The Windy Ridge quartzite quarry: hunter-gatherer mining and hunter ...

The Windy Ridge quartzite quarry: hunter-gatherer mining and hunter-gatherer land use on the North American Continental Divide Douglas B. Bamforth

Abstract Studies of hunter-gatherer activity at lithic raw material sources are relatively rare and largely descriptive, in part because archaeologists have viewed hunter-gatherer lithic procurement as a casual and low-cost activity. This paper presents the results of fieldwork at a hunter-gatherer quartzite quarry along the Continental Divide in the Rocky Mountains of northern Colorado that suggests that this perspective is incorrect. Hunter-gatherer groups at the site quarried stone intensively, although they did not often transport this stone any great distance. This suggests that it is useful to reconsider the way we think about lithic procurement, and particularly that we rethink the concepts of ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ procurement. The data presented here highlight the ability of quarry sites to expand our understanding of how mobile human groups used the landscape.

Keywords Hunter-gatherers; lithic procurement; quarries; Rocky Mountains; mobility; lithic technology.

Introduction Archaeologists often recognize a continuum of technological behaviour from the procurement of raw material, through tool manufacture, use and discard (e.g. Bamforth and Bleed 1997; Jeske 1989). However, while there is an enormous literature on the latter portions of this continuum, its beginning – raw material procurement – is often neglected. It is true that procurement sites (mines or quarries) archaeologists have discussed quarry sites for a century of more (Bamforth 1990, 1992; Clark and Clark 1993; Cobb 2000; Holgate 1991; Holmes 1919; Gramly 1980; Ericson and Purdy 1984; Topping and Lynott 2005; Torrence 1986). However, much of the work that has been done on such sites is World Archaeology Vol. 38(3): 511–527 Archaeology at Altitude ª 2006 Taylor & Francis ISSN 0043-8243 print/1470-1375 online DOI: 10.1080/00438240600813871

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descriptive, and tends to emphasize a narrow range of topics, particularly the strategies and stages of reduction carried out at the quarry, the kinds of material transported away from the source, rates of quarry usage over time and techniques used to extract raw stone. Thus, while we increasingly understand where and how people procured raw material, we tend not to consider the larger implications of this procurement. This is particularly true in the case of hunter-gatherer lithic procurement. A widespread interest in social and economic organization and craft production in horticultural groups has led to more synthetic studies of procurement in some areas (Cobb 2000; also see Burton (1984) for an ethnographic example). However, archaeological views of hunter-gatherer procurement have been dominated by the assumption that access to quarries is a low-cost activity ‘embedded’ in overall mobility patterns, which in turn are driven by subsistence practices (cf. Binford 1979); lithic procurement has generally been seen as marking the geographic scale of such movements but not as significantly influencing them. However, this paper both identifies the pattern of activity carried out at a specific quarry site and argues that this site offers important insights into a larger topic – regional land-use patterns – that would be difficult or impossible to obtain from investigations of other kinds of sites. It does this by presenting the results of one season’s work at this site and then considering the implications of this work for overall archaeological approaches to hunter-gatherer lithic procurement and for reconstructing the Native American occupation of the Colorado high country.

The Windy Ridge quartzite quarry Windy Ridge (5GA872; Fig. 1) is located close to the Continental Divide in north-central Colorado at an elevation of 2860m above sea level (Bamforth 1998). Although the site’s exact limits have yet to be determined, its presently known area can be divided into two distinct parts. In the south, the site is centred on a bedrock outcrop of relatively finegrained silver/gray quartzite capped by several feet of sandstone that is exposed along the crest of a north-south trending ridge. Much of the area around this part of the site shows an almost continuous mantle of production debris and large fragments of sandstone. The northernmost tip of this area is marked by a feature locally referred to as the ‘Pinnacle’, a point of stone exposing both the sandstone bedrock and the quartzite within it. In contrast to the higher portions of the ridge away from the Pinnacle, which are covered in pine, the area around the Pinnacle is covered in scrub aspen. The Pinnacle stands 70 to 80 metres above an open area to the north containing a scatter of flakes and finished and unfinished tools and other artefacts (including rare potsherds), as well as hearths. This lower area of the site is covered in grass and shrubs. Flaked stone artefacts in this area are overwhelmingly made of material identical to that exposed in the bedrock outcrops above this area to the south. This northern portion of the site thus appears to have been a relatively generalized occupation or secondary workshop area. Quarrying stone at Windy Ridge In the south, intensive surface survey identified 182 depressions that appear to be humanly excavated pits within an area of roughly 1.3 hectares (Fig. 2). These pits are concentrated

The Windy Ridge quartzite quarry

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Figure 1 Location of the Windy Ridge site.

south of the Pinnacle. In this area of concentration, and on the slopes extending to the east and west, the ground is completely obscured by a thick mantle of quarry debris, including flakes, worked fragments of quartzite, and large and small slabs of sandstone. It is clear that aboriginal miners removed great quantities of stone from the ground, although the huge volume of material left on the surface suggests that they were rather selective in transporting stone from the site. The naturally exposed quartzite seam along the ridge crest, on the Pinnacle and elsewhere, bears numerous hammer marks and flake scars directly on the bedrock, along with undercutting of the sandstone cap overlying the quartzite by removal of flakeable stone. However, the stone in such exposed locations tends to be badly fractured, reducing its suitability for production of many tools. Furthermore, it is impossible to account for the huge amounts of stone debris on the site surface through this kind of mining, which is possible only along the very crest of the ridge. Instead, the numerous quarry pits suggest that most stone was extracted at Windy Ridge by digging down through the overlying sandstone to the quartzite. Excavation of part of one of these pits documents this in some detail.

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Figure 2 Distribution of surface-visible quarry pits on the Windy Ridge site.

Excavations within the pit (Pit 3-2) produced evidence for labour-intensive efforts to dig down through the sandstone cap into the underlying quartzite vein. We opened seven 1-metre units within one pit, four of which penetrated to the floor of the Native American excavation. Figure 3 shows the excavation grid superimposed on the original contours of the pit, along with the location and configuration of Pit 3-3, immediately to the west.


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Figure 3 Pre-excavation topography of Pits 3-2 and 3-3, and excavation grid in Pt 3-2. Contour interval 20cm.

Figure 4 shows the results of the excavations. Profiles across the floor of this excavation (Fig. 5) indicate that aboriginal miners on the site dug down nearly 1.5m through solid rock to reach and remove blocks of quartzite. The simplest means of doing this is to exploit natural fissures in the sandstone, possibly by hammering into them stone wedges; excavation recovered fragments of both sandstone and quartzite that appear to have been used in this way. Such efforts would have broken off slabs of rock, which could then be removed using levers and brute force. Direct evidence of quarrying using some form of percussion can be seen in scars on the corners of the sandstone that were clearly formed by sharp blows, although such scars are not numerous, implying that the sandstone was rarely struck directly. Similar techniques may have been used to remove the quartzite itself. We found no evidence of any use of fire. The fill within the pit took three forms. First, the uppermost sediments are mantled by a thin and discontinuous layer of organic humus or soil. The second, and most abundant, component of the fill consists of flakes, cores and other worked pieces, along with relatively small (generally, fist-sized and smaller) fragments of sandstone, in a matrix of extremely fine-grained sediment. This deposit appears to represent knapping and quarrying debris that was initially deposited outside the pit and was subsequently blown in by the wind and washed in by rain and melting snow. Third, in addition to the relatively small pieces of sandstone scattered throughout the fill, there are discrete concentrations of much larger sandstone slabs (as much as a metre in maximum dimension) within the fill. These concentrations almost certainly represent human activity: they appear to be constructed piles of slabs of rock that were removed to get down to the quartzite. Indeed, very similar piles can be seen on the modern ground surface adjacent to isolated pits in less intensely exploited areas of the site. Interestingly, the piles we encountered in our trench overlie, and are themselves overlain by, secondary deposits (Figs 6 and 7). This implies that the pit was initiated and then left open long enough to accumulate material deposited by wind and rain. Sandstone blocks generated

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Figure 4 Extent of excavation within Quarry Pit 3-2.

during later episodes of quarrying were then deposited within the pit on top of this material, and the pit was then abandoned again. Such episodic use of the pit area is particularly interesting in light of our discoveries regarding the character of the feature in which we were excavating, which this paper has referred to as a ‘pit’. We anticipated that the size and shape of the depressions that we mapped would reflect the size and shape of the underlying aboriginal excavations which formed them. If this had been correct, we should have found a semi-circular excavation into the rock whose limits corresponded approximately to the surface limits of the pit. Instead, we found ourselves unable to locate pit walls in most of our units where such walls should have been. Instead, we located bedrock faces only in the south-western and northernmost portions of the excavation (Fig. 4). In the north, the rock face runs roughly straight along an east–west line and underlies the point at which the pre-excavation ground surface dips down into the pit, as we expected it would (although this face appears to turn sharply to the north at its western end). However, the rock face in the south west juts into the excavated area, with converging faces extending to the south west and south. To the west, we encountered a wall of sediment, flakes, sandstone rubble and quartzite fragments extending from one bedrock face to the other; similar walls are evident on the north and south walls of the excavation where bedrock is not exposed. The edge of ‘Pit’ 3-3 is located approximately 1 metre beyond this wall (Fig. 3). To the east, we encountered


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Figure 5 Cross-section of bedrock exposed in Quarry Pit 3-2.

a layer of large sandstone slabs just below the ground, extending parallel to the slope of the modern surface down towards the bedrock floor in the centre of the pit. However, this layer lies not on the bedrock surface but on an accumulation of sediment and flaking debris. The concentration of rock evident in the eastern two-thirds of the northern profile (Fig. 7) is a portion of this layer of rock. Pits or trenches? Obtaining stone using the techniques evident in our excavation is hard work, which almost certainly must have involved some level of cooperative effort and a substantial investment of time. Following previously exposed seams of quartzite into the walls of existing pits rather than initiating completely new pits would minimize such effort, and such a pattern

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Figure 6 Profile of south face of excavation in Quarry Pit 3-2.

Figure 7 Profile of north face of excavation in Quarry Pit 3-2.

of extraction fits well with our excavation data. The contour of the corner of bedrock in the south-western part of our excavation suggests that the aboriginal excavation in which we were working is not circular, but, rather, represents a portion of a network of trenches. Consistent with this, there are depressions to the north and west of the pit like the one we excavated. The converging faces of rock that form the bedrock corner in the south west of our excavation are directly in line with these depressions: excavating along those faces would most likely lead directly into those depressions. The isolated pits in the more peripheral areas of the quarry may perhaps conform more closely to our pre-excavation expectations, but it is likely that individual depressions in the intensively exploited sections of the site were formed by aboriginal miners piling quarry debris beside or behind their immediate work areas. If this reconstruction is correct, it forces us to view the more northern portions of the quarry area, where rubble and quartzite fragments are the densest, as potentially a single cultural feature. In this area, isolated free-standing remnants of the sandstone cap suggest


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that the surface of the ridge was lowered as much as a metre or more: such remnants occur nowhere else on the ridge and such intensive demolition of the rock over such a large area is difficult or impossible to account for naturally. The tremendous accumulation of material downslope from this area, then, must be viewed essentially as mine tailings, directly comparable to those around late nineteenth-century mining towns south of Middle Park. Chronology The greatest problem in making sense out of the patterns evident at Windy Ridge is the difficulty in dating any specific component of the site’s occupation. None of our excavations recovered dateable materials, and the likelihood that most of the sediment within the pit in the quarry area is redeposited implies that any such material would be difficult to link to the activity there in any event. The area around the site has been occupied by Native Americans at least since the Folsom period (Kornfeld and Frison 2000; Naze 1986), and Windy Ridge could have been accessed at any time during that occupation. We recovered projectile points from the site surface dating throughout most of the last 9000 years, along with a single tiny fragment of pottery consistent with the kinds of ceramics used in the region after AD 1300. Overturf (1994) measured lichen growth to estimate how long large quartzite chunks had been exposed on the site surface, producing age estimates within the last 1000 years. These last results suggest that the major quarrying activity at the site is relatively recent, but Overturf’s work examined only surface material; it is possible that debris removed in earlier quarry efforts is obscured by the accumulation of later debris. The available information suggests that the quarry was used most heavily within the last 1000 years or so, but this cannot be taken as a firm conclusion at present.

Discussion The Windy Ridge quarry thus represents a labour-intensive pattern of exploitation of flakeable stone involving the removal of several feet of bedrock over large areas to get down to the desired material. The remainder of this paper considers the implications of this pattern for understanding Native Americans of the Middle Park region. To do this, it is necessary to begin by discussing the overall conceptual framework within which huntergatherer archaeology generally addresses the use of raw material sources. Embedded and direct procurement This framework derives principally from Binford’s ethnoarchaeological work among the Nunamiut. According to Binford, among the Nunamiut: If everything goes well, there are few or no direct costs accountable for the procurement of raw materials used in the manufacture of implements. . . . Raw materials used in [this] manufacture are normally obtained incidentally to the execution of basic subsistence tasks. Very rarely, and then only when things have gone wrong, does one go out into

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the environment for the express and exclusive purpose of obtaining raw material for tools. (Binford 1979: 269) This argument provides the basis for a distinction between direct procurement, in which stone-tool users make special trips to raw material sources to collect stone, and embedded procurement, in which stone-tool users obtain stone in the context of trips made for other purposes. The pattern that Binford describes for the Nunamiut is clearly embedded procurement, and archaeologists who have considered this topic generally argue that this pattern characterizes most, if not all, hunter-gatherer lithic procurement. However, we can distinguish two components of Binford’s discussion. The first of these is his observation that the Nunamiut gather stone from sources that are close to the areas where they happen to be carrying out other activities. Procurement is thus ‘embedded’ in their seasonal rounds of movement across the landscape. This implies that the distance between the site at which exotic stone is found and the source of that stone does not necessarily measure anything about the effort expended to acquire it; instead, it more often measures a group’s regional scale of movement. Second, though, Binford extends this observation to argue that hunter-gatherer lithic procurement is always carried out incidentally to other activities. This second usage of the term implies that access to raw material sources is unlikely to have any great impact on the movement of residential groups across the landscape and that procurement costs for raw material are unlikely to be important determinants of technological patterns. In effect, as Binford argues in the quote above, it implies that there are essentially no costs associated with raw material procurement. Other ethnoarchaeological data provide a somewhat different view of this issue. Observing the aborigines of the Western Desert of Australia, Gould notes that: By far the greatest amount of time and effort in the stone tool-making process occurred during quarrying and transport. Not only did this behavior involve visits to specific localities where stone could be quarried and collected, but it also included transport of the stone back to camp for further shaping and use. These visits were often planned ahead of time, since quarries seldom occur in close proximity to waterholes where aborigines camp in the normal course of their hunting and gathering routine. Special efforts were made by aborigines to visit quarry localities, but only when the lithic raw material had something special about it. White chert was always collected in this manner, from localities known to lie within a day’s walk of a habitation base camp. Individual men or small groups of men made such trips whenever their supplies of this type of raw material ran low. (Gould 1978: 230) This suggests a rather different picture of lithic procurement than Binford’s, one in which special efforts are made to obtain rock and in which these efforts, in fact, represent the major investment of time and energy in stone tool production. At one level, Gould’s and Binford’s data agree: the fact that Australians make special trips to quarries within a day’s walk of camp implies that such trips are embedded in their overall seasonal round of movements. Indeed, much of the Gould/Binford ‘Righteous


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Rocks’ debate (Binford 1985; Binford and Stone 1985; Gould 1985; Gould and Saggers 1985) can be resolved by observing that aboriginal Australians embed lithic procurement in individual sacred as well as group-level secular movements, and Tacon (1991) argues that at least some Australian lithic materials were invested with great symbolic meaning as a result of their association with sacred places. Similarly, MacDonald (1999) argues that hunter-gatherers probably embedded the procurement of small amounts of stone in most long-distance movements of individuals, including movements in search of marriage partners. However, Binford’s and Gould’s accounts conflict fairly substantially with regard to the assertion that lithic procurement is cost free. These issues have a number of implications for the data from Windy Ridge (see below). However, it is worth noting that they also suggest that it may not be particularly useful to search for archaeological signatures of embedded or direct procurement among mobile hunters and gatherers: in essence, lithic procurement among such groups is probably embedded in an overall seasonal round of movements and procurement of large amounts of material is probably direct in the sense that it require a trip to a source and expenditure of effort getting stone while at that source. The distinction between embedded and direct procurement may be important in studying settled horticulturalists (cf. Torrence 1986), although, even for these groups, issues of mobility and access to lithic raw material can be complex (Bamforth and Woodman 2004). However, research focused on the interaction between mobility patterns and access to lithic material (Bamforth 1986; Brantingham 2003; Ingbar 1994) – that is, on the ways in which varying patterns of movement or varying distributions of raw material alter the ways in which groups can embed procurement in a seasonal round – is likely to be more useful in many other cases. In these cases, distinguishing between procurement through trade and procurement through visits to raw material sources is likely to be more important (but, as Meltzer (1989) points out, also difficult). Embedded procurement and/or costly procurement? The differences between Gould’s and Binford’s observations very likely reflect at least two important factors. The first of these has to do with differences in transport capabilities. The Nunamiut use sleds and, more recently, snowmobiles extensively, providing them with the ability to move far larger volumes of material than many other hunter-gatherer groups, at least during certain times of the year. They also regularly carry fairly large packs, which also enhance their carrying abilities. In contrast, Gould explicitly emphasizes the importance of the limited transport capabilities of his informants: Since these trips [to quarries] were made on foot, the amounts of material . . . . collected and carried back were limited . . . I have observed previously uncontacted desert Aborigines carrying one or two large cores of stone by hand and numerous stone flakes tucked up inside their hair. (Gould 1978: 230) Such limits on transport capabilities are likely to have been common in the past, suggesting that the Nunamiut case is marginally relevant to many other hunter-gatherer groups in this context.

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Second, the difference between these two perspectives reflects an important historical difference between the Nunamiut and the Australian aborigines. When Gould was working in Australia, stone tools were important components of Aboriginal technology; acquiring raw material thus mattered to important aspects of people’s lives. In contrast, Binford’s informants used stone tools (when they used them at all) as a fourth or fifth back-up to their otherwise metal, store-bought tools. Much of Binford’s information on stone tools reflects older men’s memories of what their fathers told them about the past rather than direct ethnographic observation. It is perhaps not surprising to find that a group that does not rely on stone tools also does not expend much effort procuring material to produce them. Whether or not a stone tool-dependent group could predictably supply its needs using the kind of casual, ad hoc procurement patterns described by Binford would presumably depend on the volume of stone the group needed and on the distribution of source locales relative to other resources. In fact, both Reher (1991) and Holen (1991) have observed that Binford’s arguments are difficult to reconcile with archaeological evidence of stone-tool procurement. Working on the plains of eastern Wyoming, Reher shows that hunter-gatherers made massive efforts to mine stone – efforts that probably exceed those evident at Windy Ridge (Kozłowski (1991) documents similar efforts by Palaeolithic hunter-gathers in Europe). Major quarries in Reher’s area show extensive evidence of residential occupation, despite the presence of preferable camping locales in the region around the quarries, implying that raw material sources actively influenced settlement and mobility patterns. Similarly, Holen shows that the Pawnees in Nebraska combined the acquisition of substantial amounts of stone with long-distance bison hunting, in order to carry out ‘two absolutely necessary procurement activities, meat and lithic, in one trip’ (Holen 1991: 410). Procurement costs at Windy Ridge The ‘no-cost’ usage of the notion of ‘embedded procurement’ is thus considerably problematic and is particularly difficult to reconcile with the archaeological record at Windy Ridge. It is certainly possible to pick up substantial amounts of quartzite casually from the surface of the site. However, the stone available in this way appears to be largely the less desirable (more granular and fragmented) material and was, in any case, generated by the more labour-intensive mining activities described earlier. These activities appear to represent a considerable investment of human time and energy, suggesting that access to the site was important to the people who used it. In contrast to the inference that the location and character of quarries have limited impacts on hunter-gatherer use of the landscape, then, the Windy Ridge data imply that the distribution and nature of such sites might well be important factors structuring such use. Native American mobility in the Middle Park area If so, Windy Ridge might well tell us something important about Native American use of north-central Colorado. At the outset, it is essential to note that the chronological ambiguity of the features at the site makes any detailed interpretation provisional and subject to change. Certainly, obtaining reliable dates on the intensive mining documented


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at the crest of the ridge is a major topic for future research. However, it is possible to suggest a pattern of behavior that can account for the data at hand. One important key to understanding this pattern is that, despite the apparent effort that went into obtaining Windy Ridge quartzite, it does not seem to have travelled very far from the area around the quarry in any great quantity. Quartzite is common in assemblages in the southern portions of North Park, into the Steamboat Springs area and south into Middle Park, but is rarely found elsewhere. Sites in the southernmost portions of Middle Park tend to be dominated by Kremmling chert, a material that derives from a source in that area, roughly 40km from Windy Ridge, and Windy Ridge quartzite is often entirely absent in more distant areas of the high country. For example, Benedict (1992) has noted that assemblages from Front Range sites east of Middle Park often produce tools made from quartzite and other Middle Park sources, but this appears to be about as far away as the rock can be found in any quantity. Even this observation may exaggerate the degree of movement of Windy Ridge material, as virtually identical stone is found in a number of localities in the northern Rockies and adjacent areas. Indeed, Reher’s (1991) eastern Wyoming quarries produce just such material, distinguished from that at Windy Ridge macroscopically by its predominantly gold rather than grey colour. This seeming conflict between intensive exploitation of the source and the limited distribution of the stone such exploitation produced suggests a pattern in which human beings arrived at the site and procured tools for use in the immediate area. The region around the site is known today as a good hunting area, and Middle Park was a major source of meat for the mining towns to the south in the late 1800s. It is therefore possible that Native Americans occupied the site and its surroundings primarily during the warmer months of the year, and may have done so to hunt: in winter, many animals move to lower elevations and deep snows hinder human movement, making movement to other areas probable. If this is so, we must also note that raw material sources are widespread in the Colorado Rockies. Black (pers. comm.) observes that, despite the fact that only about 2 per cent of the area contained within the Colorado mountain counties has been surveyed, over 200 raw material sources have been recorded. There is thus no great incentive to transport large amounts of stone very far, as many of the areas to which people could have moved have raw material nearby. The quality of the quartzite available at Windy Ridge may also have influenced this pattern: although it occurs in a fairly fine-grained form, it is often more intractable than most cryptocrystalline silicates and may therefore have been less desirable. Procurement at Windy Ridge was most likely embedded in a seasonal round in which hunter-gatherers moved into the Middle Park region as the snow melted, perhaps primarily to hunt, and moved out, perhaps to more sheltered areas to the south, for the colder months. While in Middle Park, these groups exploited the Windy Ridge quartzite source for tools needed to support them during their sojourn in the region, but they rarely took these tools with them when they left. The data needed to test these possibilities in detail are not yet available, but several observations are consistent with them. The first of these is the pattern of production at Windy Ridge. Excavations in the quarry and workshop areas clearly show that cores and bifaces were reduced in both areas, although bifaces were more common in the quarry area and cores were more common in the workshops. However, there is an unusually high

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frequency of late stage bifaces in both areas: overall, the ratio of unfinished (Stage 2 or 3 in Callahan’s (1979) terms) to finished (Stage 4) bifaces is 2.5 to 1; this ratio is 3.5 to 1 in the quarry area and 1.2 to 1 in the camping area. In contrast, at the Allen site, a Palaeoindian camp in Nebraska that is located adjacent to a raw material source and that shows abundant evidence of biface production, the ratio of unfinished to finished pieces is approximately 10 to 1 (Bamforth 2002a, 2002b, 2003). Knappers at the Allen site were likely ‘gearing up’, or producing an excess of partially finished tools for transport elsewhere, and the low frequency of late-stage bifaces at the site results from the fact that production was typically halted in the intermediate stages. In contrast, the Windy Ridge knappers appear to have carried biface reduction through to completion much more often, suggesting that they were producing tools for immediate, rather than future, use. This reconstruction also implies a fairly local, mountain-oriented way of life, which is consistent with arguments that the mountains were occupied by populations distinct from, but in contact with, those on the adjacent Great Plains and Great Basin (Black 1991; Pitblado 2003; Stiger 2001). They are less consistent with some of the proposed details of these adaptations, though. For example, Benedict (1992) has proposed a ‘rotary system’ of seasonal movement for the later occupations in the region, with groups moving north along the foothills of the Front Range in winter, crossing into North Park and Middle Park in the summer, arriving at a series of fairly sophisticated game-drive systems constructed above tree line along the Colorado Front Range in the fall. However, the most common variety of non-local stone at Windy Ridge is Kremmling chert, which suggests that people often arrived at the site from the south rather than from the north. If so, the Windy Ridge data may fit better with the kind of pattern Benedict has suggested for the Early Archaic, in which groups from the eastern edge of the Front Range moved over the mountain passes into the mountain parks in the summer to hunt. However, the presence of substantial Early Archaic pit structures that probably represent winter houses in the mountains at sites like Yarmony (Metcalf and Black 1991), implies a permanent human residence in the high country during at least some times in the past. Researchers like Black (1991) have argued for such a presence during most, if not all, of prehistory.

Conclusions The reality of what happened at Windy Ridge probably represents movements of hunting groups not just into the region from the east, but also within the high country itself, movements that probably shifted over time in response to many factors that are presently very poorly understood. Windy Ridge certainly has the potential to help sort these changes out, although problems of chronology and sampling remain major challenges to future work there. As we work these out, though, it should be possible to realize at least a portion of the substantial research potential of the site and, perhaps, to stimulate more work on other such sites. Such work is probably more important than the existing archaeological literature suggests. As both the Windy Ridge data and other archaeological data suggest, raw material procurement is not necessarily a cost-free endeavour for hunter-gatherers or anyone else. Stone-tool users must ensure adequate access to raw material, and, depending


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on such factors as the distribution of raw material and human movements relative to it, this can be an important factor determining many other aspects of their activities. Movements of both hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists in many areas were probably conditioned, in part, by the need to obtain stone as much as by the subsistence and social factors that the archaeological literature tends to emphasize. We would do well to build this possibility into our analyses, and to treat stone as a resource whose form and distribution, like the form and distribution of other resources, impact on the ways in which humans could use it.

Acknowledgements I was introduced to Windy Ridge by Bob Nykamp of the USDA Forest Service. Fieldwork there was conducted by the 1993 University of Colorado, Boulder, summer archaeological field school, with the support of Routt National Forest archaeologist Sue Struthers. We benefited greatly from assistance from Sue’s field staff, particularly Jeff Overturf. The detailed site maps and profiles were drawn by Michael Whalen. Review comments helped considerably to focus and clarify my central arguments here.

Anthropology Department, University of Colorado

References Bamforth, D. B. 1986. Technological efficiency and tool curation. American Antiquity, 51: 38–50. Bamforth, D. B. 1990. Settlement, raw material, and lithic procurement in the central Mojave Desert. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 9: 70–104. Bamforth, D. B. 1992. Quarries in context: a regional perspective on lithic procurement. In Stone Tool Procurement, Production, and Distribution in California Prehistory (ed. J. Arnold). Perspectives in California Archaeology, Vol. 2. UCLA Institute of Archaeology, pp. 131–50. Bamforth, D. B. 1998. Test excavations at 5GA872, the Windy Ridge quartzite quarry. Report submitted to the USDA Forest Service, Routt National Forest, Steamboat Springs, CO. Bamforth, D. B. 2002a. High-tech foragers? Folsom and later Paleoindian technology on the Great Plains. Journal of World Prehistory, 16: 55–98. Bamforth, D. B. 2002b. The Paleoindian occupation of the Medicine Creek drainage, southwestern Nebraska. In Medicine Creek: 70 Years of Archaeological Investigations (ed. D. Roper). Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, pp. 54–83. Bamforth, D. B. 2003. Rethinking the role of bifacial technology in Paleoindian adaptations on the Great Plains. In Multiple Approaches to the Study of Bifacial Technologies (eds M. Soressi and H. Dibble). Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 209–28. Bamforth, D. B. and Bleed, P. 1997. Technology, flaked stone technology, and risk. In Rediscovering Darwin: Evolutionary Theory and Archaeological Explanation (eds G. Clark and M. Barton). Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association no. 7, pp. 109–41. Bamforth, D. B. and Woodman, P. 2004. Tool hoards and Neolithic use of the landscape in northeastern Ireland. Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 23: 21–44.

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Douglas B. Bamforth received his MA and PhD from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He is currently Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His primary areas of research have focused on lithic analysis (particularly microwear analysis), hunters and gatherers, and the North American Great Plains.