Folsom Point Diggings: The Johnson Site in the Foothills of Larimer County, Colorado

ABSTRACT

The Johnson site is a Folsom occupation in Larimer County, Colorado. T. Russell Johnson discovered the site in 1935, which led to excavations by the Colorado Museum of Natural History in 1936 and later work in 1960 by the University of Wyoming. Little is known of the site due to limited reporting of the excavation and the Folsom assemblage. Our examination of the site collections gathered between 1935 and 1936 reveals an assemblage of 96 items, consisting of Folsom points, preforms, and channel flakes, as well as other tools including end scrapers, gravers, bifaces, and flake tools. Technological analysis of the Folsom points and byproducts of hunting-tool production suggests that site occupants fluted and finished points made from preforms of non-local materials, while additional tools and a few points were made from materials locally available in the Front Range foothills. As such, Johnson represents at minimum a hunting-weaponry-replacement locale.

KEYWORDS:

• Folsom
• Paleoindian
• preform
• lithic technology
• Colorado

Acknowledgements

The Jim and Audrey Benedict Fund for Mountain Archaeology provided funding for this project. The senior author thanks the late Gene Galloway and George Agogino for their conversations about the Johnson site and for sharing their tales of Paleoindian research in the 1950s and 1960s. Thank you to the Pete Lien & Sons Inc. for providing safe access to the site. We thank the staff from the National Anthropological Archives, the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, the Wyoming State Museum, and the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery, and in particular Linda Moore, for helping facilitate our research on the Johnson site. We certainly appreciate the comments of our three anonymous reviewers, as they helped strengthen and clarify our arguments made in the paper. Finally, this project would not have been possible without the help of the Johnson family, who provided photos and details of T. Russell’s life, as well as helping resolve the location of the Johnson site collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The locations of the artifacts and notes generated by the Irwins, Galloway, Agogino, and Steege remain unknown. Over the past 25 years, the senior author queried logical repositories such as the Denver Museum of Nature & Science (Wormington, Holmes), Eastern New Mexico University (Agogino, Cynthia Irwin-Williams), the Wyoming State Museum (Steege), the University of Wyoming Archaeological Repository (Agogino, Galloway), and the Smithsonian Institution, but in nearly all cases, came away with negative information. A few channel flakes from the Johnson site are present in the Wyoming State Museum and one channel flake (perhaps from the Johnson site) is housed at the DMNS. Both Galloway and Agogino had no recollection as to what happened to the site collections from their work (personal communication to the senior author).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jason M. LaBelle

Jason M. LaBelle is associate professor of Anthropology at Colorado State University, where he directs the Center for Mountain and Plains Archaeology. He received his MA and PhD degrees in Anthropology from Southern Methodist University and his BA degree from Colorado State University. Over the past 25 years, he supervised field and lab projects related to hunter-gatherer reoccupation, variation in Paleoindian sites, thermal features, high-altitude game drives, Fremont granaries, and lithic caches. Much of his research focuses on measuring occupational intensity (within site and over time) relative to the various ecosystems of the western Plains and Rocky Mountains.

Kelton A. Meyer

Kelton A. Meyer is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology and Geography at Colorado State University. He is a field and lab director for the Center for Mountain and Plains Archaeology at Colorado State University. He received his MA in Anthropology from Colorado State University, where he examined prehistoric communal hunting and chronology of stone features in alpine environments. His current research focuses on theory and measurement of palimpsests at archaeological sites, spatial statistical models, and Paleoindian lithic technology.

Raymond V. Sumner

Raymond V. Sumner is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology and Geography at Colorado State University. He conducts historical and conflict archaeological research under the Center for Mountain and Plains Archaeology, where he uses his 22 years of military services to assist in contextualizing conflict sites. His current research is on the conflict in 1865 between the US Army and the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota in the aftermath of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre and understanding that conflict’s implications for events over the next two decades. He received an MA in History (Public History concentration) from Colorado State University where he focused on museum studies and how collections, such as the Johnson site, could be located and utilized in current research. He also received an MA in History (American History Concentration) from American Military University and a BA in Political Science from Drake University.