ABSTRACT
Bison hunting has been viewed as the primary prehistoric subsistence strategy on the North American plains for the last 10 000 years. Large-scale communal hunts were seasonally restricted, special-purpose events designed to provide large quantities of meat for drying storage. A wide range of different butchering strategies is practiced by the Nunamiut in response to variables such as season, weather conditions, method of transport, migration as opposed to encounter hunting, nutritional state of animals, and numerous others. The aging of bison from dentition is a well-established, successful method for determining age structure and seasonality in catastrophic kills. The site chosen for discussion is the Maple Leaf site, a multicomponent bison kill located south of the village of Bellevue, at the eastern edge of Crowsnest Pass in the southern Alberta Rocky Mountains of Canada. Site stratigraphy reflects a very complex depositional history since glacial times. As a result, only the pertinent upper soil layers will be briefly described.
