From Channel Flakes to Bison Jumps: Current Investigations of the Terminal Pleistocene/Early Holocene Archaeological Record in Southern Idaho

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "From Channel Flakes to Bison Jumps: Current Investigations of the Terminal Pleistocene/Early Holocene Archaeological Record in Southern Idaho" at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

As early as the Younger Dryas, southern Idaho’s archaeological record has reflected the importance of bison in subsistence. Recent investigations of the Layer 18 assemblage from Owl Cave provide compelling evidence for a Folsom/bison association. These studies also resolve decades-old misinterpretations of the cave’s depositional environment and identify conditions that likely resulted in artifact contamination. Although Owl Cave is the only site in the region to produce fluted points in a buried context, Folsom points have been recovered from nearly 50 surface localities, including a Folsom production site. These localities are concentrated in the wetlands of the Lake Terreton Basin (LTB), which also contains a very high density of Haskett points. XRF analyses suggest disparity in the mobility and land use patterns associated with these technologies. The mass kill in Owl Cave (Layer 16) indicates that, during the early Holocene, the cave continued to be utilized for the purpose of dispatching/processing bison, with XRF results supporting the possibility of an organized, communal hunt. As bison populations declined in the region during the middle Holocene, communal hunts were no longer effective. However, a surge in bison numbers during the Little Ice Age appears to have encouraged the re-employment of jumps/mass kills.