Introduction

Within the context of the American West that encompasses them, the Rocky Mountains are unique. The structure of the Rocky Mountain landscape, patterns of human use over the past 11 000 years, even the history of archaeological inquiry - all of these distinguish the Rocky Mountains from their archaeologically better-known neighbors: the grasslands of the Columbia Plateau and Great Plains (see Americas, North: Plains) and the deserts of the Great Basin (see Americas, North: Great Basin) and Colorado Plateau (see Americas, North: American Southwest, Four Corners Region).

In a way that the lowland Far West and Great Plains by definition do not and cannot, the Rocky Mountains encompass tremendous environmental variability in a highly compressed physical space - a structural difference with important implications for prehistoric human use of these dynamic settings. For example, whereas Plains residents throughout 11 000 years of prehistory organized their subsistence and land-use strategies around the hunting of large grazing mammals (see Americas, North: Plains) on a flat landscape (and sometimes in the adjacent mountains), Rocky Mountain-based hunter-gatherers always exploited a highly varied faunal and floral resource base and moved extremely flexibly up, down, and around the mountain landscape. Agriculture, which revolutionized prehistoric subsistence and mobility on the Colorado Plateau and played a crucial role in parts of the Great Basin and along some Plains river systems, was never adopted to any significant degree by prehistoric Rocky Mountain hunter-gatherers, and thus rarely if ever influenced their decisions about when and where to move.

As for archaeological research itself, the Rockies have only recently been subjected to intensive investigations. The first systematic archaeological research in the western United States focused on Southwestern agricultural sites and began well over a century ago (see Americas, North: American Southwest, Four Corners Region). Plains archaeology likewise registers a long history of inquiry, with classic Palaeoindian sites like Folsom and Clovis documenting by 1927 that the first Americans lived alongside now-extinct ice-age animals (see Americas, North: Plains). The remarkable preservation of textiles, subsistence debris, and even ancient human remains in dry caves of the Great Basin have for many decades lured professional archaeologists to work in that setting as well (see Americas, North: Great Basin).

The Rocky Mountains, on the other hand, were traditionally viewed by archaeologists as marginal to a broad-scale understanding of the prehistory of western North America, a point punctuated by the dates of the first archaeological conferences focusing on subregions of the west. The first ‘Pecos Conference’, an informal gathering of Southwestern archaeologists, was held in 1927; the first Plains Anthropological Society meeting in 1931; and the first Great Basin Anthropological Conference in 1954. Rocky Mountain archaeologists, however, had to wait until 1993 to attend the first-ever Rocky Mountain Anthropological Conference in Jackson, Wyoming.

The overarching goal of this contribution is to summarize what archaeologists have learned not just since 1993, when the subdiscipline could finally sustain its own conference, but from the earliest inklings that the Rocky Mountains may have been more to prehistoric people than a snow-capped backdrop to daily lowland activities and an impediment to travel. The chapter first introduces the Rocky Mountain region and environment, and then discusses elements that make the archaeological record of the Rocky Mountains unique: its prehistoric chronology and general observations about land use through time and site types and the many reasons why prehistoric people used the Rocky Mountain landscape.