Paleoindian Bison Hunting on the North American Great Plains--Two Critical Nutritional Constraints

Abstract

Post-Clovis Paleoindians living on the North American Great Plains are often thought to have been dedicated bison hunters, fulfilling most of their food needs from this one large herbivore. The archaeological record seems compatible with this view, as it is dominated by kill sites, many containing the remains of dozens to hundreds of animals. Campsites often produce remains of a broader range of animals, but these sites too are overwhelmingly dominated by bison, both in numbers of bones and in terms of meat weight. Bison are also the most obvious food source that would have been available to Plains-dwelling Paleoindians, providing an abundance of protein, fat, and hides. However, largely on the basis of nutritional grounds, this paper challenges the viability of a subsistence system based heavily on bison, or even one that relies to a similar extent on other animals. Building from the as-sumption that humans cannot subsist for extended periods on a diet in which protein intake exceeds ~35% of total calories, I present data to show that bison, even in peak condition, are unlikely to yield sufficient fat. The shortage of fat in bison, and in most other wild ungulates, would have been exacerbated by the fact that Plains Paleoindians made little effort to maximize the yield of skeletal fat from their kills. They often ignored major marrow bones, and apparently made little or no effort to boil grease from the bones. As a consequence, in order to maintain a viable diet, post-Clovis Paleoindians in the Plains may have had to hunt bison and/or other animals in excess of their lean meat needs, primarily for the purpose of obtaining additional fat. The number of kills they would have had to make beyond their lean meat needs depended on the size of the group that had to be fed and the condition of the animals. Unused lean meat could have been fed to dogs, or simply abandoned and left to rot. Plains Pa-leoindians also may have made greater use than archaeologists currently assume of oily and starchy plant foods, although to do this they may have had to leave the Plains proper, at least seasonally, to forage in adjacent areas such as the foothills of the Rockies. Finally, drawing on Binford’s conception of embedded toolstone procurement, archaeologists use the location of “high-quality” flint sources to determine Paleoindian hunting ranges. I suggest here that the lithics will probably tell us little about the food-related mobility of Plains Paleoindians. In addition to bison, the seasonal availability of foods rich in fats, oils, and starches almost certainly played a far more important role than flint in determining when, where to, and how often groups moved. More likely, what the flint-based distribution maps offer us are insights into the spatial arrangement of peoples who had ties to the same ancestral landscapes and shared broadly similar belief systems. Although the focus of this paper is on Paleoindian bison hunters, many of the same nutritional arguments likely apply to Eurasian Paleolithic hunting peoples who at times also relied heavily on the naturally lean meat of wild ungulates.