Move When the Wind Blows Hunting When the Earth Had Four Corners (Part Three)	by Scott Chandler
Central States Archaeological Societies 2025 October Journal	Sarasota, Florida

This excerpt from "Move When the Wind Blows Hunting When the Earth Had Four Corners (Part Three)" published in the 2025 Central States Archaeological Societies 2025 October Journal Read the complete column in the Central States Archaeological Societies 2025 October Journal which can be purchased on-line after March 2026

Figure 33.

With evidence going back to Paleo times, the "buffalo jump" is a textbook case of the marriage between textual and physical archaeology. Native Americans employed efficiency in what the topography offered and utilized advanced cognitive functions like vision, conceptualization and foresight in deciding which plateau afforded a sufficient jump. Zenas Leonard implies that the "buffalo jump" among the Crow of 1832 was an adrenaline filled, blood spilled outing and must have been a spectacle to witness: “When they are in a country suitable, these people will destroy the buffalo by driving a herd of some hundreds to the edge of a convenient rocky precipice, when they are forced headlong down the craggy descent. This is more dangerous…unless the Indians are very numerous, will sometimes rush in a solid column through their ranks…”(110). Artifacts and bones discovered at the bases of steep precipices in western regions, as well as at nearby processing sites, affirm both the textual and archaeological record. Lewis and Clark observed this practice and added to our dossier of knowledge that a decoy would be used to lead the bison to the edge, a dangerous job since the runner often dove into a rocky crag just before the animals went over the cliff. Sometimes referred to as red deer, elk surprisingly were also run over jumps by Canadian inhabitants as surveyor Thompson noted in the 1700s: “...Red Deer...[are] too bold to be encircled, though frequently driven over high steep banks” (558). The re-creation of the "buffalo jump" by the Smithsonian in Figure 33 documents a brutal yet efficient type of hunting where gravity weaponized the animal's body weight on itself and did most of the damage.

Somewhere near the Columbia River, trapper Alexander Ross in the early 1800s supplied important data that may comport with a modern theory of archaeology. Ross relates that Natives would combine natural with man made structures in the taking of various animals that included deer: “As soon as the fish season is over, the Indians again all withdraw into the interior or mountains, as in the spring, and divide into little bands, for the purpose of hunting the various animals of the chase. In their mode of ensnaring the deer and other animals, they are generally very successful...they frequently select a valley or favourable spot of ground between two mountains, having a narrow outlet or pass at one end; and the better to decoy the unwary game into it, bushes are planted on each side of the pass, contracting, as it were, the passage as it advances into the form of a funnel, until, at the outlet, it becomes quite narrow. Here the animals, being pressed forward by their pursuers, fall an easy prey to those who in ambush await their arrival, and by whom they are generally all killed while struggling to extricate themselves from the snare” (111-112).

Embedded within Ross's observation is a valuable statement that may be a case where textual archaeology (a form or ethnoarchaeology) affirms physical archaeology: “As soon as the fish season is over, the Indians again all withdraw into the interior or mountains, as in the spring, and divide into little bands, for the purpose of hunting the various animals of the chase." This fascinating insight may have roots in deeper time where communities seasonally cycled from the lowlands to the mountains for hunting purposes. Based on lithic evidence and point type classifications, two Western models have been presented in recent decades to explain possible migrations of ancient societies from the Great Plains to the Rocky Mountains.

The Mountain Tradition Model holds that a separate cultural adaptation began in the late Paleo period where hunter-gatherer’s came from the Great Plains to the mountains and adjusted, survived and remained there year round. Not rotating back to the Plains, as was customary, they created a separate identity from lowland sustain themselves in the mountains all winter. Yet stories abound from hunters that deer and elk will often stay in the high country throughout the winter and not necessarily venture out into the more temperate plains as is typical. Also tied to projectile point sequences is The Altithermal Refugiam Model. This model posits that climate change caused the transition from Paleo to the Archaic period, when drought conditions generated a hiatus of people from the Great Plains to seek refuge in the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains around 7,000-4500 ybp. In other words, climate change was the apparent catalyst that put in motion a rotation routine of high country living that lasted until the archival era when explorers logged their data. Whatever the ...

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