That model proposes establishment, within a millennium and a half of arrival of the region's earliest Clovis hunter-gatherers, of systematic, often logistically-organized, seasonal transhumance strategies between mountain-interior basin valleys, Front Range foothills and high altitude mountain forests and alpine tundra by indigenous native populations, strategies only occasionally modified by periodic introduction of new technologies and cycles of climatic change.
Comparative archaeological and Geographic Information System (GIS) modeling studies have reconstructed long-term prehistoric subsistence and paleoclimate/ paleoecosystem change in North Central Colorado's mountains resulting in a thirteen millennia model of cultural landscape history. Three decades of archaeological field studies in Colorado's Southern Rocky Mountains have documented thousands of prehistoric sites and site components occupied from the Late Pleistocene to Early Historic times. Large game drives of the Colorado alpine zone represent accumulated landscapes of artifacts and features, the byproduct of many years of construction, use, and re-use, and built for a variety of reasons.
Lithic analysis of the debitage and tools, from both excavated (blinds) and surface contexts (intercept and processing areas), provides possible scenarios for the use of the site. Radiocarbon and lichenometric dates suggest occupations spanning the last 3200 years, with diagnostic tools suggesting even older use. At least 45 blinds and 1307 m of rock walls are present, to funnel game upslope to waiting hunters.
Byron Olson and James Benedict conducted work at the site in the late 1960s.We combined their efforts with our recent field and lab work to produce a synthetic overview of the site. It is one part of a much larger game drive complex located at Rollins Pass, situated above modern tree limit and along the Continental Divide, at approximately 3600 m above sea level. The Olson site (5BL147) is a multi-component rock walled game drive located in the James Peak wilderness area of Northern Colorado, USA.
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