Buffalo's Little Brother Hill: A Little Ice 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.

This study investigates whether Buffalo’s Little Brother Hill (10BT2303) functioned as a bison jump using GIS analysis. To assess whether the site could have been utilized as a jump we examined the upland topography and conducted a least-cost-pathways analysis. These results indicate that three gaps or “funnels” in the basalt cliff are directly associated with a single drive lane, which would have guided bison from a milling basin to the northeast to the basalt cliff. The drive lane is linked with nineteen rock cairns and two hunting blinds, similar to patterns seen in the Great Plains. AMS assays reveal that the jump was likely used at least twice during the onset of the Little Ice Age when it is likely that bison populations expanded as a result of cooler, wetter conditions.

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): 53148