This conversation originally appeared on In the Moment. Listen to in its entirety here:
Lori Walsh:
Welcome back to In The Moment. I'm Lori Walsh. The last couple of years we've seen an increase in investigations of recorded and unrecorded archeological sites identified as Bison Kill Sites in the state. Well, this Sunday at 2:00 PM inside the Froiland Science Complex at the University of South Dakota you can attend the 37th Annual Third Sunday Archaeology Lecture Series as it continues. This time Michael Fosha, the assistant state archeologist with the State Archaeological Research Center in Rapid City will present on the topic and he's joining us now from the Black Hills Surgical Hospital Studio and STPBs Rapid City Studio. Michael Fosha, welcome, thanks for being here.
Michael Fosha:
Well thank you very much for having me.
Lori Walsh:
And joining us in the Kirby Family Studio in Sioux Falls we have Adrien Hannus, he's a professor of anthropology and director of the Archeology Lab at Augustana University. Adrien, nice to see you. Welcome back.
Adrien Hannus:
Thank you very much.
Lori Walsh:
Michael Fosha, if you want to get us started about. For people who don't know what a Bison Kill Site is. First of all, let's put that in context for listeners, please.
Michael Fosha:
Well, what we've been looking at are communal bison kills and these come in several forms. We have ambush sites, we have traps and we have bison jumps, which is probably the most popular and visible in people's minds. But the one thing we are looking at is the fact that they are communal bison kills, and not individual events. And not locations where they're just processing, but the actual killing then itself.
Lori Walsh:
All right, so the numbers are increasing of location of these. Adrien, do you want to address that a little bit in the broader scope of finding things in 2020 that happened years, centuries even ago?
Adrien Hannus:
Well, I guess that as additional work goes on these landscapes that appear in the Dakotas and the Northern Plains generally, these landscapes have not been surveyed as extensively as in other parts of the United States. And so one of the phenomenas that exists here is that bison become more and more prominent on the landscapes as the climates change over the last 10 to 12,000 years. So we have ultimately coming into even to the almost modern times huge herds, I mean, of millions of animals. I think.
So these were certainly creatures that the prehistoric groups pursued. They were an important source of not only food but clothing and so on, but the techniques of killing were honed and changed. And so I think what Mike is going to be talking about here, and he can correct me, is looking at these as communal events, how did the technology shift over time? Did it become more effective, less effective, et cetera?
Lori Walsh:
So interesting. Mike give us a little preview of Sunday's lecture. Take us to that place.
Michael Fosha:
Well the last few years we've been re-investigating or investigating some Bison Kill Sites. Majority of these have been in western South Dakota, but there's also been some in eastern South Dakota we're looking at. And we're trying to, like Adrian discussed, look at patterns through time in pre-history. And during one period of time, were they using more natural traps or was it more ambush style hunting? And when we see things that are out of the ordinary, we get to ask ourselves, "Well, why did they change back to something else? Or why didn't they do it this way?" So I'm going to be discussing several of the sites we've been working on to put on a national register of historic places. And just take them through how we excavated them, what we learned from each site and future directions to each site.
Lori Walsh:
Where are we speaking of by the way? Is there a site that we can be specific about to sort of spin this story out a little further?
Michael Fosha:
Right now there's 22 sites recorded as bison kills. The ones we've looked at so far, about half of them we can say, "Yes, these are bison kills." There's a good percentage of the sites that no longer exist just because of erosional practices and things like that. But the majority, they seem to cluster a lot in Harding County. And one of the reasons for that is the erosion or nature of those sediments there that are exposing and destroying at the same time these Bison Kill Sites. So the majority of the sites I'm going to be talking about are in Harding County, but I will be discussing one in the [inaudible 00:06:30] Hills as well.
Lori Walsh:
Adrien, talk a little bit about that exposing and destroying at the same time. .
Adrien Hannus:
It's one of the great conundrums of anthropology and archeology I guess. The landscapes are shifting continuously. I mean, landscapes are dynamic and there certainly are different sediments that are more prone to the effects of wind and water and so forth as far as erosion. So as Mike was saying there, some of the zones in the state are more susceptible to these exposures being caused by the natural processes of wind and water erosion.
Certainly farming is another aspect in probably coming more to the eastern part of the state. As landscapes are farmed, the various processes again cause certain levels of erosion. And in a lot of cases in the past, I think these situations where you have a bone bed, which represents a kill have not necessarily been recognized as something that was a prehistoric event.
Many times people think, well I mean, I've had people come in and say, "Here's some bones I found. These are probably cows," and you're going to examine them for a while and you say, "Well no, they're not actually modern cattle. They're actually bison." And then of course you get into the debate about, "Well, what kind of an exposure do you have?" And frequently we'll find these on Creek drainage systems and so on. And certainly when we've had some of the heavy flooding in the last several years, the back cutting of bank areas and so on has intensified.
Courtesy of USDSo again where you go through sort of cycles of exposures and then these things can also be reburied by the same processes that are exposing them, so. And we probably have more eyes out on the landscapes these days than we used to have, not as professional archeologists, but as educational collectors and so on.
And so we constantly try to encourage people if they see something to instead of doing anything about it, like starting to dig it out, actually try to contact us. Because if it is indeed a human event, in other words not a natural die off of these animals, but something that was caused by human activity, a lot of evidence can be pretty easily destroyed pretty quickly through the process of just collecting the bones or something. So, I guess we have a active Archaeological Society in the state. And I think over the years, for instance these lectures on Sunday are meant to encourage people to get in touch with us and share this information with us. And we certainly appreciate that and try to then become engaged in investigating some of these localities.
Lori Walsh:
And Mike, the science itself is fascinating. The process is fascinating, but through the process of talking to people about what's happening right here in South Dakota and Harding County for example, it also opens up this world to sort of rethink our own humanity and our own history and sort of open doors for people in new ways as they can ... Even if they're not wanting to go out into the field and do a little archeology on their own.
Michael Fosha:
Well that's true. One of the things I really enjoy about working with the public, with the Archaeological Society is giving them some small measure of insight into past human events and the people that caused these events. For instance, for thousands and thousands and thousands of years, people have been hunting bison on the plains and it's not something that they have to reinvent the wheel every time. They have a strong knowledge of the bison. They know exactly how the bison herds are going to break up into male herds or communal herds. What time of year, when is the best time to take bison for their higher levels of fat and get them thinking about exactly what would all go into a successful communal bison kill.
Lori Walsh:
And this idea of setting a trap or a, what did you say? A jump and then the processing that happens after that if you have multiple bison there to process. It just kind of blows my mind. Adrien, speak a little bit about the technologies that these people really had created to not only understand what they need to do, where they needed to do it. But how they needed to do it so that it was useful for their community.
Adrien Hannus:
Yeah. Well, in the first place, it's as part of this whole set of discussions, it's calling attention to the fact that the peoples in the past had a very intimate knowledge, not only of the habits of the animals they were hunting, of the climates in which they were working, but also the landscapes themselves become a tool. In other words, the landscape is configured in ways that the people understood and hunting bison, for instance we've talked about bison jumps. It's a very complicated process, because the animals have to be gradually, gradually, gradually moved into a position that ultimately allows the group of hunters to push them forward. Because they're not normally going to go over cliff sides and so on. So it's something that it was very, and they created for instance sort of a funnel like of rocks and bushes and so on, which would channelize the animals.
So the landscapes themselves were reworked in part to create these systems. And there's some huge sites. For instance, in Canada we have a number of very important sites that probably were used over five or 6,000 years of time where people continued to come back and come back and come back.
Well then when you talk about a group of animals going over let's say a jump. Once they start over the jump, you're not going to step out in front of them and stop them, or you'll become part of the event yourself. So in some instances, more animals went over these jumps than would actually be able to be dealt with in the butchering process. In other words, it depended again on the time of the year. In some cases, groups in the fall of the year going into the early winter maybe could live around the kill site itself or near where they pulled some of the animals.
But you have to realize that these animals, each animal probably is 1,500 or more pounds in weight. And we did an experimental butchering some years ago out in the Black Hills with stone tools. Extraordinarily efficient. But it was very, I mean I was working with Dr. George Frison from the University of Wyoming at that time who spent his life studying these kinds of sites. And he says, "Well here, grab these legs of the animal and we'll flip it over so we can cut through the stomach area." And nothing like grabbing 1,200 pounds of dead weight. I mean, I was, I couldn't. I and about six other people sort of gradually tipped this animal over.
So it was something that took a lot of very intense physical activity coupled with a very deep knowledge that the people had of animal anatomy, the habits of the animals, the climates in which they were moving around and so on. So as Mike said, "There are times of the year that you would hunt them. There are times of the year that you really wouldn't hunt them." Just because of the herd habits themselves.
Lori Walsh:
Mike Fosha has been with us. He's the assistant state archeologist with the State Archaeological Research Center in Rapid and Adrien Hannus with the Archeology Lab at Augustana University. Thank you both so much for being here with us and telling us just a tiny a bit of the story, please come back again.
Adrien Hannus:
Thank you.
Michael Fosha:
Thank you.