ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the variation seen in human occupation within the Central Plains and Rocky Mountains of the western United States at the end of the Pleistocene. It argues that human settlement systems changed dramatically during the Younger Dryas chronozone, where regional reorganization by Folsom groups followed hundreds if not thousands of years of colonization efforts by Clovis and perhaps earlier populations. The late Pleistocene marked a time of humans settling into the landscape, detailed natural resource mapping, and in some ways, the beginnings of social intensification. This process is the by-product of thousands of years of population growth and the slow in-filling of a landscape previously devoid of people. This shift in cultural form is best understood by first outlining the changing climate during the Younger Dryas. The local mountain range, referred to as the Front Range, forms the Continental Divide along the midcontinent and separates the watersheds that drain into the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.
