| As an edible resource, bison has been viewed as important, if not critical, to the survival of prehistoric human populations in the Great Plains during the Late Prehistoric period. This interpretation has derived in part from the ethnohistoric accounts of nomadic tribes who employed a bison-centered economy during the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, and has since been bolstered by the excavation and analysis of several key bison kill sites in the Northwestern Plains, such as Glenrock and Head-Smashed-In. These sites suggest an intensification of bison procurement during the Late Prehistoric period. However, the archaeological record elsewhere in the Great Plains lacks clear evidence of intensive bison procurement. In fact, large kills are quite rare in the archaeological record of the Southern and Central Plains and Middle Missouri regions. In this dissertation, I challenge the assumption that bison hunting was a critical component of subsistence in the Late Prehistoric Great Plains. Using archaeological site data compiled from unpublished government documents, cultural resource management reports, and published literature on all recorded Late Prehistoric bison kill and processing sites for the entire Great Plains region and using GIS spatial analysis, I evaluate the spatial and temporal variability in the bison procurement record during the Late Prehistoric period. In addition, using paleoenvironmental data, I assess whether bison hunting strategies reflect adaptations to geographically-dependent environmental conditions. By testing existing models of bison procurement, I assess the ability of the available models to explain the observed archaeological record. I conclude that the role of bison hunting and the importance of bison in the subsistence economy of Great Plains populations were highly variable over time and across space, and no single model can explain the role of bison in ancient subsistence economies. |
