| dc.description.abstract | Archaeologists, working in the Rocky Mountains and throughout the world, have long recognized that people, regardless of time and space, invest social meanings into the landscape around them. Based on de Certeau’s (1984) “Spatial Stories,” these “socialized landscapes” consist of two archaeologically identifiable components: espaces (or practiced spaces) and tours (or practiced paths). I operationalize these ideas by creating archaeological expectations for six socialized landscape types, inspired by Scheiber’s (2015) mountain landscape tropes: resource, symbolic, wilderness, refuge, recreational, and composite. In doing so, I ask what types of socialized landscapes we can identify from a largely lithic archaeological record in the Rocky Mountains. I test my expectations with a pilot study in the Bridger Mountains of southwestern Montana. By controlling for time period using projectile point types found at sites throughout the mountains, I conduct a series of four analyses by time period to determine what types of espaces and tours people there created in the past. I then compare those results against my archaeological expectations. My results indicate that people in the Paleoindian Period created a resource socialized landscape, whereas groups from the Early Archaic through to the Late Pre-Contact Periods created composite socialized landscapes of resources and symbolic place-markers. Although this pilot study reveals areas of the methodology and analyses that can be improved in future studies, my study suggests that we can use this approach to study past socialized landscapes created by hunter-gatherers both in the Rocky Mountains and throughout the world, even when we lack oral traditions to better understand these spaces. | en_US |
