Folsom Adaptations to Bison Hunting: a comparison of Northern and Southern Plains arroyo trap kills

Summary

The purpose of this research is to compare and contrast Paleoindian arroyo trap bison kills on the Southern plains to analogous sites on the Northern plains to investigate the transition from opportunistic hunting to organized hunting under different environmental regimes. Analyses to address this problem include: Stable isotopes of bison bone to aid in environmental reconstruction; radiocarbon dates to determine the antiquity of the sites being compared; and the seasonality of the kill event to relate hunting organization to bison behavior and trace element analysis to reconstruct bison mobility patterns. This research provides new perspective on the transition from passive, opportunistic hunting of large game to active, organized hunting of bison herds that developed during the early Paleoindian period in North America.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• New Perspectives in Folsom Archaeology

Keywords

Spatial Coverage