Late Pleistocene culturally modified mammoth bones from Kansas

[Daryl Habel]

The high incidence of Folsom sites in the mountains is of interest.Has anyone sighted any additional information on this topic?

There's quite a bit of information, including primary literature available from internet sources.  

To begin with, free full text from PNAS:

Frison, G.C. (1998). Paleoindian large mammal hunters on the plains of North America. PNAS.  Vol. 95, Issue 24, 14576-14583.

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/95/24/14576

and

Lovvorn, M.B., Frison, G.C. & Tieszan, L.L. (2001). Paleoclimate and Amerindians: Evidence from stable isotopes and atmospheric circulation.  PNAS. vol. 98, no. 5, pp.  2485-2490.

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/98/5/2485

These should provide you with some general background to a proposed (and generally well-accepted) shift  during the Holocene into two concurrent but distinct cultural groups, based on subsistence strategies, as earlier proposed by George Frison in:

Frison, G.C. (1992). The Foothills/Mountains and the Open Plains: the dichotomy in Paleoindian subsistence strategies between two ecosystems. In Stanford, D.J. & Day, R.S. (eds.), Ice Age Hunters of the Rockies. Niwot, CO: University of Colorado Press. pp. 323-342.

Ice age Hunters of the Rockies also has an article:

Benedict, J.B. (1992). Along the Great Divide: Paleoindian archaeology of the high Colorado Front Range. ibid. pp. 343-362.

This summarizes findings from some Folsom sites found in the high-altitude Front Range of Colorado.  I have the book, and recommend the entire volume, it's very good reference on many aspects of Paleoindian research.

However, to continue with what is available free from the internet, check into Todd Sorovell's University of Wyoming website at:

http://uwacadweb.uwyo.edu/SUROVELL/

for several freely downloadable pdfs, especially look into the Barger Gulch excavations in Middle Park, Colorado.

Dar

 

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

Another update on Kanorado from the RockyMountainNews:
http://rockymountainnews.com/drmn/state/article/0,1299,DRMN_21_3865433,00.html

Apparently they found at least one more large bone in the final days of this years dig.

Thanks for passing on this additional bit of journalistic info on the Kansas work carried out by Steve Holen and Rolfe Mendel. However, you will have to admit that -- except for the lengthy section on the Folsom discoveries -- it does not add much substance to the previous reports. Actually, what I find most interesting is the insistence of the part of the writer to present these Kanorado finds in an interpretive light that -- should they survive further analyses -- will not serve them well, palaeoanthropologically speaking.

Jacques