Echoes of Paleoindians: Analyzing Faunal Remains from the Jones-Miller site in Wray, Colorado

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Jones Miller site is a Bison antiquus kill site in Northeast Colorado near the town of Wray. The site was discovered by Robert Jones, Jr. in 1972, and excavated by Dennis Stanford at the Smithsonian Museum. The site is a thick, very large (approximately 36m by 40m) bone bed located in a former draw off the Arikaree River basin. The site dates to 10,800 years before present towards the end of the Pleistocene and contains at least 2 kill events leaving behind the remains of at least 300 bison. This study is a detailed zoo-archaeological analysis of one square (D106). This study seeks to understand the details of site preservation, taphonomic processes, human caused butchery patterns, and also the role that non-humans played in altering the skeletons. For this study 535 skeletal elements have been examined thus far using standard zooarchaeological methods. All remains belong to Bison Antiquus. Radioulnae are the dominant skeletal element of the long bones, the MNE=14, the MNI=12, 35% (n=7) have cut marks, 0% (n= 0) have carnivore tooth marks. The analysis shows that humans were preferentially butchering the forelimb in this square.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53931