Where Men Get Their Meat: Predicting Jump Locations at the Grapevine Creek Buffalo Jump Complex

Summary

Buffalo jumps have long been part of Crow oral histories. In 1962, at Grapevine Creek in Montana, Joseph Medicine Crow recounted oral histories to identify two buffalo jumps and associated drive lines above cliffs overlooking the floodplain. In 2015, a team of archaeologists, and Crow tribal monitors from the Tribal Historic Preservation Office employed geoarchaeological methods to investigate whether bison bones might be preserved in primary context in the drainage. We focused on recorded oral histories of land use at Grapevine Creek, and incorporated GIS mapping to visualize topographic landscape features and prehistoric site distributions in order to predict where additional buffalo jumps might be found. The resulting model uses oral history documents, digital elevation models, geologic and soil maps, site distributions, chert extraction locales and prehistoric trail locations to predict buffalo jump site locales. In a relatively small portion of the drainage, our team identified two additional buffalo jumps and drive lines spanning 2,000 years. Both the oral histories and predictive model suggest that other jumps may be present in the Grapevine Creek drainage.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage