Abstract

The serendipitous (Barton Gulch) and intentionally targeted (Indian Creek) discovery of two deeply buried, stratified, multicomponent Paleoindian occupation sites in the Montana Rockies of southwestern and west-central Montana, respectively, led to their multi-year multi-disciplinary investigation. The artifact-bearing deposits are incorporated within fine-alluvium sequences in low-gradient (Barton Gulch) and steep-gradient (Indian Creek) mountain valley floodplains. These unexpected and usually informative, Late Pleistocene-Early Holocene archaeological manifestations were exposed as an effect of localized commercial mining ventures designed to extract economic minerals from alluvial sediments in stream valleys. This paper explores geological and site-formational processes and illustrates the effects of historic placer mining on artifact-bearing landscapes. These independent processes and events have converged to enable advancement of archaeological understandings regarding post Ice Age ecology, Paleoindian hunter-gatherer resource selection and use, settlement selection behavior, and patterned details of Paleoindian adaptive strategies peculiar to this region. Locational and investigational implications of these insights for Paleoindian (and possibly Paleoamerican) site prospection in yet other intensively placered Rocky Mountain valleys are considered in the long term.