'The First Ascent: Ten Thousand Years of Native American Occupation in the Colorado Mountains'

About the program:

Professor LaBelle’s lecture, The First Ascent, details our current understanding of Native American occupation of Colorado’s highest mountains over the past ten thousand years, as revealed through archaeology, ethnohistory, and oral history. Colorado archaeologists have recorded several thousand indigenous sites above 10,000 feet, with particularly high densities in the Colorado Front Range and San Juan mountains. LaBelle will demonstrate the various ways Native American peoples called these mountain ranges their “home”, showcasing research on complex hunting traps known as game drives, lakeside campsites, broken pottery “trails”, and items rapidly melting from ice patches, such as bison bone, stone tools, and coniferous trees.

About the presenter:

Jason LaBelle is a Professor of Anthropology within the Department of Anthropology and Geography at Colorado State University (since 2005), Director of the Center for Mountain and Plains Archaeology, and Curator of CSU’s Archaeological Repository. As a past president of the Colorado Council of Professional Archaeologists and the Colorado Archaeological Society, he enjoys working with the greater archaeological community and sharing his knowledge with the general public. He obtained his BA degree in Anthropology from Colorado State University and his MA and PhD in Anthropology from Southern Methodist University. His research lab, the Center for Mountain and Plains Archaeology, is grant-sponsored by federal agencies and supported by the James and Audrey Benedict Endowment for Mountain Archaeology. His research specializes in the subsistence and mobility of Native American hunter-gatherers inhabiting the American West over the past 13,000 years, with primary emphasis in Colorado. He has active research projects underway in Rocky Mountain National Park and within several Wilderness Study Areas in the deep canyons of northwestern Colorado.