Alpine ice patches create conditions of exceptional preservation for organic artifacts and other remains that are otherwise rarely found. We report on an ancient environmental DNA analysis of a ~6000-year-old moccasin from the Kitsu Plateau in Tahltan Territory—a major archaeological obsidian quarry. Microscopy and shotgun sequencing of four components of the moccasin—the bottom and top hides, fur, and sinew—revealed a multi-species construction: top hide and fur from coastal hoary marmots (Marmota caligata), the thick sole hide from an ABC-clade brown bear (Ursus arctos), and sinew from northwest interior BEL caribou (Rangifer tarandus). Mitochondrial genomes were reassembled from all tissues, allowing for phylogenetic investigations of population origins, and various species of plant DNA were found reflecting alpine and boreal environmental DNA. Microbial DNA is consistent with communities found on leather and clothing, along with alpine environments. This composite biomolecular record reflects the use of animals from diverse ecogeographic zones, echoing the broad spatial distribution of Edziza obsidian across northwestern North America. This moccasin offers a rare, direct line of evidence into Middle Holocene human mobility, material procurement, and high-elevation land use, illuminating the intersection of biological and lithic networks in the subarctic Cordillera.

The Wyoming Rocky Mountains lie between two widely recognized ancestral Athapaskan archaeological cultures. Sites of the “Promontory phenomenon” largely lie to the west in northeast Utah and sites of the “Dismal River Complex” lie to the east on the western Plains of Colorado, Nebraska, and Kansas. Many Wyoming sites have yielded Athapaskan pottery, but these data have yet to be incorporated within this larger body of research. Here, we describe variation in ancestral Athapaskan archaeology in Wyoming and present our current understanding of its age and location relative to more widely recognized traditions to the east and west. We then focus on the Willow Springs site, a recently investigated archaeological site in southeast Wyoming with a rich record of Athapaskan pottery and associated artifacts and features. We argue that sites of the Western Dismal River complex in the interior of the Rocky Mountains are key to understanding spatiotemporal relationships between the Promontory and Dismal River phenomena.

The appearance of Promontory groups in the Great Basin and the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains in the early 13^th century created opportunities for ancestral Ndee groups to move into the Central Great Plains. The Plains landscape was already occupied at this time, however. Various Native groups, including Caddoan (ancestral Pawnee and Wichita), Siouan (ancestral Ioway, Oto, and Ho-Chunk) speakers and others lived in the Central Plains before and after the appearance of the Ndee. We address two under-explored issues related to the appearance of the Plains Apache. First, where were different groups positioned in the Central Plains before and after the appearance of the Plains Apache? Second, did the Ndee bring a unique economic focus to their new home, or were their subsistence strategies similar to other Plains groups? We answer these questions through a Bayesian analysis of more than 900 radiocarbon dates to establish relative chronologies of the 13 different Central Plains cultural groups before or during the Plains Apache occupation. In addition, we draw from a dataset of more than 100 archaeological sites to better understand cultural and temporal variation in the zooarchaeological record of precontact and contact period groups in the Central Great Plains.

Nephrite (jade) was used for over 3000 years in western North America to make ground stone celts. A small proportion of these labour-intensive tools were transported over a thousand kilometres east across mountains and linguistic boundaries to Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. Nephrite celts are among the most widely dispersed artifacts in pre-contact Canada but lack clear utilitarian value in the regions to which they were traded; they may have been gifts or prestige items acquired by exchange. We link these artifacts to a chronological period that may overlap with Dene migration through the commercial production centres of nephrite celts in British Columbia. Detecting Dene migration has largely eluded northern archaeologists but jade celts may serve as a small and proxy indicator of a cultural and economic fluorescence stimulated by new Dene participants in the Plateau Interaction Sphere, one outcome of which was long-distance exchange of jade across the Dene world and beyond.   

The Palmer Divide between the Arkansas River and Platte River basins in eastern Colorado, USA is often cited for its ecological characteristics and draw. Indigenous occupation on the landform has been persistent. This persistence remains true during the Middle to Late Ceramic periods (800 to 250 CE). Associated buried components, however, eluded archaeologists until recently. Since 2019, ERO Resources Corporation has completed excavations of six new sites containing well-constructed and lightweight Ndee Western Dismal River Gray Ware sherds. These ceramics occur in large numbers alongside well-made arrow points, large bifaces, hide-working tools, and patterned stone tools. Unanchored by complex hearth architecture and ground stone processing, the sum of the assemblages combined with the presence of obsidian, maize, and Northern Rio Grande valley ceramics points to a people who were technologically oriented around movement. This skill enabled Ndee people to thrive in places like Palmer Divide as well as ecozones typically avoided in the past. Cumulatively, these newly excavated assemblages provide insight into the lifeways of a people who traversed the Front Range of the Southern Rocky Mountains and influenced spheres on the High Plains and Northern Rio Grande River valley.

This paper examines the semantic structure, etymology, and distribution of Dene words in two cultural domains with the aim of outlining their relevance for the study of Dene culture history. The Dene languages form a large family spread over a wide, discontinuous territory in western North America. The regional distribution of these languages has motivated grouping the Dene languages along geographic lines (Jaker et al. 2019). Supporting these groupings on linguistic grounds has proved difficult, both because of dialectological admixture affecting the clarity of the historical signal, as well as a paucity of data. However, recent improvements in the availability of data as well as in computer-aided classification techniques have produced better models of the phylogenetic structure of the language family (Snoek et al. 2022). The phylogenetic models still contain uncertainties providing difficulties for accurate interpretation. This study aims to overcome these difficulties by analysing the vocabulary for puberty and pipes from the perspective of Cultural Models Theory (Bennardo and de Munck 2020) and Cognitive Linguistics (Croft & Cruse 2004, Langacker 2008). The paper argues that the distribution of semantic patterns can reveal relationships between the Dene languages that are relevant to the study of history of these Peoples.