The Scattered Artifacts of Falls Creek: What They Are, Where They Went, Where They Are Now, And How They Got There (Photocopy)

Description

Author: Ross, Reid

Publisher: Co-published by The Friends of the Durango Rock Shelters, the La Plata County Commissioners, and the San Juan Archaeological Society.

Pub Date: 1995

Binding: Paperback (Stiff plastic report covers, plastic sleeve on spine, taped.

Condition:  Fair.  Binding tight.  No tears, bends, folds.  Upper front cover corner at spine head has a small label blacked out.  Lower title page also has an area blacked out.  Ex-library?  Probably not since this is a photocopy.  Text clean, photos obviously photocopied,  Light edge and corner wear (lots of tape).

Notes:  Photocopy.  Falls Creek is located north of Durango, Colorado.  Prehistoric glaciers carved two rockshelters into the Falls Creek valley walls, known as the North and South shelters.  The rockshelters were large enough for a number of dome-shaped residential structures, and the valley provided good soil for agriculture, good water, and plenty of game animals.  The rockshelters provided the first evidence of the Anasazi Basket Maker II people in southwest Colorado.  First excavated in the late 1930s by Zeke Flora, Earl Morris and friends, a large portion of the artifacts from the rockshelters went walkabout–to individuals, museums, libraries, local and state archeological societies, and the Forest Service.  Keeping track of where the artifacts went, well, that was a secondary concern.  In the mid-1990s, the Friends of the Durango Rock Shelters received a grant to locate, describe, photograph and curate the missing artifacts.  The appendices in this volume list the 5 principal locations of the bulk of the artifacts, and Florence Lister’s book “Prehistory in Peril: The Worst and the Best of Durango Archaeology” (University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), gives an account of the Falls Creek excavations and artifact dispersal.  This photocopy is of the report to Colorado State Historical Fund.