Horned Owl Cave, Wyoming

Horned Owl Cave in the northern Laramie Mountains of Wyoming has provided a wide array of normally perishable artifacts in association with pictographs. Material objects recovered from the cave include fragments of atlatls, darts, shaft feathers, arrowshafts, blunt arrows, bark, weaving, bone tools, pottery, and lithic objects. The disturbed condition of the fill of the cave prevented a controlled stratigraphy, but typologically the material falls within the Late Middle culture and the Late Prehistoric culture phases of the northern Great Plains. The pictographs have been divided into three styles: an early red-figure style, a shield-figure style, and a final and probably late series of black-figure drawings. It is suggested that the red-figure drawings were a product of the last phases of the Late Middle culture, or perhaps the early phase of the Late Prehistoric culture. The shield style and the black-figure style would seem to belong to the Late Prehistoric period.