Calgary & Southern Alberta

The bison bones found in archaeological sites can reveal a wealth of information about how the people of the plains lived before their contact with Europeans. The kinds of bison bones – mandibles, femurs and so on – found in a site, and the condition and location of the bones provide clues to what kinds of activities people carried out at the locale. The dense "bone beds" archaeologists find at bison jumps, for example, represent the parts of bison carcasses not carried away to nearby campsites. Bones found in pristine condition, moreover, tell a different story from those bearing the distinctive signs of having been chopped apart, crushed, or incised with cut marks from buchering tools.

Courtesy of Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump

By analysing the damage visible on the bones of slaughtered bison, archaeologists can reconstruct how Aboriginal people skinned and butchered the animals. They can also determine what portions of meat interested the hunters, and whether or not they utilised all parts of the carcass. Hunters probably inflicted the cut marks that archaeologists often find on the bottom borders of bison jawbones, for example, when they were severing jaw muscles in order to remove prized tongues from bison carcasses. Archaeologists often find the thoracic vertebrae that protrude upwards broken at their bases. They can infer that the people who butchered the animal removed the animal's hump, another desirable meat portion.

Hunters often carried longbones like femurs off to campsites. Once they had removed the flesh, they sometimes smashed open the bones to remove the nutritious interior marrow. Sometimes, they then boiled the bone fragments and splinters in pits of water (heated with stones) to release "bone grease", a valuable source of fat used historically in making pemmican.

By identifying all the bones at a kill site, and then counting the number of similar bones or bone parts in the catalogue, archaeologists can also establish whether the hunters killed a few animals or many. By studying the size and the appearance of particular bone elements like mandibles and ankle bones, researchers can determine the age and sex composition of the slaughtered herd. Bison calves tend to be born at the same time each year, and the teeth of young bison erupt according to a predictable schedule. Thus, if they find immature jawbones, archaeologists can even deduce the season in which a herd was killed. If they identify foetal bone at a kill site, they can infer that the animals represented in the “bone bed” were dispatched in winter.

Example of a Butchering Analysis from an Archaeological Site

Did ancient hunters on the plains conduct large communal bison drives only at certain times of the year? How did they use the animals they killed? Did culturally distinct indigenous people on the plains customarily butcher bison in different ways? Archaeologists do not yet have definitive answers. Each bit of information culled from bison bones, however, sheds new light on these and other critical questions about early Aboriginal life on the southern Alberta plains.