The Lindenmeier site

Sorry for not posting last week. I kinda just dropped the ball on that one. This week though there will be two posts to make up for it. So yesterday on my day off my partner and I went to Soapstone Prairie Natural Area in the city of Fort Collins. It is this beautiful little prairie area that everywhere you look is just grass and dirt as far as you can see. We went up there to see how close we could get to the Lindenmeier site. I had heard and learned about this site from Dr. Jason La Belles Great Plains Archaeology class.

So what is cool is that this is a Folsom type site. Folsom is the type of arrow head found at these types of sites and these sites are found all around the Great Plains of North America. This specific site was found by the Coffin Family in 1924. The Smithsonian Institution and Colorado Museum of Natural History Begin their Work at the Lindenmeier Site in 1934 and 1935.

Some other stuff that is cool about this site is: the sheer quantity of materials, the diverse faunal assemblage, earliest and best evidence for decoration in the New World, it was reoccupied several times (Folsom, Cody, Archaic, Late Prehistoric), the size of the site, the diverse activity areas within and across the site.

On the drive there it got me thinking though how crazy it is that in the short amount of time from the discovery of the site to now that the Fort Collins area has grown so much and it isn’t just hunter-gathering peoples any more. That we can just drive around the areas that had been walked for so many generations and so many seasons. I don’t know. It is just strange to think about, that this area has been occupied for so long and has changed so much. It is also cool that this site is protected. We need to help preserve places like this but also allow for people to enjoy it too, this also had a bunch of trails we could hike too.

DR. La Belle’s
DR. La Belle’s
Smithsonian
Mine
Mine
Mine
Mine
Mine

3 thoughts on “The Lindenmeier site

  1. Very interesting Natalie! It makes me wonder… We had a section of Ben Delatour Boy Scout Camp in Red Feather Lakes that was named “Camp Coffin”. I never really thought about why it had that name, but I wonder if it had to do with the Coffin Family you mentioned in your post? Hmmmmmm?

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  2. There is a lake north of Ft. Collins named the ,Lindenmeyer lake. Wonder if there is a connection. This was a great post. Kind of makes you look at things a bit differently.

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