Zooarchaeolgy Final Exam 2001

AP465 SPRING 2001

FINAL EXAM

Your final exam in this class will be a paper in which you summarize your semester’s work on one of three the research topics introduced here. Topic 1 deals largely with research that seeks a better understanding of past ecological communities and the indirect effects that prehistoric peoples may have had on those communities. This deals with anthropological and paleoecological research domains at the community level. The second topic focuses on attempting to gain a better understanding of one of the game animals that played a major role in the lives of prehistoric peoples in western North America. This second topic will cover some aspects of anthropological, paleoecological, and paleoenvironmental research domains. The third exam topic focus primarily on the behaviors of prehistoric human groups and is thus mostly within an anthropological research domain. You must select a research topic and let me know which topic you’ll be dealing with on or before Friday February 2, 2001 and begin working on your semester project at that time. If you can make a compelling case for doing you term paper on another topic, you must also have a brief, one-page project summary approved by February 2^nd.

TOPIC 1

Before the early 1970’s, open pit garbage disposal area were a major source of food for grizzly bears in Yellowstone National Park. A leading researcher on the Park’s bears suggested that although these dumps were in a sense “artificial” food sources, they could also be seen as an example of ecocenters, which are defined as “large, dependable sources of high-calorie food that seasonally attracts and holds large aggregations of bears for periods of two to three months” (Craighead et al. 1995:2). Craighead suggested that the remains of bison kills produced by prehistoric hunters would have served a similar ecocenter role. In terms of long-term inter-species ecological relationships, Craighead argued that closing the Yellowstone dumps without providing alternative ecocenter locations was an unrealistic situation that would, in fact, be very different from the environment to which western North American carnivores had been adapting to for at least 10,000 years. From this perspective, “an ecocenter formed at a bison jump is as natural or artificial as one formed at garbage disposal sites. Ecologically, they are equivalent” (Craighead et al. 1995:2). This view has not been widely accepted, and a recent article on carnivores in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem has stated that “given the intermittent human use of bison jump sites, it seems improbable that they could provide the consistent nutrition of modern garbage dumps” (Schullery and Whittlesey 1999:17).

Using zooarchaeology approaches, assess the merits of the ecocenter model for understanding pre-Columbian ecological relationships in western North America. What sorts of information are already available to help evaluate the model (literature review)? What sorts of zooarchaeological observations (data collection) could you make on materials from bison kill sites to provide more solid data on which to evaluate the ecocenter idea? Develop an interpretation of the role that bison kill sites played in the lives of non-human carnivores (not necessarily exclusively grizzlies) and how difference in human hunting strategies may have effected carnivore populations.

TOPIC 2

One of the factors that conditions a grazing animal’s longevity is the degree of tooth wear. As the teeth wear out, an animal’s ability to process enough forage to survive seasonal periods of food shortage decreases. Zooarchaeological studies of bison teeth from a number of bonebeds in Wyoming and Montana suggest that although rates to tooth wear varied with range condition (i.e., grass type, precipitation, grazing intensity, etc.), prehistoric bison seldom reached ages beyond about 15 years. Contemporary commercial bison herds often have animals that reach 20 years of age and cows at nearly 30 years are reported to still be able to have and raise calves. Preliminary examination of bison mandibles from the Kaplan-Hoover site (a 2700 year-old bison kill near Windsor, Colorado) indicates that the number of ‘very old’ animals in this deme seems to be much greater than usually reported in the more northern bison kill sites. This suggests that there may have been a latitudinal gradient in prehistoric bison longevity with the more severe winters in the northern Plains being a limiting factor. In Colorado, and further south, the more mild winters may have allowed animals to reach a more advanced age before teeth became “too worn” to survive.

Using zooarchaeology approaches, evaluate the idea of a “dental attrition/winter severity gradient” as part pre-Columbian bison ecology in western North America. What sorts of information are already available to help evaluate the model (literature review)? What sorts of zooarchaeological observations (data collection) could you make on materials from bison kill sites to provide more solid data on which to evaluate this model idea? Develop an interpretation for the variation documented in Plains bison dental attrition and discuss how differences in longevity could influence human predation strategies.

TOPIC 3

The One of the most oft repeated stereotypes is that Native American peoples of western North America, although effective hunters, that they always “used every part of the bison” they killed. Usually this statement is made in comparison to the wasteful use of resources by the Euroamericans as evidenced by the very rapid, near extinction of the Plains bison herds, which had survived thousands of years of often intensive hunting by Plains Indians with little apparent adverse effects. However, ethnographic evidence suggests that there was much more variation in how completely an animals carcass might be butchered depending on a number of factors (e.g., season, distance the meat had to be carried, number of people in the group, danger of contact with hostile groups, location of the kills, etc.). Wilson (1924) describes two general patterns of bison butchery: a heavy or intensive processing and a light or minimal processing. Binford’s classic (1978) study of Nunimiut hunters in Alaska went a long way to demonstrate that carcass processing by hunter-gatherers is often much more strongly influenced by economic factors than by cultural norms.

Archaeologically, excavations of a fairly large number of kill sites and campsites on the western Plains and mountain west has hinted at some general chronological trends (not universals, but trends) in how bison resources were used by the first Americans. Sites from the late Pleistocene through the mid Holocene seem to indicate a rather limited emphasis of heavy butchery and preparation of large quantities of foods for longer-term storage. Over the last several thousand years, the quantities of food products from bison kill sites processed for storage and longer-term use seems to have increased dramatically. One of the central problems, however, in evaluating such assertions is methodological. How do we realistically assess butchering intensity from archaeological remains? During the 1970, a number of interpretative conventions were developed that suggested:

· The greater the skeletal disarticulation, the more intensive the butchery

· The more broken bones, the more intensive processing

· The greater the disparity in bone frequencies (i.e., the number of crania relative to the number of leg bones, etc.) the more heavily butchered.

By the 1980s it became clear that without additional information, these criteria are, at best, ambiguous, and at worst terribly misleading. Decay and non-human scavengers disarticulate animal’s bodies, bones can be broken a wide range of ways, and many things can result in differences in skeletal element frequencies. More direct sources of information on processing intensity were clearly needed and attention began to turn to more detailed documentation of direct physical evidence of human butchery – numbers and locations of cutmarks, locations and frequencies of impact points for opening marrow cavities, etc. began to be recorded. By the late 1990s it has again become clear that even these more rigorous forms of documentation are not without problems. What does a statement that 39% of the bones from site X have cutmarks, while only 11% from site Y exhibit the butchery marks really tell us about processing intensity?

Using zooarchaeological approaches, discuss the problems and potentials of butchery analysis as a source of information and about past subsistence practices and resource use. What sorts of archaeological information are already available (literature review)? What sorts of observations (data collection) could you make on materials from bison kill sites to provide more concrete date on which to base interpretations of prehistoric resource use? How do we move beyond stereotypic, normative statements about prehistoric bison utilization to develop more reliable, testable interpretations about the nature and causes of variation in processing intensity, diet breadth, foraging strategies, and long-term behavioral change?

RFERENCES

Binford, L.R. (1978). Nunimiut Ethnoarchaeology. Academic Press. New York.

Craighead, J.J., J.S. Sumner, and J.A. Mitchell (1995). The Grissly Bears of Yellowstone: Their Ecology in the Yellowstone Ecosystem 1959-1992. Island Press, Washington, D.C.

Schullery, P. and L.H. Whittlesey (1999). Greater Yellowstone Carnivores: A History of Changing Attitudes. In Carnivores in Ecoysystems: The Yellowstone Experience, edited by T.W. Clark, A.P. Curlee, S.C. Minta, and P.M. Kareiva, pp. 11-49. Yale University Press, New Haven.

Wilson, G.L. (1924). The Horse and the Dog in Hidatsa Culture. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History 25(2):125-311.