This site will look much better in a browser that supports web standards, but it is accessible to any browser or Internet device.

Skip Navigation skip menu and banner
University of Wyoming
Mary Lou Larson

Mary Lou Larson
Professor and Associate Director, Frison Institute
Archaeology

BA 1976, University of Wyoming, Anthropology
MA 1982, U. of California Santa Barbara, Anthropology
Ph.D 1990, U. of California Santa Barbara, Anthropology
mlarson@uwyo.edu • (307) 766-5566 • Anthropology Bldg 204

 

Her research includes investigation of prehistoric hunter-gatherer existence across time and space. On-going projects include GIS in the Moxa Arch and Jonah/Anticline areas of southwest Wyoming and the rock shelters of the Bighorn Basin and Mountains; excavation and analysis of the Hell Gap site, a stratified Paleoindian site located in eastern Wyoming, and laboratory analysis of materials from the Laddie Creek and Bugas-Holding sites. She has received grants from the National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Geographic Society, Wenner-Gren, the Bureau of Land Management, NASA Space Grant Consortium. She is currently the UW faculty representative for the University Consortium on Geographic Information Science.
 

 

Courses Taught:

ANTH 1450           World Archaeology
ANTH 2210           North American Indians
ANTH 4150/5150   Sem. in Prehistory: Indo-European Expansion
ANTH 4160/5160   GIS in Anthropology
ANTH 5860           Advanced Arch. Field Studies: Paleoindian
ANTH 5880           Professionalism in Anthropology
 

 

Recent/Selected Publications:

Larson, Mary Lou, Marcel Kornfeld, and George C. Frison (editors). 2009 Hell Gap: A Paleoindian Campsite at the Edge of the Rockies. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake.

Kornfeld, Marcel, and Mary Lou Larson 2008 Bonebeds and other Myths: Paleoindian to Archaic Transition on North American Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. Quaternary International 191: 18-33.

Kornfeld, Marcel, Mary Lou Larson, Adam Wiewel, Craig Arnold, Mike Toft, and Dennis J. Stanford. 2007 The Nelson Site: A Cody Aged Bison Bone Bed in Eastern Colorado. Plains Anthropologist 52 (203):257-278.

Larson, Mary Lou 2007 A GIS Perspective on Rock Shelter Landscapes in Wyoming. In On shelter's Ledge: Histories, Theories and Methods of Rock Shelter Research, edited by Marcel Kornfeld, Sergey Vasile'ev, and Laura Miotti. BAR International Series 2007, pp 163-172, Oxford.

Hall, Christopher T. and Mary Lou Larson (editors). 2004 Aggregate Analysis in Chipped Stone Studies. University of Utah Press.
 
 

Research Interests:
Spatial distribution and variation of surface archaeology across the landscape using geographic information systems; Chipped stone technological organization, particularly debitage and minimum analytical nodules; Understanding Rocky Mountain and Plains prehistory through analysis of intensively excavated stratified archaeological sites; The investigation of early to mid-Holocene house pit structures throughout the west; Paleoindian to Archaic transition in the Rockies and the Plains.

 

Press releases: