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The Archaeology of People: Dimensions of Neolithic Life, Whittle

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<< Our Photo Pages >> Fincastle Grazing Reserve Bison Kill - Ancient Mine, Quarry or other Industry in Canada

Submitted by bat400 on Tuesday, 17 March 2015  Page Views: 2956

DigsSite Name: Fincastle Grazing Reserve Bison Kill
Country: Canada
NOTE: This site is 14.775 km away from the location you searched for.
Type: Ancient Mine, Quarry or other Industry

Latitude: 49.915000N  Longitude: 111.892W
Condition:
5Perfect
4Almost Perfect
3Reasonable but with some damage
2Ruined but still recognisable as an ancient site
1Pretty much destroyed, possibly visible as crop marks
0No data.
-1Completely destroyed
 no data Ambience:
5Superb
4Good
3Ordinary
2Not Good
1Awful
0No data.
 no data Access:
5Can be driven to, probably with disabled access
4Short walk on a footpath
3Requiring a bit more of a walk
2A long walk
1In the middle of nowhere, a nightmare to find
0No data.
 no data Accuracy:
5co-ordinates taken by GPS or official recorded co-ordinates
4co-ordinates scaled from a detailed map
3co-ordinates scaled from a bad map
2co-ordinates of the nearest village
1co-ordinates of the nearest town
0no data
 2
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Fincastle Grazing Reserve Bison Kill
Fincastle Grazing Reserve Bison Kill submitted by TheDruid-3X3 : Picture of the River Ravine where of the Bison Kill. (Vote or comment on this photo)
Ancient Industry or work site in Alberta.
Radiocarbon dated to 2500 years ago, this kill site did not involve "jumping" Bison from a cliff, but instead suggests that the hunters stalked and ambushed the herd as it watered in marshy land. Penned in by sand dunes, the bison would have had limited escape routes.

A dig performed by the University of Lethbridge and the Archaeological Survey of Alberta has discovered over 100 projectile points and eight unusual arrangements of bison bones found standing on end, perched in precise, almost sculptural patterns.

The projectile points reflect two different and distinct styles associated with different pre-contact cultures; one associated with the Besant Phase, a cultural complex more often found to the east, and the Sonota, which was based in what’s now the Dakotas. This find indicates these two cultural groups may have been working on the Alberta plains at least 500 years earlier than previously thought. The site lies within the public land of the Fincastle Grazing Reserve. The location linked is for Purple Springs, the nearest village and does not reflect the actual site of the dig.

Note: 2,500-Year-Old Bison-Kill Site Offers New Clues Into Ancient Culture of Northern Plains
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Fincastle Grazing Reserve Bison Kill
Fincastle Grazing Reserve Bison Kill submitted by TheDruid-3X3 : Picture of the River Valley of the Bison Kill. (Vote or comment on this photo)

Fincastle Grazing Reserve Bison Kill
Fincastle Grazing Reserve Bison Kill submitted by TheDruid-3X3 : Picture of the Valley that is the Site of the Bison Hill. (Vote or comment on this photo)

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"Fincastle Grazing Reserve Bison Kill" | Login/Create an Account | 4 News and Comments
  
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Bison-Kill Site by Runemage on Wednesday, 10 April 2024
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Druid 3x3 has commented
"No Access to this Site as it is Fenced Off by Barbed Wire so a 1. No Ambience at all so 1 on that and maybe a 3 for Condition
[ Reply to This ]

Re: 2,500-Year-Old Bison-Kill Site Offers New Clues Into Ancient Northern Plains Cult by Anonymous on Monday, 24 February 2020
Not sure if you know this but there is an older dig site called Fletcher. Estimated to be 9000 years old. Try looking up information Glenbow Museum Archives online. There is a lot of information there about various sites throughout Alberta here. I live in between the fincastle and fletcher site. I used to farm the land just north of the fletcher site up until 2013 so I’m very familiar with it. I was around when they dug it again in the eighties.
[ Reply to This ]

The Fincastle site: A Late Middle Prehistoric bison kill on the Northwestern Plains by Andy B on Thursday, 14 July 2016
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The Fincastle site: A Late Middle Prehistoric bison kill on the Northwestern Plains by Shawn Bubela

DOI: 10.1179/2052546X14Y.0000000009
Free access

Excavations at the Fincastle site located in southern Alberta began in 2004. Objects recovered include bison bone fragments, debitage, lithic cores, projectile points, expedient and formed tools, and fire-broken rocks. Our analysis shows that Fincastle has kill spots as well as primary (carcass disarticulation) and secondary (tongue removal, marrow extraction, and grease rendering) butchering activities.

Fincastle is a single event site with a number of ceremonial bone upright features. The features and the predominance of Knife River Flint signify a strong cultural connection between the Fincastle hunters and groups living in the Middle Missouri area during the Late Middle Prehistoric Period. These findings and its early date of 2500 B.P. add to the debate surrounding the classification and interpretation of the Outlook Complex, Besant Phase, and Sonota Complex on the Northwestern Plains.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1179/2052546X14Y.0000000009
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2,500-Year-Old Bison-Kill Site Offers New Clues Into Ancient Northern Plains Culture by bat400 on Tuesday, 17 March 2015
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A massive bison kill carried out some 2,500 years ago among the sand dunes of southern Alberta left behind a wealth of artifacts that are offering new insights into a poorly-understood culture of the ancient Northern Plains.

In addition to the scattered remains of at least 65 bison, archaeologists have found more than a hundred stone points, most of them fashioned from a type of rock found only in North Dakota, a thousand kilometers away.

And beneath the layer of animal fragments and tools, even more rare finds were discovered: eight arrangements of bison bones found standing on end, perched in precise, almost sculptural patterns.

Excavated between 2004 and 2012 in the Fincastle Grazing Reserve just north of the Montana border, the site has revealed a chapter in Plains history that was nearly lost, said Dr. Shawn Bubel, archaeologist at the University of Lethbridge.

“I started to excavate at Fincastle was because the site was being looted,” Bubel said. “There was evidence of pits dug across the site, gouges in the side of the dunes, and bone was tossed everywhere.
... we came up with a plan to survey and document the site before it was lost.
As it turned out, the project grew into something fantastic. The archaeological remains were incredible.”

The most abundant artifacts are more than 200,000 fragments of bison bone, comprising the remains of dozens of animals that were butchered and processed, likely in a single event. Radiocarbon tests of several of these samples returned dates in the range of the year 500 BCE.

The location of the kill site suggests that the hunters used a particularly canny approach — ambushing the herd as it watered in marshy land tucked among the sand dunes, leaving the animals with few routes for escape.
“It’s not what most people think about when bison hunting is talked about,” Bubel said.

“Big bison-jump sites where the hunters drove the herd off a cliff, or used the natural landscape to drive the herd into a trap like an arroyo, or driving the bison into a trap they constructed to enclose the animals, are the strategies archaeologists talk about.
Fincastle showcases more of a stalking and ambushing strategy.”

... noteworthy are 118 projectile points, whose styles and sizes suggest the influence of two major cultural complexes in the region.
Some of the points are broad-faced and side-notched, like those associated with the Besant Phase, a complex whose traces are more often found to the east, starting around 2,000 years ago.

But some of the tools are more elongated than typical Besant points, suggesting the distinctive style of a more distant group, the Sonota, which was based in what’s now the Dakotas.

“These points showcase attributes that are seen in [both] Besant and Sonota point assemblages,” Bubel said.
“What makes them of great interest is that they were made 2,500 years ago.
“The Fincastle assemblage is one of the earliest occurrences of this cultural group in the Northwest Great Plains — it confirms that the Besant/Sonota cultural groups were living in southern Alberta by that time.”
The fact that these points were found in Alberta also raises questions about how — and how far — these cultural groups spread to the north and west.

“The points and tools were predominantly made of Knife River Flint that came from North Dakota,” Bubel explained.
“More than 75 percent of the tools were made of this stone.”
“Does this mean that hunters travelled from the Dakotas into Alberta? ” Bubel conjectured. “Perhaps.”
“One could also argue that the hunters were already in Alberta and simply traded with other groups living in the Dakotas for Knife River Flint.
“That could have been the case, but the quantity of Knife River Flint is very high in the Fincastle assembles — higher than what is normally seen if an exotic stone was traded in.”

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