Naturalist Nights in Carbondale: The First Ascent

Each winter, Wilderness Workshop partners with the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies (ACES) and Roaring Fork Audubon to co-host Naturalist Nights! This popular speaker series features experts from across the country who explore different topics of the natural world with our community.

About the presentation:
Professor LaBelle will detail our current understanding of Native American occupation of Colorado’s highest mountains over the past ten thousand years, as revealed through archaeology, ethnohistory, and oral history. Colorado archaeologists have recorded several thousand Indigenous sites above 10,000 feet, with particularly high densities in the Colorado Front Range and San Juans, but with surprisingly low counts in the Elk and Sawatch ranges. LaBelle will demonstrate the various ways Native American peoples called these mountain ranges their “home”, showcasing research on complex hunting traps known as game drives, lakeside campsites, broken pottery “trails”, and items rapidly melting from ice patches, such as bison bone, stone tools, and coniferous trees.

Jason LaBelle is a Professor of Anthropology within the Department of Anthropology and Geography at Colorado State University (since 2005), Director of the Center for Mountain and Plains Archaeology, and Curator of CSU’s Archaeological Repository. He obtained his BA degree in Anthropology from Colorado State University and his MA and PhD in Anthropology from Southern Methodist University. His research lab, the Center for Mountain and Plains Archaeology, is a research-learning lab grant-sponsored by federal agencies and supported by the James and Audrey Benedict Endowment for Mountain Archaeology. His research specializes in the subsistence, mobility, seasonal aggregation, and camp layout of Native American hunter-gatherers inhabiting the American West. He has active research projects underway in Rocky Mountain National Park and within several Wilderness Study Areas in the deep canyons of northwestern Colorado.

This is a free event and registration is not required.

Unable to join us in Carbondale? Jason will also be presenting in Aspen on Thursday, February 23 at ACES Hallam Lake Nature Preserve. His February 23 presentation will also be available to watch on Facebook and Grassroots TV. It will be available through other media outlets afterwards.