Article

Complementary approaches to the identification of bison processing for storage at the Kutoyis complex, Montana

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  • Archaeo-Physics, LLC
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Abstract

Identifying sources of variability in carcass processing activities is central to the construction of inferences about primary consumption as well as production of storable and transportable by-products. In the northwestern Plains of North America, bison harvesting and processing underwent important changes in scale and intensity in the millennium before European contact. Recent studies of surface stone architecture dating to this time period point to band- and supra-band investment in the planning and construction of elaborate hunting facilities. Site-scale butchering and carcass processing, on the other hand, are good indicators of the degree to which hunting families foresaw the need to secure foodstuffs for future consumption and trade. This report discusses the results of a magnetic survey, excavations, and faunal analysis undertaken at the Kutoyis Site (24GL366), a Late Prehistoric-period hunting complex located in Montana, to characterize processing activities associated with large-scale communal bison hunting. Positive magnetic readings across the site's floodplain, discovery of processing features, and patterned bone fragmentation across the site suggest an investment in the production of storable and transportable by-products such as pemmican, and support architectural and environmental evidence of economic intensification.

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... Because most of the processed food (pemmican, dried meat) and other by-products (tanned skins, sinew, bone tools) resulting from a kill are rarely preserved archaeologically, processing activities are generally recognized through direct and indirect archaeological evidence, such as meat drying racks (i.e., post-hole), pitted hammerstones for crushing bone, boiling pits or cooking pots associated with thermal features (Bethke et al., 2018;Brink, 2008). In addition, because extracting within bone fats is often a key goal from carcasses processing, processing areas often contain large quantities of broken bones, charcoal and ash, and fireaffected rock. ...
... This was a chaotic, dirty task requiring a great deal of labor. All members of the group(s) involved in the hunt, perhaps 100 or more people, would take part in the carcass processing phase (Bethke et al., 2018;Schaeffer, 1978). ...
Chapter
Modern human hunters from across the globe have been using traps to hunt large herbivores for tens of thousands of years. While substantial investments in terms of labor and resources, traps significantly increase efficiency and yield from communal hunting of multiple prey. While the physical construction of traps is important, hunting success requires highly coordinated and ritualized actions of large numbers of people.
... The act of hunting bison encompasses principles, dispositions, and practices deployed by hunters in response to predictable and unpredictable conditions affecting people, prey, and place. This Bhunter's ethos^both replicates tradition and introduces innovation to address present issues and structure responses to future events (e.g., Joyce and Lopiparo 2005;Zedeño 2013;Zedeño and Anderson 2010;Zedeño et al. 2014), such as the ability to engineer the hunting ground through the construction of permanent hunting facilities, to manage grasslands and possibly bison herds through the use of fire, to expedite ecological renewal through intricate religious rituals, and to use these communal hunting strategies to procure sufficient food for storage and trade (Bethke et al. 2018;Oetelaar 2014;Roos et al. 2018;Zedeño et al. 2014). The framework of the hunter's ethos more fully conceptualizes the relationship between the Blackfoot and bison by capturing the totality of the bison hunting complex, which included not only the actual act of killing bison, but also all the requirements for a successful hunt: an understanding and manipulation of the landscape, the construction of facilities such as drives or corrals, knowledge of the prey and its environment, and all the actions, rituals, and social structures associated with organizing the kill (Bamforth 1988;Barsh and Marlor 2003;Brink 2008;Harrod 2000;Oetelaar 2014;Scheiber 2007;Zedeño et al. 2014). ...
... Prior to the introduction of the horse, hunting parties were limited in the amount of meat and secondary products they could carry back from the camp (Lewis 1942:38;Roe 1955:365). While recent evidence from Late Precontact Period bison kill sites indicates a ramping up of the extensive processing and storage of bison products during this time (Bethke et al. 2018;Brink 2008), the horse made it possible to carry even larger quantities of meat, fat, and hides back to camp for secondary processing and subsequently transport those supplies in the long term, insuring a larger and more regular supply for consumption and trade (Ewers 1955:304;Landals 2004:255;Lewis 1942:38). Evidence of carcass processing at equestrian bison kill sites, such as the Castle Forks and Flicka sites, supports these divergent patterns in carcass part abundances (Peck 2011:434). ...
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The dynamic relationship between horses and nomadic peoples has a long history of study within pastoralist research worldwide. In the Plains of North America, however, the story of the horse is not often considered within these discussions. This article focuses on the story of the Blackfoot people in order to move beyond description of observed impacts of the horse and toward a discussion of what these impacts mean in terms of culture change, continuity, and Indigenous resistance. Recognizing Blackfoot horse culture as a true mode of pastoralism acknowledges the complexity of Indigenous responses to Euroamerican contact while also expanding our understanding of the global development of pastoralism as a lifeway.
... In this context, it is worth reiterating that changes in socioeconomic organization can drive abrupt, climate-independent fire regime changes (17,64,65). This appears to have occurred in our study area first with the transition to intensive, place-based bison procurement and pemmican processing for trade (35,66), followed by the adoption of the horse and transition to equestrian bison hunting (67). Although simple dichotomies between foragers and farmers may not be useful for interpreting human impacts on past fire regimes, closer attention to particular socioeconomic patterns and transitions may be useful for discriminating changes in human impacts on fire regimes. ...
... Test excavations (1 m × 1 m) were conducted at four bone bed sites associated with driveline complexes (Badger, Racine, Stranglewolf, Two Medicine/Schultz) to supplement the regional survey. Stratigraphic excavations at the Kutoyis bison bone bed and processing site revealed five thermal features (66) and at least three discrete layers of burned bison bone deposits. Bison bone, canid bone, charcoal, and blowfly pupae were radiocarbon-dated from the tested bone beds and stratigraphically from Kutoyis bone bed and processing features (SI Appendix, Table S1). ...
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Significance The relative importance of human activities and climate in shaping fire regimes is controversial. In North American grasslands, climate exerts strong top-down influences on fuels. For centuries before the introduction of the horse, Native American and First Nations hunters built and used landscape features on these grasslands to harvest bison en masse. Charcoal layers associated with drivelines indicate that fire was an important part of these hunting practices. Furthermore, correlation of dated fire deposits and climate records indicate that ancient bison hunters burned in response to favorable climate conditions. This study indicates that climate and human activities are not mutually exclusive factors in fire histories; even relatively small groups of hunter-gatherers can enhance climate impacts.
... Pemmican was nutritious, lightweight, and could be stored for long periods of time. 27 Bison tongues, a sacred food, were dried for use in ceremonies and particularly in the summer Okan. 28 Jumps were rarely used in the late spring or summer, when only pounds or parks were built from wood to hunt for immediate consumption. ...
... Bement 1999;Frison, Wilson, and Wilson 1976;Meltzer 2006;Wheat 1972) and cliff-jumps (e.g. Bethke et al. 2018;Brink 2008;Brink and Rollans 1990;Frison 1970;Kehoe 1973) are perhaps the most wellknown. Many sites include dense bonebeds from one or more mass kills. ...
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This paper examines chronological methods for reoccupied archaeological sites with surface arrangements of stone features in the alpine tundra. It is challenging to interpret feature dates in the tundra due to sample scarcity and poor context. I use a case study from a communal hunting site in the Rocky Mountains of North America to argue that archaeologists should use multiple dating methods to disentangle complex site formation histories. The High Grade (5BL148) game drive is located in Colorado’s Southern Rocky Mountains and includes 30 stone walls, 52 hunting blind pits, and a short line of cairns. Dating results suggest occupations from 4650 b.c.–a.d. 1850, based on artifact typologies, radiocarbon dates on charcoal and bone collagen, and lichenometric dates on stone walls.
... The anthropogenic accumulation of faunal remains as a result of hominin waste disposal and storage behaviour (Stahlschmidt et al., 2015). The subaqueous storage of meat has been proven to be a good method for meat preservation as subaqueous environments have favourable conditions in which meat can be preserved for several months (Bethke et al., 2018;Fisher, 2009;Speth, 2017). c. ...
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The Lower Palaeolithic, Middle Pleistocene locality Schöningen has been a focus of archaeological research for over the past two decades. The locality is best-known for the discovery of wooden spears in close association with numerous butchered remains of horses and other large mammals in the Spear Horizon (Schö 13II-4), with an age of ca. 300 kyr. Several site formation models have been proposed to explain the faunal accumulation at the site: 1) single hunting event on a dried lake shore; 2) multiple hunting events in the soft mud of a lake shore; 3) deposition on an exposed delta plain; 4) geogenic displacement by hydrological processes; 5) hominin waste disposal and storage behaviour; and 6) hominin butchering activities on a frozen lake surface. Visual spatial analyses allow for the (subjective) incorporation of archaeological knowledge in the interpretation of spatial data, while spatial statistics allow for more objective and reproducible inferences about spatial patterns. The combination of the two could thus provide a vital tool in disentangling complex site formation processes. This study uses a combination of visual spatial analyses, spatial statistics and orientation analyses in order to further disentangle the site formation history of Schö 13II-4 and to assess the impact of post-depositional processes on the faunal assemblage. This study revealed the existence of intra-site and inter-species differences in spatial distribution and orientation. The results of this study are compared to the suggested site formation models for Schö 13II-4 to test which of these models is most parsimonious with the spatial distribution and orientation of the faunal assemblage. It is concluded that the previously proposed site formation models are overly simplified and cannot be used to explain the site formation history of Schö 13II-4.
... Bone grease rendering is certainly not unique to the Crow because it is a common processing technique at Northern Plains bison jumps (Bethke et al. 2018;Brink and Dawe 2003), but it is unlike processing strategies at bison jumps in Wyoming and Colorado subsequent in time to Wold, such as Glenrock (Frison 1970b), Roberts (Johnston 2016), and Vore (Reher and Frison 1980), where butchery seems more focused on the recovery of meat, organs, and marrow, rather than grease rendering. Granted, bone grease rendering could have been undertaken at some distance from these latter bone beds, and may have simply gone undocumented, but for now the evidence suggests that bone grease rendering is more associated with early Crow presence in Wyoming, with which Wold is associated, than at later bison-focused occupations. ...
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We report results from excavations at the Wold Bison Jump (Wold, site number 48JO966), a Late Prehistoric (ca. 300–500 BP) bison jump located in the southeast foothills of the Bighorn Mountains, Wyoming. We argue that (a) the site was created by the ancestral Crow based on its location, age, material culture, and hunting technique and (b) the jump at Wold triggered a large rock fall event, as evidenced by the presence of articulated bison remains beneath cliff spalls in the bone bed and a general co-association with colluvial, clast-supported matrix. We conclude that Wold was part of a larger spread of bison jumping to areas south of Montana late in prehistory, coeval with the Piney Creek and Big Goose Creek archaeological sites, and the earliest bison jumps at Vore, and alongside a suite of material culture associated with the ancestral Crow on the Northwest Plains.
... Tipi encampments reused over multiple generations grew eightfold the size of the largest known Archaic tipi ring sites. The manufacture of bison by-products for consumption, storage, and exchange is well represented in processing sites along the foothills (e.g., Bethke et al., 2016;Brink, 2008). This record suggests that the ancestral Blackfoot were able to produce pemmican and hides in excess of their needs and to engage in the vast aboriginal trading networks that crisscrossed the Plains and Rockies beginning in the Late Archaic-Late Prehistoric transition and continuing until the late 1800s (Ewers, 1968;Reeves, 1983). ...
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Mary Stiner uses ecological niche theory to analyze and interpret several Middle Paleolithic archaeological and paleontological sites in southern Europe. Her concern is with how the hunting, scavenging, and foraging behavior of Neandertals compared and contrasted with the subsistence behavior of other large predators living in the region at the time - lions, hyenas, and wolves, for example - and with how Neandertal subsistence behavior related to the behavior of the anatomically modern humans who subsequently came to dominate the area in the Upper Paleolithic. Her conclusion, very broadly stated, is that Neandertals entered the Middle Paleolithic in direct and successful competition with lions, hyenas, and wolves, but ended the period in direct and ultimately unsuccessful competition for the ecological niche that we came to occupy with our slightly more advanced technology and slightly more sophisticated ambush hunting strategies and techniques
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Remains of earth ovens with rock heating elements of various sizes and configurations are common at hunter-gatherer sites around the world. They span the last 30,000 years in the Old World and some 10,000 years in the New World. Although various foods were baked in these ovens, plants predominate. Earth ovens are ethnographically well documented as family- size and bulk cooking facilities, but related technology and its archaeological signatures remain poorly understood and understudied. These ubiquitous features are often mischaracterized as generic cooking facilities termed hearths. It is proposed that, in fact, most rock “hearths” are heating elements of earth ovens. Reliable identification and interpretation of earth ovens requires documentation of heating elements, pit structure, rock linings, and various remnants thereof. Fundamental technological concepts for investigating their archaeological signatures include thermodynamics, construction designs, and life cycles in systemic context, as informed by ethnographic, archaeological, and experimental data. Earth oven technology explains well the primary purpose of labor-intensive thermal storage for long-term cooking and conserving fuel. Information from the extensive archaeological record of earth ovens on the Edwards Plateau of south-central North America illustrates these points.
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The Upper Paleolithic site of Vale Boi in coastal, southwestern Portugal currently represents one of the earliest known cases of grease-rendering in Eurasia, with initial occupation of the site occurring during the early Gravettian at ∼28,000 BP. Already by this time, Vale Boi foragers were intensively processing ungulate carcasses by rendering grease from their bones. Zooarchaeological evidence of grease rendering includes extensive fragmentation of red deer and equine remains, abundant evidence of impact features on specimens and a lower proportion of preserved grease-rich skeletal portions. Comparisons of red deer and horse bone portions with density assays and utility indices suggest that ungulates at Vale Boi were systematically processed for their marrow and bone grease. The early onset of grease-rendering at Vale Boi, in addition to heavy rabbit exploitation may have been spurred by ungulate communities unable to support human consumer-demand on their own. However, the continued practice of grease-rendering at Vale Boi over the course of the Upper Paleolithic may also be closely related to the significance of bone fats for mobile hunter–gatherers – as a highly valued, storable and easily-transportable resource.
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This paper explores the influence of sedentary and semi-sedentary ‘tribally’ organized Eastern Woodlands and Middle Missouri horticultural villagers on Canadian plains hunter-gatherer social organization during the millennium prior to European contact. So-called tribal organization of Canadian plains bison hunters has been suggested to have been caused by the acquisition of domesticated horses from Europeans, which enabled the ritualized mass killing of bison, large group size and a more complex material culture. That is, the complex culture of plains groups at the time of European contact is held to be the result of that contact. It is clear, however, that the material culture correlates of semi-sedentism, complexity and tribal social organization begin to appear in the archaeological record of the Canadian plains with the development of horticultural villages to the south and east, and the appearance of certain aspects of village material culture (primarily specific types of pottery and lithic raw materials) in Canadian plains archaeological assemblages well prior to any European influence. Expansion of horticulture slowed dramatically upon encountering the plains peoples who, I suggest, adopted certain aspects of the culture of their horticultural neighbours and sometime invaders, including a segmentary tribal social organization, sodalities and limited use of traded horticultural products, primarily maize. By adopting a communal bison-hunting subsistence system that included the construction of gathering facilities such as pounds and jumps, people were able to increase their food production capabilities while reinforcing their tribal social structure. These cultural changes would have occurred as a result of resistance to the expansion of apparently aggressive horticultural neighbours combined with acculturation to a changing world system of food production. The complex culture of Canadian plains peoples appeared well prior to the appearance of Europeans and is an indigenous development.
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In recent years archaeologists and paleontologists have become increasingly interested in how and why vertebrate animal remains become, or do not become, fossils. Vertebrate Taphonomy introduces interested researchers to the wealth of analytical techniques developed by archaeologists and paleontologists to help them understand why prehistoric animal remains do or do not preserve, and why those that preserve appear the way they do. This book is comprehensive in scope, and will serve as an important work of reference for years to come.
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Through chemical extraction, weight and percentage of fat are quantified for proximal, distal and medial sections of leg bones from three Plains bison. Bone grease weight is accurately predicted by dry bone weight (r2=0·981), bone volume (r2=0·959) and by density (r2=0·877). Binford's Grease Index is reviewed and found to be a questionable measure of bone fat. Results of this study and those of Emerson are generally complementary. Carnivore selection of bones correlates strongly with grease content (r=0·954). Differential yield of grease may help account for patterns of faunal abundance at certain bison kill sites. Bone grease is a minor but dependable and nutritious fat supply that may have been especially important during time of stress. As the last and the most destructive of butchering events, bone grease rendering has the potential to exert great influence over patterns of skeletal abundance.
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Human transport of bones with high food values, and destruction of bones with low density values are the traditionally invoked explanations of the frequencies of bones in archeological contexts. The manner in which these two explanations have been used suggests archaeologists assume the explanations to be independent of one another. The transport explanation is operationalized as the modified general utility index (MGUI) of Binford, and the destruction explanation is operationalized with measures of bone density. Statistical correlation of the MGUI with bone density, while weak, indicates that many high utility bones have low density values while many low utility bones have high density values. Because low density bones tend to be destroyed more readily than high density bones, inferences of human utility strategies derived from bone frequencies and based on the MGUI may be inaccurate. The utility strategies suggested by three archaeofaunas are compared to bone density, and two of these faunas are shown to potentially be the result of differential destruction and not human transport as measured by the MGUI.
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Differences between body part representation of small and large domestic stock at Ngamuriak, a Pastoral Neolithic site in Kenya, are generally similar to those described for small and large wild animals at many other sites from different time periods. In order to explore the underlying reasons for the existence of these patterns at Ngamuriak, multiple regression was used to consider the value of meat, marrow, bone grease, and bone density for predicting body part representation. Caprine body part patterns could be predicted quite accurately by marrow and bone grease. Cattle body part patterns could not be predicted very well, and patterns were not so consistent. Within-bone nutrients and density were the most useful variables for predicting body part representation. These results, along with patterns of long bone breakage, suggest that the difference between caprines and cattle resulted from differences in bone processing. Since processing for within-bone nutrients at Ngamuriak created patterns of skeletal part representation that are similar to those attributed at other sites to meat transport, our results suggest that the role of within-bone nutrients should be examined before transport based on meat value is assumed.
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Ranking animal body parts according to their economic utility has enabled archaeologists to investigate the economic decisions that resulted in the differential deposition of body parts in faunal assemblages. One of the indices developed by Lewis Binford ranks animal bone according to the quantity and quality of the marrow associated with each bone. The present study demonstrates that a much simpler index based solely on the amount of marrow is a better predictor of marrow extraction by Nunamiut and shows that additional insights into marrow use are obtained when the parts are ranked on the basis of the costs in time and the benefits in calories of extracting bone marrow.