Explore PCRG Research Projects

All
Colorado
High Altitude
Historical Trails
North Dakota
Paleoindian
Plains Village
San Luis Valley

La Botica

The La Botica site (5CN1061), located in Conejos County’s spectacular La Jara Canyon, is a large and complex archaeological site that preserves a remarkable record of American Indian lifeways spanning at least 7,500 years. The site is also an important locality for the San Luis...

Magic Mountain

The Magic Mountain site, located in a sheltered valley south of Golden, Colorado, is well known for its stratified Holocene archaeological record. For more than 30 years following the 1966 publication of Cynthia Irwin-Williams and Henry Irwin’s landmark monograph, data from the site were crucial...

Scott Miller Projectile Points

The Scott Miller site is a relic wetland or peat bog that is no longer active, likely due to modifications of the stream channels and a lowering of the water table in the San Luis Valley from extensive agriculture in modern times. In the past,...

San Luis Valley Historical Trails Research

The Old Spanish National Historic Trail (OSNHT) was a pack route primarily used in the early to mid-nineteenth century by merchants traveling between Santa Fe and Los Angeles to exchange blankets and other woolens for horses and mules. The routes these pack caravans traveled were...

Archaeology of the Mount Zirkel Wilderness

The Mount Zirkel Wilderness Area encompasses approximately 65,000 hectares of montane woodland, subalpine forest, and alpine tundra situated within the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest at the northern end of the Park Range in north-central Colorado. The Park Range, in turn, forms the western boundary of...

Molander Village

The Molander site consists of two Plains Village settlements and an American Settlement-era homestead located in northeastern Oliver County, North Dakota. The larger of the two Plains Village settlements is a fortified earthlodge community covering about 2.1 ha (5.2 acres). Both the fortified community and...

Miranda Valley Historical Trails Research

LeRoy and Ann Hafen once described the Old Spanish Trail as the “the longest, crookedest, most arduous pack mule route in the history of America.” Between 1829 and 1848, traders used the trail to take blankets and other woolens produced in the northern Rio Grande...

Larson Village

Larson Village is a large, fortified earthlodge settlement located on the east bank of the Missouri River north of Bismarck, North Dakota. During 2006 and 2007, PCRG, the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies at the University of Arkansas, and the State Historical Society of North...

Uncompahgre Cirque

Uncompahgre Cirque is a quarry workshop located at 3,840 m (12,600 ft) on the flank of Uncompahgre Peak. The site consists of a dense concentration of flaking debris and chipped stone tools covering more than a hectare. PCRG’s investigation at the site, a cooperative project...

Upper Crossing

Upper Crossing is a multi-component site in western Saguache County, Colorado. The site’s features and buried cultural deposits preserve a robust record of the American Indian occupation of the San Luis Valley that spans more than four millennia. The oldest documented deposits contain a series...

Beacon Island

Beacon Island is a multi-component site located on the Missouri River in western North Dakota that contains a well-preserved Agate Basin-age bison kill-butchery locality. Spread across the sloping sides of a shallow kettle basin, the Agate Basin component consists of the butchered remains of at...