At Home in the High Country: Folsom Houses and Community in Southwestern Colorado

The Illinois Valley Archaeological Society (IVAS) will meet Tuesday, July  3, 2018 at the Dickson Mounds Museum beginning at 7:00 p.m.  Featured speaker will be Dr. Brooke Morgan, Curator of Anthropology at the Illinois State Museum in Springfield, who will present a talk titled “At Home in the High Country: Folsom Houses and Community in Southwestern Colorado”. This event is free and the public is invited to attend.  Refreshments will be available following the presentation.

The term “Paleoindian” often conjures thoughts of rapidly moving big game hunters spreading quickly throughout the continent. While pursuing big game was certainly part of Paleoindian adaptations, their strategies for survival went beyond this stereotype. In fact, evidence for Folsom groups settling in and utilizing their local environments has been found throughout the Rocky Mountains. At the Mountaineer site near Gunnison, Colorado, remains of some of the oldest houses in North America reveal that Folsom hunter-gatherers spent a considerable amount of time at the site. These houses give archaeologists a glimpse into the everyday lives of a Folsom community as they dealt with the challenges of living at the end of the Ice Age.

Brooke Morgan got her start in archaeology as a volunteer in the laboratory at Loyola University Chicago, where she helped catalog stone tools and debris from the Mueller-Keck Clovis site in St. Clair County, Illinois. It was here she developed an interest in Paleoindian archaeology. After graduating from Loyola, Brooke earned her MA and PhD from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, where she focused on Folsom adaptations in the Southern Rocky Mountains. Brooke has conducted research throughout the Midwest and Great Plains, most recently on Late Prehistoric Plains Village sites in North Dakota.