LoDaisKa site
archaeological site in Colorado, United States
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.
Geography
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.
History
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.
Paleo-Indians
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.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6663069. VIAF identifies the subject as 315143886. Authority coordinates are 39.627, -105.194. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1000.
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This entry incorporates text from “LoDaisKa site” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.