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Lnrenci(o Conyan dLne Canour Curr Cultural Xesourcet /rtrerstory ' loadout area, the railroad spur corridor, the eastern portion of the P3 haul road corridor, and the eastern edge of the surface mine area. A(( of these areas were pan of the I996 cultural resource survey (McKibbin et al t997), and a few of them wire tested in 1997. The areas with the highest densities of known sites are in the original loadout area and the loadout area on southeast facing benches and slopes. These previously surveyed areas of high site density overlap with the proposed contour cut areas, and where they overlap, no ne.v survey will be needed. From the results of the previous survey, it is expected that three or four sites will be found an the unsurveyed bench area west of the loadout, and that very few sites or isolated finds will be discovered on the steeper slopes in the remainder of the project area. These sites are most likely to be open camp or open lithic sites with little or no potential depth. The project area is located around the lower reaches of Lorencito Canyon on the south side of Picketwire Valley, about fifteen miles west of Trinidad, Colorado. This area falls within the prehistoric context for the Arkansas River Basin (Zier and Kalasz 1999}, and the Colorado Southern Frontier Historic Context (Mehls and Carter 1984}. The general cultural contexts for the project area are summarized in the latter iw~o RP3 documents. A more complete discussion of the specific prehistoric and historic context of Lorencito Canyon is given in McKibbin et al (1997). Lorencito Canyon is located at the northern edge of the 1Vlaxwell Grant created in the mid-1840s by the newly established Mexican government and confirmed by the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848 when the United States assumed control of this region.'I'he Maxwell Grant included over two million acres in Colorado and New Mexico. These lands were settled in the traditional Hispanic pattern, with small extended family villages located principally along arable bottomlands such as the Picketwire Valley. Colorado Coal and Iron, one of the . predecessors of Colorado Fuel and Iron (CF&I}, began to develop coal reserves around'I'rinidad and in the Picketwire Valley and upper Purgatoire River Valley in the early I S60s. The Lorencito Canyon Mine property was within portions of the Maxwell Grant obtained from the federal government by Colorado Coal and Iron, and Cf'&1 continued to hold title to these lands until 1946. But the coal reserves here were overshadowed by richer or mare accessible coal reserves to the north and northwest, and this area remained undeveloped. The Parsons family, who had teased much of this land from CF&I over the years, obtained the Lorencito property from CF&[ in 1946. The land remained undeveloped, and was used primarily for grazing. Consequently, there are few known historic resources in this area, and no cultural resource investigations were conducted around Lorencito Canyon until after the property was acquired by the F.E. Hill Company and Hill Ranch in 1994. Prehistoric Context A prehistoric context for the Arkansas River Basin, which encompasses roughly the southeast quarter of Colorado, has recently been compiled for the Colorado Council of Professional Archaeologists {Zier and Kalasz 1499}. Lorencito Canyon is in the south end of the Park Plateau sub-section in the southwest corner of the latter context area. Table 2 lists the cultural taxa ihst are used in the Arkansas River Basin context, with their temporal ranges, and equivalent or overlapping cultural taxa that have commonly been used in cultural resource investigations in the region. The prehistory of the area is divided into three cultural stages, Paleoindian, Archaic, and Late Prehistoric. "I'he concepts of these cultural stages and their subdivisions are chronological and evolutionary, but the assignment of particular sites to these taxi is often narrowly based on