Cultural and Environmental Change of the Terminal Pleistocene Through the Earliest Holocene in the French Pyrénées and America’s Southern Rocky Mountains

Abstract

Cultural adaptive strategies in the French Pyrénées and north central Colorado Rocky Mountains in the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene, although reflecting quite different cultural traditions, had broadly comparable topographies and experienced similar climatic and ecosystem changes in the Late Pleistocene through the Early Holocene. Archaeological and paleoenvironmental data presented in this article describe and compare broadly-based culture-environmental change models associated with the role of natural and human seasonal transhumance patterns of respective Late Pleistocene-Early Holocene landscapes of two widely separated world mountain regions, Europe’s Pyrénées and the North America’s Rocky Mountains.

The Symbiosis of Lichenometry and Radiocarbon Dating: A Bayesian Chronology of Alpine Hunting in Colorado’s Southern Rocky Mountains, Usa

“…In Colorado, there are more than 80 hunting sites with stone architecture above timberline (∼3500 m asl), which range in size and complexity, but the largest contain dozens of stone features used by communal hunting groups on a seasonal basis. The tradition of game driving is a critical variable for models of seasonal transhumance in the region (Black 1991;Benedict 1992Benedict , 1999Brunswig et al 2014), and the high density of sites suggests a local fluorescence of driveline technologies.…”