LoDaisKa Site

About this property

The LoDaisKa Site is a prominent archaeological site in the U.S. state of Colorado, located within a rockshelter near Morrison. The rockshelter was first inhabited by people of the Archaic through the Middle Ceramic period, generally spanning 3000 BC to 1000 AD. Located near the town of Morrison, off U.S. Route 285, the site is located in the southern Rocky Mountains foothills, at about 6,200 feet (1,900 m) elevation, where uplifted Dakota Sandstone formed a steep hogback. The rockshelter is sheltered by distinctive 60 foot "red rock" formation, caused by an uplift of Fountain Formation rock. The Morrison area is between the locations of two important early people: Desert societies of the Great Basin west of the Rocky Mountains and those of the Great Plains, which lies to the east of the Rocky Mountain foothills. Within the Denver basin, prehistoric cultural periods are traditionally identified as: Paleo-Indian, Archaic and Ceramic periods. Within the LoDaisKa Site, five defined complexes were assigned from A to E by Cynthia C. Irwin (later Cynthia Irwin-Williams) and Henry Irwin, complex E being the oldest phase. The period immediately preceding the first humans coming into Colorado was the Ice Age Summer starting about 16,000 years ago. For the next five thousand years the landscape would change dramatically and most of the large animals would become extinct. Receding and melting glaciers created the Plum and Monument Creeks, the Castle Rock mesas and unburied the Rocky Mountains. Large mammals, such as the mastodon, mammoth, camels, giant sloths, cheetah, bison antiquus and horses roamed the land. There were a few Paleo-Indian cultures, distinctive by the size of the tools they used and the animals they hunted. People in the first, Clovis complex period, had large tools to hunt the megafauna animals of the early Paleo-Indian period. With time, the climate warmed again and lakes and savannas receded. The land became drier, food became less abundant, and as a result of the giant mammals became extinct. People adapted by hunting smaller mammals and gathering wild plants to supplement their diet. A new cultural complex was born, the Folsom tradition, with smaller projectile points to hunt smaller animals. Aside from hunting smaller mammals, people adapted by gathering wild plants to supplement their diet. The earliest artifacts at the LoDaisKa rockshelter date from the Paleo-Indian period; the remains were from Complex E. People of the Archaic period (generally between 5500 and 1 BC) were hunters of small game, such as deer, antelope and rabbits, and gatherers of wild plants. The people moved seasonally to hunting and gathering sites. Late in the Archaic period, about AD 200–500, corn was introduced into the diet and pottery-making became an occupation for storing and caring food.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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