Project Summary: The internship will last 10 weeks including a 4 week field component in Mongolia participating in archaeological field work. The intern will prepare for and accompany the Arctic Studies Center's field expedition to Mongolia, 15 June to 16 July, 2005 and will assist William W. Fitzhugh in processing field data upon her return to Washington DC in late July and August. During fieldwork, she will take part in a research conference and workshops taking place upon our arrival in Ulaanbaatar and will help organize the logistics of the field program. During fieldwork she will assist in archaeological surveys and excavations, work with local Mongolian experts on the expedition, assist in various aspects of other scientific work in botany and ethnography, and will help with field logistics and data processing. Following her return to Washington DC she will transscribe field notes and documentation, process samples, and work up a report on the expedition and its results under the supervision of project director, William Fitzhugh. She will also study the available literature on relevant Mongolian archaeology and assess the expedition's resuslts in the context of existing scholarship.

Gender: Male. Ethnicity/Race: Institution: University of Notre Dame Status: Junior. Major: Anthropology. Career Goals:

Thomas Thornton

Project Summary: Our study area lies in the San Luis Valley of south Central Colorado, a high altitude (7800 feet) mountain basin that is nearly three times the size of Delaware.

Here, the largest land preservation effort in Colorado state history was successfully transacted in 2004. The Nature Conservancy, Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Rio Grande National Forest cooperatively acquired 97,000 acres that formerly comprised the privately-owned Baca Ranch. Smithsonian archeologists will be among the first to investigate paleoindian archeology on the Baca this summer. An opportunity arose during Pegi Jodry's study of private San Luis Valley collections in Spring 2005, to visit and map archeological site locations on the Baca that are known to local artifact collectors. Prominent among these individuals is the former foreman of the Baca Ranch, who has been intimately involved with this landscape for nearly fifty years, as a rancher, hunter, and avocational archeologist. His artifact collection is extensive and important, but is not yet documented professionally. In a spirit of intellectual cross-fertilization, we will travel the Baca together during summer and fall 2005, sharing and recording information about paleoindian archeology on these newly preserved lands. Using GPS/GIS technology, we will investigate the relationships among climate, hydrologic, and biotic change and human land use patterns for the time interval - 13,000 to 8000 years ago.

The San Luis Valley is an ecologically diverse wonderland of wetlands, mountains, and rugged desert dunescapes, through which the Rio Grande flows after leaving its headwaters in the San Juan Mountains to the west. Hundreds of thousands of migratory waterfowl visit these wetlands yearly. Mammoth once grazed these low-lying marshes, as elk and bison do today. Elk painted on bison robe, photo by Lynn Snyder.

The Great Sand Dunes rise 700 ft above the basin floor, the Sangre de Cristo Mtns exceed 14,000 ft. Paleoindian foragers arrived prior to 13,000 years ago, not long before the extinction of late Pleistocene mammoth and camel. This summer we will record a number of localities where mammoth bones and/or Clovis spear points have been found.

Reconstruction of early foragers traveling across the desert west. Charles McKnight rendering of mammoth.

By 11,900 years ago, the climate returned to ice age conditions, during a period known as the Younger-Dryas. At this time, Folsom people developed a specialized technology designed for bison hunting. In late July we will move to the high country bordering the western San Luis Valley and continue Smithsonian excavations at the Black Mountain site (5HN55), the highest altitude Folsom camp yet investigated in North America (10,200 feet).

Rio Grande headwaters west of Creede, Colorado. Bull from a local herd of 1,200 bison.

Folsom points excavated by Smithsonian at Stewart's Cattle Guard site (5AL101).
The 2005 test excavations at Black Mountain will center on a hearth radiocarbon dated to 10,700 years BP (11,700 calendar years ago). The Black Mountain Folsom camp appears to have been occupied on more than one occasion, during relatively brief stays by small groups of hunters. The tools at the site are made of stone available in the high mountains, indicating that this raw material was collected during the relatively brief snow-free season. Today, this area receives some of the deepest snow that falls during a Colorado winter.

The Black Mountain site lies along North Clear Creek, a headwater stream of the Rio Grande. A high knoll provided an overlook from which hunters could watch game in the park downstream.

Between 10,000 and 8000 years ago, dynamic changes in climate and vegetation lead to the development of modern ecological communities and is signaled archeologically by a transition from late Paleoindian to early Archaic tool assemblages. Human life ways and land use patterns are not well understood during this time period. In February 2005 Jodry conducted a technological study of 165 projectile points from this interval. XRF analysis of the chemical composition of obsidian and basalt from which many of the points are made indicates that most of the stone was collected in New Mexico and transported some 160 miles to the Colorado's San Luis Valley.

Dalton points from the San Luis Valley, obsidian from 160 miles to the south.
Visits to San Antonio Mtn, a source of basalt tool stone that lies just south of the Colorado-New Mexico state line are planned during the 2005 field season to enlarge our sample of control specimens. This work continues ongoing collaboration with Drs. Steven Shackley (University of California, Berkeley, XRF Lab) and Brad Vierra (Archeologist, Los Alamos National Lab) in the sourcing of volcanic stone used prehistorically in the Northern Rio Grande region. All researchers involved are flintknappers, and Tom Thornton will be introduced to this important avenue forlearning about prehistoric stone tool technology.

We are pleased to include Tom Thornton as our summer intern. He will be given an opportunity to participate in a variety of archeological activities, including survey, data recording, mapping, archeological test excavation, stone tool analysis, and artifact curation. The work will be conducted in different settings, some of which involve collaboration with other researchers and with local valley residents. He will interact with botanists, archeologists, ranchers, National Park rangers, Fish and Wildlife researchers, and biologists at The Nature Conservancy.

Notre Dame - NMNH
Internship Program in Anthropology
List of Finalists
2005

  Finalists: 4

Last Name	First Name	Application Received	Cover Letter Received	First Reference Received	Second Reference Received
Easterday	Noelle	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Galecki	Rachel	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Irvine	Melanie	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Thornton	Tom	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes