Persistent Places, Storied Spaces: An Ethnogeography of Indigenous Land Use in Western Colorado

Abstract

Archaeological research on Great Basin landscapes primarily emphasizes resource acquisition and survival strategies, as interpreted from material artifacts. This approach has established the critical role of seasonal mobility for the region’s Indigenous populations but has disregarded social and ontological aspects of their land use practices, including the significant roles that local philosophies, as expressed in material and non-material manners, play in landscape relationships. To better address the nature of Indigenous knowledge and landscape-based experiences, my dissertation draws from Indigenous Studies and Indigenous Archaeology to construct a new framework for exploring how Indigenous peoples have engaged with the landscape at rock art sites over time. This decolonizing and Indigenizing theoretical approach reframes land use as a relational process. Using concepts like Native Science, Storywork, and local epistemologies, I employ this approach to investigate how a broad range of Indigenous groups constructed and used particular “persistent places” in western Colorado between 8,000 BCE–1800 CE. My dissertation integrates three unique datasets: geospatial analyses of regional site patterns from almost 400 rock art sites in western Colorado, specific iconographic data from field survey at 25 of those sites, and traditional knowledge and history communicated in more than 100 Ute oral traditions. I use these lines of evidence to identify trends in placemaking practices within western Colorado and to document how people created layered landscapes. With an emphasis on multicomponent rock sites, this study provides a rich analysis of how multiple identity groups left their mark on the same landscape over time. My dissertation presents a unique contribution to the theoretical literature on Indigenous land use, which has largely ignored the concept of placemaking in the “pre-contact” era and rarely focuses on iconography. This research rigorously employs Indigenous knowledge and local oral traditions to develop a new “storied landscape” approach for studying land through archaeology, which lays the groundwork for future collaborative inquiry.