Tammy Stone

Fairly technical but still interesting, especially when contemplating what a multidisciplinary endeavor archeology has become. There’s a lot of information here that would give the environmentally and politically correct fits, if they ever could be persuaded to read it. This, of course, is not author Tammy Stone’s intention; she’s just synthesizing available information on The Prehistory of Colorado and Adjacent Areas.


The initial chapter, on the modern environment of Colorado and paleoenvironmental reconstructions, is one of those fit-inducers. Stone provides a nice table (1.4) of paleoenvironmental periods, with temperature and precipitation bouncing all over the place. (She’s normally pretty careful about describing climate as warmer or cooler and/or dryer or wetter than “present”, but sometimes falls into the trap of describing them as different from “normal”.) So why don’t “climate scientists” take advantage of information like this when carving their hockey sticks? Dismissing outright fraud, I suspect it’s because climate reconstructions like these are based on faunal and pollen analyses and produce results like “between 12.5-8 kya we find groupings of plants and animals that today would be found at a lower altitude; we infer that overall conditions were warmer and dryer”. This is not conducive to a neat point on a chart; thus it gets ignored. To be fair, a lot of the reconstructions are difficult because they involve groupings of organisms – “ecosystems”, if you will – that aren’t found anywhere today, even though all the component plants and animals are still extant. This part gives environmentalists fits in their turn (as opposed to ecologists, who know better). One of the disasters predicted for global warming is the creation of “novel ecosystems”, which seems assumed to be a bad thing, on the order of plagues of frogs or the rivers turning to blood. In fact, all ecosystems are “novel” as organisms evolve, go extinct, migrate, disperse, etc.


There’s something of a controversy over the date of arrival of humans in the New World. The consensus position is right around 14.5 kya. There’s a more exotic view, based on scattered and much-debated evidence, that the date was much earlier – perhaps as much as 50 kya. Stone is firmly in the consensus group, although she mentions some of the dubious older sites. One thing that is clear is once people got here they spread very rapidly; one of the oldest firmly dated sites is in southern Chile. Stone’s discussion of the Paleoindian (Clovis, Folsom, Late Paleoindian complexes) would be pretty useful just about anywhere in North America, since these complexes are fairly uniform. The Folsom hunters were another politically incorrect group; in contrast to the “use every part of the buffalo” myth foisted on modern natives, they specialized in mass bison drives (the Clovis people haven already taken care of mammoths, ground sloths, and other miscellaneous megafauna). The preferred tactic was driving the bison herd of the edge of a cliff - something that took careful preparation, since you needed a setup where the edge was abrupt enough so the stampeding animals couldn’t see the drop-off. An alternative tactic, demonstrating that the Folsom hunters were acute observers of animal behavior, was to get the animals to stampede at the bottom of an arroyo, then set up some sort of obstacle – perhaps as simple as having a bunch of people leap out from behind bushes yelling “Boo!”. If this was timed right, the lead animals would attempt to turn around and collide head-on with the followers. It’s unpleasant to speculate on what would happen to the people jumping out if it wasn’t timed right.


Another apparently politically incorrect thing happened at the end of the Folsom period – bison almost went extinct in Colorado. It’s not clear; the animals may have learned not to run off cliffs, or only smaller herds survived the mass drive tactics, or the migration patterns changed, but the Late Paleoindians had nowhere near as much bison remains as the Folsom people.


After the Paleoindian period, Stone has to divide the state up into areas: the plains, the four corners, the mountains, and the northwest. She’s very careful to describe the different associations of artifacts as “complexes” rather than “cultures”, correctly pointing out that wee have no way of knowing if a change in pottery and projectile points actually represents a change in cultures or simply cultural evolution within a group. It’s instructive to speculate what a future archeologist might make of similar evidence for our own “culture”; would they interpret the .30-06/glass bottle People as invading and displacing the .45-70/earthenware jug People, only to be ousted by the .223/polyethylene terpthalate invaders in their turn?


The last chapters are again politically incorrect. Stone points out that all the current “native” groups in Colorado arrived after European contact; the original plains inhabitants (around 1700) were Apache; they were driven south and west by Comanche, who were in turn driven south by the Cheyenne/Arapahoe (because they had been displaced by the Chippewa). One interesting fact was the observation that the Cheyenne/Arapahoe were successful against the Comanche despite being outnumbered and less well equipped with firearms and horses. This was apparently because the Cheyenne/Arapahoe had “warrior societies” who spent time planning and organizing raids and attacks – in short, sort of a general staff.


I have perhaps made Stone’s book a lot more political sounding than it actually is; Stone doesn’t mention climate change or political correctness but merely presents the facts. This, then, is a reference book that will repay a lot of study and thought. Recommended.… (plus d'informations)