Butchering practices at the Vore Buffalo Jump (48CK302): investigating organization with the nearest neighbor test

Summary

Spatial recognition of organization at mass kill sites is often commented on in the literature but is rarely systematically investigated. The goal of this paper is to investigate social organization of butchery with the nearest neighbor test. The lack of these sorts of methods in the literature is primarily due to the ever-changing methods of archaeological excavation and limited ability to easily analyze provenience data. In the literature, observations of organization and spatial patterning have relied on site maps of excavation blocks and in-field observations. In this paper, statistical methods are applied to a mass kill site of Bison bison from the Vore Buffalo Jump (48CK302) to investigate the organization of butchery. Using a nearest neighbor test, pairwise bootstrapping tests, and a chi-square analysis, this study finds that these methods can give insight into dense stratified bone beds and locate patterns more confidently.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 16447