Calgary & Southern Alberta

Human adaptations changed as the physical environment of southern Alberta changed. The region's first residents, whom archaeologists call Paleo-Indians, were sparse in number and isolated in small, mobile bands. They hunted a variety of game, including Ice Age megafauna ["big animals"] such as enormous bison. Many animals that thrived in western North America during the Ice Age, including mammoths, mastodons, and horses, eventually became extinct. Bison, however, survived, although their size diminshed over time. The bone remains left in archaeological sites in southern Alberta and elsewhere in the United States and Canada verify that buffalo were the mainstay of life on the Great Plains for millennia before the herds were finally exterminated in the 1870s and 1880s. The Story Behind the Bones

Courtesy of Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump

A Mammoth Courtesy of the Illinois State Museum

Archaeological evidence shows that North America's indigenous people developed a sophisticated inventory of stone tools and other cultural adaptations to exploit the land. Turning a rough stone nodule into finely balanced weapon points took patience and great skill. People prized good knapping materials and they traded stone of exceptional quality over long distances. The early people of Alberta's plains produced weapon tips from many exotic materials, including obsidian imported from Yellowstone in present-day Wyoming.

How to Make a Stone Tool

The bow and arrow is a relatively recent invention. Before it was introduced to the Great Plains from Asia around 1,000 BCE, Native Albertans hunted their quarry first with long spears, and later with atlatls tipped with stone projectives. The atlatl was a spear, the end of which could be slotted into a separate handle. The combination "lengthened" the hunter's arm, enabling him to throw his spear further and with greater velocity.

Weapons and Other Tools Used in Pre-European Contact Times

While Alberta's Aboriginal people left no written records in Pre-Contact times, the bones, stone tools and other artifacts they left in sites they occupied reveal how they lived. Archaeologists in southern Alberta have found many large bison drive sites, campsites containing rings of stone used to anchor tipis, and large stone circles called "medicine wheels", which bear the hallmarks of religious locales. Some medicine wheels and bison drives are 5,000 years old.

Other kinds of archaeological sites common in southern Alberta include small "overnight" hunting camps, rock quarries, tool-making stations, and rock art sites, the most famous of which are protected today in Alberta's Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park on the Milk River near the Montana border.