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Class //1 G~(nva! Resource <br />the Picketwire Valley and upper Purgatoire River Valley in the early 1860x. The <br />• Lorencito Canyon Mine property .vas within portions of the Maxwell Grant obtained <br />from the federal government by Colorado Coal and Iron, and CF&I continued to hold <br />title to these lands until 1946. But the coal reserves here were overshadowed by richer or <br />more accessible coal reserves to the north and northwest, and this area remained <br />undeveloped. The Parsons family, who had leased much of this land from CF&I over the <br />years, obtained the Lorencito property from CF&I in 1946. The land remained <br />undeveloped, and was used primarily for grazing. Consequently, there are few known <br />historic resources in this area, and no cultural resource investigations were conducted <br />around Lorencito Canyon until after the property was acquired by the F.E. Hill Company <br />and Hill Ranch in 1994. <br />PREHISTORIC CONTEXT <br />. A prehistoric context for the Arkansas River Basin, which encompasses roughly the <br />southeast quarter of Colorado, has recently been compiled for the Colorado Council of <br />Professional Archaeologists (Zier and Kalasz 1999). Lorencito Canyon is in the south <br />end of the Park Plateau sub-section in the southwest corner of the latter context area. <br />Table 2 lists the cultural taxa that aze used in the Arkansas River Basin context, with their <br />temporal ranges, and equivalent or overlapping cultural taxa that have commonly been <br />used in cultural resource investigations in the region. The prehistory of the area is <br />divided into three cultural stages, Paleoindian, Archaic, and Late Prehistoric. The <br />concepts of these cultural stages and their subdivisions are chronological and <br />. evolutionary, but the assignment of particular sites to these taxa is often narrowly based <br />on technological styles of certain diagnostic artifacts, such as hafted bifaces and pottery. <br />The earlier portions of this chronological scheme, the Paleoindian Stage, and the Early <br />Archaic Period of the Archaic Stage, are very weakly represented in the Park Plateau. <br />Beginning with the Middle Archaic period, more sites have been identified and a wider <br />range of material remains has been recovered. <br />~J <br />7 <br />