Who Hunted the Most Bison?

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The bison jumps and bison pounds of the Northern Plains are prominent features of the landscape, but conditions are different on the Central and Southern Plains. Early historic documents tell of large long-distance communal hunts conducted from horticultural villages. Thousands of hunters used surrounds to take the animals, but no kill sites of that kind have been detected. Furthermore, transportation costs limited the number of bison bones taken home from the kills, making bone assemblages in villages a poor measure of the volume of bison taken by the residents. This presentation demonstrates means of detecting both large long-distance pedestrian hunts and the intensity of bison processing through analysis of chipped stone tool assemblages.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• SAA 2021: General Sessions

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33099