Named stone
Trout Creek jasper
Also called Trout Creek chert, Trout Creek jasper (5CF84)
A kind of jasper
Trout Creek jasperJasperRockies & Great BasinDescription
Trout Creek jasper comes from a large source (site 5CF84, about 400 hectares) at the foot of Kaufman Ridge by Trout Creek Pass, the gap between South Park and the upper Arkansas River valley in central Colorado. It was a favourite Folsom stone. At the Antelope Springs Folsom site, 16 km east of the source, two finished Folsom points and seven preforms are of this jasper, and portable XRF matched most of the pieces to source samples. Folsom hunters also carried it to Barger Gulch in Middle Park, 140 km north, and to four Folsom sites in the San Luis Valley 100 to 150 km south. Similar-looking jaspers exist nearby and in Wyoming's Hartville Uplift, so identifying it by eye alone is risky.
How to identify it
- Colour
- Reported at Barger Gulch Locality B as a dendritic orange chert (Surovell et al. 2001).
- Texture
- High-quality toolstone (Boulanger et al. 2020); one Folsom point at Antelope Springs was made on a grainier variety.
- Inclusions
- Dendritic (branching) markings, per the Barger Gulch description (Surovell et al. 2001).
Where it comes from
Rockies & Great Basin
States
Quarries and outcrops
- Trout Creek source (5CF84), base of the western slope of Kaufman Ridge near Trout Creek Pass, central Colorado; about 400 ha (Boulanger et al. 2020)
Used by
- Folsom: Antelope Springs, South Park (points, preforms, channel flakes, scrapers) (Boulanger et al. 2020)
- Folsom: Barger Gulch Locality B, Middle Park, about 90 to 140 km north (Surovell and Waguespack 2007; Boulanger et al. 2020)
- Folsom: Cattle Guard, Linger, Reddin and Zapata in the San Luis Valley; also reported at Lindenmeier, 260 km north (Jodry, via Boulanger et al. 2020)
Look-alikes
Stones that are easy to confuse with Trout Creek jasper.
- Parlin Flats jasper, Gunnison Basin, Colorado (used as a comparison sample by Boulanger et al. 2020)
- Black Forest silicified wood (also called Bijou Basin or Elizabeth petrified wood), which in small flakes can look like Trout Creek jasper (Boulanger et al. 2020)
- Other jasper sources near the Trout Creek quarry, and Hartville Uplift stone in east-central Wyoming (Boulanger et al. 2020)
Sources
- Boulanger, Matthew, Robert J. Patten, Brian N. Andrews, Michelle R. Bebber, Briggs Buchanan, Ian Jorgeson, G. Logan Miller, Metin I. Eren, and David J. Meltzer. 2020. Antelope Springs: A Folsom Site in South Park, Colorado. PaleoAmerica 7(2). DOI 10.1080/20555563.2020.1857541.bpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com (opens in a new tab)
- Surovell, Todd A., and Nicole M. Waguespack. 2007. Folsom Hearth-Centered Use of Space at Barger Gulch, Locality B. Chapter 8 in Frontiers in Colorado Paleoindian Archaeology, edited by Robert H. Brunswig and Bonnie L. Pitblado, pp. 219 ff. University Press of Colorado, Boulder.archaeologycolorado.org (opens in a new tab)
- Surovell, Todd A., Nicole M. Waguespack, Marcel Kornfeld, and George C. Frison. 2001. Barger Gulch Locality B: A Folsom Site in Middle Park, Colorado. Current Research in the Pleistocene 18:58-60.liberalarts.tamu.edu (opens in a new tab)
