Reconstructing a prehistoric Ute sacred landscape in the southern Rocky Mountains through visibility and orientation analysis.

摘要

Reconstructing a prehistoric landscape encompasses many fields of study and necessitates a consideration of site placement at a regional scale. My thesis examines whether sacred features on Peterson Ridge in North Park, Colorado, are visually or directionally connected to sacred natural and cultural places or trails in Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP) selected from Ute oral narratives, Ute ethnographic interviews, and archaeological work. I use GIS to run individual viewsheds from each of the sacred Peterson Ridge features: a stone circle, alignments, vision quests, arrows, an effigy, and cairns. For feature classes with more than one feature, I add the individual viewsheds to create a cumulative viewshed. I calculate orientation lines from the features to investigate a directional connection. The viewshed results indicate that Peterson Ridge may be part of the RMNP intervisibility network. However, the orientation results show weak to no connection with the RMNP places.