Bison Leap Lore: Layered Landscapes and Legacies - A GIS Investigation of the Owl Cave Early Holocene Bison Jump in Southern Idaho

Summary

This is an abstract from the "From Channel Flakes to Bison Jumps: Current Investigations of the Terminal Pleistocene/Early Holocene Archaeological Record in Southern Idaho" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Although the evidence suggests bison were consistently taken by indigenous hunters on the eastern Snake River Plain throughout the Holocene, quantitative faunal analyses indicate that bison were taken in modest numbers. Contrasting this pattern, the Owl Cave assemblage, dated at 9020 cal BP, represents a concentrated bison bone bed. This accumulation is indicative of a highly organized, communal procurement event, positioning the site among the earliest known instances of mass bison kill via a bison jump in North America. A detailed reevaluation of the original research at Owl Cave, juxtaposed with ethnographic and regional archaeological evidence, and integration of GIS technology, suggests a systematic approach to a communal hunt. Using tools available in GIS, least-cost pathways are calculated to identify potential natural drive lanes and viewshed analyses are conducted to simulate the bison’s point of view. Paleoenvironmental conditions during the early Holocene (including the presence of a pluvial lake complex), unique topographic features, and high bison population densities, likely prompted hunters to communally hunt. The implications of a mass kill event using a bison jump is significant; informing on the adaptive strategies of early Holocene hunter-gatherers, bison herd dynamics and biogeographical distribution, as well as paleoenvironmental reconstructions of the region.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• From Channel Flakes to Bison Jumps: Current Investigations of the Terminal Pleistocene/Early Holocene Archaeological Record in Southern Idaho

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53146