Description

In this presentation, Dr. Jason LaBelle provides an overview of his lab’s ongoing work on Fremont farming communities located along the base of Blue Mountain, situated between the Yampa and White River valleys of southwestern Moffat County, Colorado. He will discuss results from excavation (5MF379, 5MF607, 5MF835), pedestrian survey, radiocarbon dating, repository collections work, and photogrammetric mapping of over 20 granaries scattered in this rugged canyon country. Rather than being an isolated and ephemeral occupation, he argues that Blue Mountain was (relatively) intensively occupied by small hamlets of farmers approximately 1000 years ago, and one of a number of contemporaneous Fremont polities in the region, centered in places like Canyon Pintado, Cub Creek, Castle Park, and Browns Park. The ultimate goal of this work is to better understand the interaction between these scattered communities and with the larger Fremont villages found further west in the Uinta Basin of Utah and beyond.