avocational archaeologist and master flintknapper. He authored the books Old Tools, New Eyes (2009) and Peoples of the Flute (2005), among several other research works.

Brian N. Andrews

Brian N. Andrews is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and Sociology at Rogers State University in Claremore, Oklahoma. He has conducted research throughout the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, examining questions of mobility, settlement, technology, spatial patterning, and social organization.

Michelle R. Bebber

Michelle Bebber is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. She specializes in experimental archaeology and co-directs the Kent State University Experimental Archaeology Laboratory.

Briggs Buchanan

Briggs Buchanan is Associate Professor of anthropology at the University of Tulsa in Tulsa, Oklahoma. His research investigates the evolution of technology among small-scale societies particularly in response to environmental and demographic changes.

Ian Jorgeson

Ian Jorgeson is a graduate student in anthropology at Southern Methodist University. His doctoral research explores the causes and consequences of Pueblo coalescence in the Classic Period Northern Rio Grande.

G. Logan Miller

G. Logan Miller is Associate Professor of anthropology at Illinois State University in Normal, IL. He currently directs field research at the Langford Tradition village of Noble-Wieting in central Illinois.

Metin I. Eren

Metin I. Eren is Assistant Professor at Kent State University and a Research Associate at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

David J. Meltzer

David J. Meltzer is Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory at Southern Methodist University. His research interests are in the peopling of the Americas, Paleoindians and paleoenvironments, and the history of American archaeology.