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all right my name is Martha Cole I'm a historical specialist here at the Montana Historical Society and I'm delighted to welcome you to the first of our series Montana history in nine easy lessons I hope you'll come back next week when state archaeologist Stan wilmuth will be talking about the early contact period but I'm absolutely delighted to introduce today Jessica Bush he's going to be talking about the pre contact period jessica is the State Historic Preservation Office review and compliance officer she received her master's degree in anthropology from the University of Montana and there her primary area of interest was pre-contact plains archaeology making her the perfect person to kick off our series so please join me in welcoming Jessica Bush [Applause] is that working great welcome to the first course today in Montana history I hope I can lead you off right and that you'll come back for the rest of the presentation so you should be fantastic Thank You Martha for the wonderful introduction as she said I work at the Montana State Historic Preservation Office I'm an archeologist and I'm review and compliance officer so I deal with a lot of section 106 today I'm gonna give you really an overview of pre-contact Montana history I'm gonna be covering about 12,000 years of history in about 50 minutes so there's a lot that I had to leave out so I apologize for that if you're really interested there are great resources on the internet here on the MHS website and you can also contact myself or other people if you have questions down the road I also want to preface this presentation with there's a lot we don't know my presentation is going to be based on information that's been found in the ground hey there's no real written records of this there's a lot that we don't even have anymore so just something to keep in mind when I'm giving this presentation also things change all the time in archaeology it's one of the things I love about my field but that means that some of the stuff I say here today could change tomorrow could change in 10 years could change in 20 years it all kind of depends so just keep that in mind as we're going through this presentation as well I decided to break up my presentation into three kind of main time periods and I'm gonna start my first time period which is the early prehistoric and I'm gonna cover from 12,000 BP to about 7,500 BP now before I go any further I want to make sure I explain what I'm talking about when I say BP BP means before present and you'll hear me say that a lot throughout this presentation it's probably one of the main time terminologies that I use as an archaeologist so it's the one I'm most comfortable with and the one that I will refer to the most I do know for a lot of people they're used to something you know a different way of looking at it so I did include on my interest slides for each time period the BCE which is before Common Era formerly BC before Christ and then that is then common arrow which used to be ad so this first part of my presentation I'm gonna talk about a group of people that I'm gonna call the paleo Americans okay and they are the first cultural complex that we know of being in Montana based on the archaeological record now a cultural complex for people who are not familiar is an anthropological term and basically what it means is it's a group of people who are using interrelated traits now these traits can be an object they can be a technique a belief or an attitude and when they form a collective function that's a cultural complex so that's what I'm kind of referring to when I say cultural complex this early in America the defining trait that we use for cultural complexes are going to be projectile points so when I say projectile point kind of break down the word it's the point that goes on a per type of projectile so and that's gonna change you'll see as we go through my presentation it could be a spear point it could be a dart point it can be an arrow point often this is the only thing that we find at archaeological sites these stone points these projectile points and the debbye taj or the waste material that's left over for making these points and then also we find sometimes their stone tools so this makes it a really good trait to base our cultural complex on because it's the only thing we have consistently from most sites and from these people now as you can see this early the type of point we're going to be looking at is what we call a landslip point and there's a good example up on the bottom side bottom of my slide these are points that are long and kind of narrow and come in to a point at the top these are pretty large points so you're talking probably about from the bottom my hand almost to the top of my hand in size for these types of points often these points would have been attached to a spear or to an atlatl dart which I'll which I have a picture of up on the screen if you don't know what an atlatl is and basically the atlatl was an innovation a hunting technique weapon that was developed that helped people hunt the spear is a nice weapon don't get me wrong but with the atlatl and it's Dart you get more range more accuracy and there's more momentum with the dart as you can see from the picture it kind of extends your arm and gives you it's like throwing a football you get a little more that range in that accuracy when you're using it the spear can also be thrown it's harder to throw you don't get as much distance and as much thrust we do believe that in addition to being thrown it was probably an ideal weapon close encounter hunting such as mammoths or finally the final dispatching of animals so you got a wounded or a sick animal you can get in close with the spear the first of these cultural complexes that I'm going to talk about today is Clovis and I'm sure many of you familiar with Clovis it's out there a lot we know of Clovis sights from all over North America not just here in Montana and the Clovis people they needed these big points because they were hunting big animals this is the time in North American we when we had the megafauna okay so animals such as the mammoths we have horseback at this time we have camel giant sloths etc and we found remains of these animals at Clovis site so we know that they were hunting some of them especially the mammoths now I will preface that based on the geology of Montana and some of its topography and just the way archaeology works that we a lot of the information that I'm gonna be presenting today about Clovis is gonna be coming from well has come from archaeological sites in Canada and in Wyoming and in the Dakotas we just don't have as many or some of the main sites that we get our information from today here in Montana but that doesn't mean we can't infer that that's what people were doing here in Montana recognizing that back then this wasn't Montana this was all one big landscape that people were using we do have a mammoth site here in Montana it's called the Lindsay mammoth site it's in eastern Montana and it does date from this period but archeologists basically are arguing about whether or not Clovis was at the site we're unsure the bones look like they have butcher marks but a lot can happen to a bone that's 12,000 years old to make it look like it has butcher marks so we're not really sure but we do know there were mammoths here in Montana so these kill sites are one of the main sites that we find for Clovis people in addition to these kill sites though another site type that is distinctly clovis is what we call caches or basically collections of items or goods that been buried or stored for later recovery in these caches from Clovis we see things such as projectile points stone knives bone and antler tools and we even have a meat cache the Colby site down in Wyoming is a fascinating site where the people actually butchered several mammoths and then piled up the meat into these caches anticipating to come back and never did which is why we found them now here in the today and now so very interesting you know we don't really know why they were doing all these caches I mean obviously there was some anticipation of returning we also though think some of these in addition to supplying stores could have been trail or path markers or may have been ceremonial now because most of what we have from the Clovis people are these caches and these kill sites we don't actually know a whole lot about them we know that they were a nomadic people they probably had a pretty small overall population and they most likely lived in small family groups and we believe that these family groups probably covered large areas of land you got to imagine these small family groups of people traveling you know 50 60 miles and a day or two in in ways that we can't comprehend with our travel methods that we have now so but for them this was just part of their life cycle and this was part of their seasonal cycle and their their cultural cycle we also believe that these family groups probably got together and met up with other family groups now there's many reasons you would do this you would do this for trade we know Clovis people liked exotic materials you can see on this picture up on the top some really beautiful Clovis points they probably exchanged news about what was going on in there environment they probably exchange stories and let's face it if you're traveling in a small family group you're probably meeting up with other groups so that boys and girls could meet spread the genetic pool a little bit so based on archaeological features that we have found at two sites we do think that they lived in small circular temporary dwellings that were somewhat dug into the ground we found floor areas and post holes at the hell gap site and the agate Basin site in Wyoming so kind of picture we think that they're having a structure that somehow has either mammoth tusks or large branches kind of bent over in a dome that they're digging postholes and you know putting into the ground but not in any permanent fashion one of the most famous Clovis sites here in Montana and in North America is the Ann's excite the Ann's excite is a Clovis burial that dates to about 11,000 40 BP you can see this picture here is an overview looking over where the burial was found and the pictures looking to the east and those are the crazy mountains this site is located in your will saw Montana and it was found in 1968 it was an accidental discovery that was discovered during earthwork and it is the oldest excavated site in Montana at this time this burial they found the remains of a 1 to 2 year old child now there was another burial associated with the site but that data from a later time period so I'm not going to talk about that burial I'm just gonna talk about the Clovis the Clovis child at the time the Clovis child was the oldest human remains that had been found in North America it still is some of the oldest but there's actually been recent finds in Alaska it's from the upward Sun River site and these burials are contemporary with the Anzac site which actually makes them for some really interesting study and inferences that we can make about Clovis at this time then that's because these burials that we found up in Alaska are also infant burials so we have how many thousand miles between US and Alaska and we have these people with a similar or similar cultural trait burying their infants with lots of goods in very similar ways so that says something what is going on that even though they're this distance are they that's still closely related you know dude they haven't diverged that far these people came down here you know and just traveled straight down there wasn't a lot of time between when these groups of people split we don't know that yet recently they did do a study on the DNA from the antique child and they proved what native peoples have been saying for a really long time that this child is their ancestor and is their ancestors who have lived in this land for a very long time eventually the antique child was reburied at an undisclosed location he was put back in the ground where he belongs this is a picture of some of the artifacts that were found with the anzick-1 with over 100 artifacts when they were found they were covered in red ochre which is an iron oxide mineral that you'll find all over the world is associated with ceremonial sites and burial sites with early peoples because of how these tools were made and how some of them are in earlier stages of work and summer and later there's some speculation that these weren't grave goods these weren't goods made to be buried with the child but these were everyday items placed with the child after he had passed some of these items are not from local sources stone sources we know that material from the Anzac burial site comes from at least six different pre-contact quarries that range from western Montana all the way to Eastern Wyoming so that's a big space that these people are either travel and gathering this material and carrying it with them or are they trading and gain this material from other Clovis groups we don't know there's also bone and antler items that were found with the Anzac child and I can show you either see a right down here in the bottom of the side and we don't really know what these are either there's some speculation that these are four shafts four darts that were thrown with the addle addle that then you had the projectile point attached to or there's some people who say maybe they were bone or antler projectile points themselves now remember that site in Alaska that I talked about these same types of bone antler items were found in the Alaska burials with the infant's up there so it's kind of interesting what this does do though and why antek was so special was not only did we have this child buried but this was really one the first times we got to look deeper at Clovis like I said before what we had there points and some kill sites and some caches that doesn't tell you allow you know people are going hunting and if they need to eat this provides you a deeper look at these people it's indicative of a belief system and rituals what those are we don't know but it says something about these people that you know they're interacting and they believe in something beyond what they can see this pictures from the display you probably walked by before you came in this room please I encourage you to go see if the picture does not do it justice on the beauty and the craftsmanship of these items so please please stop and check it out well as always happens things begin to change you know everything's going good you're getting used to this environment and then it goes and changes on you right around ten thousand eight hundred to ten thousand two hundred BP the climate begins to shift it begins to become cooler and wetter on the North American Plains in a period that we call the Younger Dryas now the younger driest was a global event but there's some indications that the change that occurred on the Great Plains happened a little bit quicker and a little more sudden that it did in the rest of the world and we don't know why there's been some speculation that maybe an asteroid hit in Canada and you know caused a lot of items to go up into our material to go in the atmosphere caused it to get cooler sooner we don't really know this speculation has been based on some dark soil horizons that have been found at Clovis level sites just above the Clovis occupation at these sites but like I said it's not conclusive and there's also people who say you know what it was just a regional variation to the Younger Dryas which it could be as well so just prior to the Younger Dryas and during the Younger Dryas in north america we see the megafauna begin to go extinct I'm sure you've heard there's a lot of speculation who killed the mammoth who killed the megafauna we still don't have a lot of specifics on that and honestly it's probably from a variety of reasons it probably had to do with the climate changing it had to do with human predation had to do with other animal predation all that kind of stuff factors in together what is interesting though is that as of today archaeologists have not found Clovis points caches or ma moth kills the date later than the 10,800 BP date so there's a real distinct end that we see to this Clovis complex appearing in the archaeological record but it is also then during this time that we see the emergence of two new cultural complexes coming into the Great Plains and that's the Goshen and the Folsom cultural complexes and as you can see and as I mentioned before I identified by a change in the projectile point type so you can see the points that I have up on the screen now look quite a bit different than the Clovis points that I showed you there's still LAN slip points but whether what we call stemmed LAN slip points and there's still quite large four points they're still hunting lard quite large animals but they are slightly smaller than what we would see for the Clovis points we believe that these people were direct descendants of Clovis and so we're not talking about a new group of people coming in but what we're seeing here is a change in the people people adapting to the changes that are going on in the climate and in their environment we have this wetter cooler climate that means we got more grass we have more forages more plants the mammals increase so even though we went through this this extinction event we still have mammals and these mammals that they're hunting being supported by their environment we see an increase in hunting during this time of bison antiquus now bison antiquus what is an ancestor of modern-day bison bison which is the Bison we have today bison antiquus was about 25% bigger than our bison that we have today and was one of the large mammals that did survive the mass extinction event we know that they hunted these animals not only probably individually but this is the first time we really see people in Montana utilizing large bison hunts so on a bigger scale one of these sites is on the agate Basin site in Wyoming which I'd mentioned before was an arroyo trap where they trapped bison in this Arroyo so in this land formation this kind of erosional ditch if you will that will come to a point and slaughtered some bison another important Goshen bison kill site is actually here in Montana and it's called the mill iron site it's in the southeast corner of Montana and this we know was a spring or early summer kill that resulted in the death of thirty bison and we know this from the remains that were found at the site and also we see because of the large kill they were selecting the choicest pieces of the bison and the meat to take away from this site and leaving the rest behind but it makes sense you just killed 30 bison antiquus that's a lot of meat for people at the end of the Younger Dryas we begin to see another climate change and the wetter weather pattern begins to become warmer and drier and this pattern we call Delta thermal also known as the hips of thermal this is in full-swing by 8,000 BP and is going to lead to more environmental changes that are going to lead to significant cultural changes in the lives of pre-contact Montanans so everything i've talked about up to this point was the early prehistoric we're gonna enter into my second phase of time here in early montana and that's the middle prehistoric also we refer to it as the the archaic period now their cake has a lot going on in on it sorry on within it so i'm gonna break it down into three periods itself and i'm gonna start with the early archaic the early our cake starts at 7,500 around 7,500 BP and goes to about 5,000 BP again the weather is warm and dry it's alta thermal we see a decrease in available forage which leads a decrease in to animal populations and a decrease in available water for these people so people begin to move they begin to move to where they can get the resources they need they move to find stable water they move to where the animals are going and typically this is in more upland mountainous areas that have a stable water sources is where the animals are going and it's a lot cooler than being down on the plains we also think at this time because there's this restriction in resources for people that they're moving shorter distances so before we see Clovis what we believe is potentially them moving across a huge landscape people are becoming much more restricted and we know this or we think we know this as archaeologists because when we look at these early archaic sites the types of stone that they're using to make their stone tools and their points mostly come from local lithic materials we're not seeing the exotics that we saw with Clovis and with earlier groups it's at this time that bison antiquus goes extinct and we have the emergence of bison bison onto the plains they're still hunting bison during this time just not to the extent that we saw before their diet becomes more varied again they're moving off the plains the animals that they relied on so heavily go extinct so they're moving and they're gonna rely on different food sources so we know that at this time in addition to the Bison some bison they are also hunting a lot of small game they're hunting bighorn sheep and pronghorn we also see the first time in the archaeological record people processing plants now people are probably processing plants for a long time leading up to this we just don't see in the archaeological record but this is the first time that we see it in the archaeological record and we believe us because they're doing a lot more of it than they were doing in the past and we see this by we see a lot of different types of grinding stones and plant processing tools entering the archaeological record now a little side kind of side note is this trend where we see it be cut with the Bison and then moving to other food sources we also see this trend happening in more mountainous areas to the very western parts of Montana on the western side the Continental Divide and there's a site called the Alexander Creek site which is in Lincoln County Montana for those you not familiar that's the very Northwest County in Montana and we see this trend with deer so this is really interesting that you know we're seeing this even in these mountainous areas this Alexander Creek site has several archaic occupations so we can see the trend as it changes the older occupation of the site dates to the end of the early archaic period and has a wide diversity of faunal remains the later component of this site which then dates into the late archaic late prehistoric period which I'll talk about in a bit has almost 80% of their file remains our deer and that's at the same time we're seeing a change that are they're gonna be going back to bison the top picture of my slide is a display that's also here in the exhibit that you may have walked through to get to this presentation room in the homeland exhibit and it's a great example that shows kind of what I'm talking about it not only show some of these plants that people would have been utilizing but shows some of the types of tools that they were processing these plants with so I encourage you to go find that and look at it after my presentation because people have moved into these higher elevations and they're relying on different food sources and they're not moving as much we think that they were also in smaller groups again and that there may have been even a slight population decrease people are probably doing more individual hunting you don't need as many people but mammoths are around you don't need as maybe you'll bring down the animals and you can do a lot more of this individual hunting versus a large group hunting that we saw before you also see points at this time make a drastic change before we had these lance lynn's points get a notch they get what we call a corner knotch and these points seem to be less technically well made they still worked it still takes skill to make them but they just some of the craftsmanship isn't exhibited like what we saw with the Clovis and even the Goshen and the Folsom points we believe that the corner notch was a technological development that made it easier to have these points onto the atlatl darts and also because they're making these smaller points and they're less and they have these corn notches the technology change we think that they were easier to make and so they could use a lesser quality raw material which goes in with the fact that they're probably I'm using more local material which isn't always the nice stuff that you can get if you're traveling to the places you know they have the really quality material because of this technology change we believe that the atlatl at this time and the dart become the weapon of choice this doesn't mean they're not using Spears still but this is the weapon of choice for people like I said you got to imagine tooth they're hunting more deer now pronghorn bighorn sheep you don't need big Spears for that and honestly I can't imagine if you stand up and throw a spear at a deer you're gonna have much luck hitting it you're gonna have a lot better odds with the atlatl animal bones at early archaic sights tend to be quite fragmented and to archaeologists this indicates that they were extracting marrow and they were trying to get as much nutrition as they could from the animals that they were killing interestingly in southwestern Montana this is also the time that we see pit houses begin to appear it's not a cultural trait that's common throughout all Montana we believe it it's something that's coming up from more in the Utah area but you do find these in the southwestern part and the use of these pit houses extends into the middle Archaic this is an area of kind of of newer study for archaeologists we don't have a lot of information about the early archaic partially because we don't have a lot of early archaic sites to look at so there's a lot of new research going on trying to find these higher elevation sites there's currently work going on on the Forest Service right outside Helena here with Carroll College where they are looking at some higher elevation sites so hopefully in the next year or two we're gonna be learning a lot more about these people and their lifestyles and these higher elevations that being said we do have some sites in Montana and in the region that have given us some of this information about their early plains archaic and one of these is the Meyers Hinman site this site was excavated in the 1970s and it has an early archaic occupation that dates to around 6,000 BP now the Myers Hyman site has earlier occupations and later occupations I'm gonna focus mostly on the urk early archaic occupation but it's important because it gives us a broader view of what's going on before during and after the earlier kake period the site is a great archaeological site because it is great static rafi so when I talk about static Fe I'm talking about the layering of the soil and looking at it in levels the lower level is going to be older the one more toward the surface is going to be newer so what we think happened at the site is that there was flooding for a nearby stream that periodically would cover the site cover the occupations and place distinct layers of sterile soil in between occupations so this site has really good clear static rafi kind of breaking down each occupation of people this site is located near Lewistown Montana and the Yellowstone River which would have been a potential stable water source during the Alta thermal we also know that there Springs nearby to the site which would have been a stable water source as well the site is located in a draw at the base of the Absaroka mountains so it would've been protected from the wind it's kind of your ideal camping site which is why it was used over several thousand years people know a good site when they see it not a lot changes in that there's a lot of edible plants and good plants for other uses in this area it probably would have had some trees and even today there's a lot of animals that frequent this area so we can figure that there's probably a lot of animals in this area as well so you have everything you need at this site for a time when the climate is working against you and the plains are in a stable place to live you have a place that sheltered has stable water plant resources and a wide variety of animals we believe the site was typically occupied in the late fall late winter was probably of occupation that lasted several months and really exemplifies the changes of what people were doing this time like I said there's a lot of animals we found remains of these animals at the site so we found bison at the site pronghorn bighorn sheep deer elk dog that's a lot of different animals that they're using his resources also some of those grinding stones that I talked about earlier we find those at this site so we know they're processing plants at this site and this was a type of site where it wasn't like I said we think we're there for several months this wasn't just a hunting camp or a short-term occupation people who were living here and doing all the types of work that you would see at a long-term camping site they have found all's at the site beads needles shaft smoothers for woodworking so you're finding everything it's probably men women children the elderly everybody is living at this site the end of the earlier cake really at least for our archaeological division in time comes when the climate makes another shift and goes back to this wetter cooler trend that we had seen right before the Alta thermal so by 5000 BP we are square into the middle Archaic on the plains we see an increase in grass and different plants we see an increase in bison and so people begin to move back on to the plains to hunt bison again and this is really when we start to see the development of the bison hunting cultures that we know in Montana today that were here when Europeans came into the area it is important to note that people don't just let go of everything they've learned from you know when they were living in these higher altitudes we still see even though there's an increase in the bison hunting and it does become the main animal that they are going after there's still diversity insights with faunal remains and that's a trend that does continue throughout pre-contact Montana we also think there's an increase in population at this time which makes sense there's less stresses on these people for their environment lives are more stable the populations gonna increase archaeologically sites from the middle and the later cake are much more common and we know of many more of them here in Montana than we do from either the early archaic or the paleo American times common projectile point types are Oxbow and McKean there's many others but these are the ones I kind of picked to talk about these come about in the middle Archaic and they're distinct because they have a concave base you can see the picture on my slide is of an oxbow point has those same notches that I talked about before and now you have this concave base and they're keep getting just a little bit smaller by the later cake the distinctive point really here in Montana is what we call Pelican Lake and I always think of this one as having Mickey Mouse ears they're kind of rounded the Pelican Lake kind of goes in the opposite direction is really sharp almost like Barb's because as these really steep corner notches in it and so it's a very different look that you see with the later points there's a great site in your Great Falls Montana it's called the Sun River site and the great the Sun River site in your Great Falls has three occupations that actually span the entire archaic period so it's a really great site that shows the changes that have been happening though and it really does show this change and this reliance back to bison so the oldest occupation of the site we see predominantly pronghorn remains 78% of the faunal remains from the early archaic occupation of the site our pronghorn by the time we get to the late archaic occupation of the site ninety-three percent of the final remains are bison that's a pretty dramatic shift that we're seeing at this site in terms of what they're eating by 3,000 BP in the late archaic bison hunting is dominating the plains its dominating their subsistent patterns and it's starting to dominate their ultures and a lot of what we see developing here is going to remain unchanged for several thousand years until we see the horse coming on to the plains which then has another dramatic change to these cultures we believe people at this time we're traveling over long distances using the dog Travoy and care to help them carry their items and their shelter over these long distances people this is when we see or we have TB ring sites or stone circle sites dated in Montana the earliest ones day at 2:00 so this is really when we see the teepee kind of emerge as a shelter type in Montana you can see the bottom picture shows a ring of circles and that's what you see what we believe is that and what we have from oral traditions and stories and information is you know they were using these stones to hold down the liners of their teepees and when then when they would get up to leave they've removed their teepee and leave these stone circles behind now I will caveat this I call I like to calm stone circles because they're not always teepee rings we do believe that a lot of them war and their remnants or that show where people set up their teepees and camped for a while but there's many other types of stone circles out there I just wanted to throw that out there we also see it now that people are moving around again an increase in trade and an increase in exotic stone materials that we're finding at these sites now the trade and these exotic materials that we see coming into Montana we also know that they're going out of Montana at this time so it's not just a one-way flow of materials stuffs going in and stuffs going out and this is not just stone materials such as obsidian we know obsidian travels out of Montana at this time they found obsidian as far away as Iowa we also have sites here in Montana that have items that are made from around the Mississippi area we also know that people during this time we're also trading in addition to like obsidian and our local stone tools and material types that they're trading bison items and items made from mountain animals that you can't get in other areas this is also when we begin to see pottery enter into the archaeological record now we know if some is made locally but we also know some is coming in from trade and is in being influenced by trade there's limited use most likely because these people are mobile people pottery is hard to travel with they have much better ways to carry water than a big clay pot we also see an increase in quarries being used here in Montana at this time as a result of the trade that I was talking about and because they increase their bison hunting they're going through more weapons and tools so because they're hunting more bison this is when we see the re-emergence because we kind of saw it before but the re-emergence of the large-scale bison hunts ok we now have the people then they're in the right areas and the the large bison herds that they can do these large-scale bison hunts and they become really common in the archaeological record at this time some of the ones that we see are Arroyo traps which I had talked about previously being used we also see Corral's being used so people are actually building structures to herd the bison into so that they can kill them and what's interesting about these sites is they're all very similar but they all have differences and that's because a lot of times doing these large-scale bison hunts it's very much dependent on the environment you're in where is the herd where are they coming from where are you trying to get them to you know it's all very specific so they often all have their own variation in differences we also think that there were cultural differences that if you had a corral different cultural groups might have used a different shape had a different height probably different ceremonies associated with it so that's all kind of stuff to take into consideration this picture up here is a display from here in the museum and the bottom one you can go walk up to it it's like a life-size version you can kind of get an idea of what we're talking about when we said we would build they would build these Corral's and bring the Bison in I'm still risky and then the top picture is kind of just an overview shot of what it might have looked at down at to get an idea of how they're moving them in and then the round shape of a lot of these Corral's probably the most well known way to kill a lot of bison here in Montana or bison jumps it's hard to live in Montana and not know about bison jumps they're also called pushkin which is the Blackfeet word and we know that people would get together to do these hunts and that they would drive large numbers of bison over a precipice and either to kill or to maim these animals archeologists have identified three different types a bison jumps we have the steep Bank which is usually along a river the perpendicular Bluff which usually is over a rock outcrop and then we have this sending scarp which is usually associated with a terrace that has one sloping kind of gently sloping side and then a drop off on the other side now bison jumps are not they are not a sight that is just the jump there's many components to the Bison jumps so one of them is we have drivelines how are they getting the Bison to these jumps you have to imagine that these people are working on these jumps for days if not a week or more working to get the herd of bison from point A to point B which is over their precipice that takes a lot of work for people and when you're doing it from that kind of distance they don't have the use of drones and can't look down and how are they aiming these bison well they're using drive lines that they've made so what you'll see a lot of times at these bison jumps is you'll see drive lines maybe you'll see some coming in this way and then you'll see some coming in this way and then all depended on where the herd was and how they're moving them in so there's not just one runway and that's what they're going down it was all dependent and it depended on the time of year and like I said where they're coming from and how big the herd was was it mostly cows did they have calves all that kind of stuff it was a very complicated undertaking there were a lot of factors now we know that these drive lines are usually made up of what we call Karen so rock piles sometimes it's just a straight rock line you can see the kind of the middle picture is from the Henry Smith site up kind of near Malta Montana and that's pretty much just the line of rocks going across the landscape the Cairns can vary in size we know sites where they have large Cairns we know places where they use small Cairns and there's some speculation based on different bison jump sites especially the Keyhoe bison jump that maybe this was a cultural difference and how they made their canter drive lines but we don't really know so another component of these bison jumps we have the jump and we have the drive lines then of course at the bottom we have our bone bed and these bone beds can be extensive I don't know if anyone has ever been to see them I recommend it it's quite a sight the bottom bottom picture on my slide I think from the base of the top is somewhere on seven eight feet and that's just layers a barn and this is from people using these sites not only the numbers that they're killing but using these sites over and over again over a thousand years in addition so like I said this takes days week or more where is everybody well there's gonna be camps and processing areas nearby obviously you don't want to be in the path of the bison as you're driving them to the edge but you want to be nearby so that when the event happens you're ready to go so usually there's an area with the teepee rings and processing areas where they're removing the best pieces of meat away from this mass kill sometimes even up on another higher area where you have more wind less bugs where they can do their processing I encourage you to visit some of these sites in Montana several are state-owned and/or open to visitors there's walk bachou ghen which is near Havre there's the Madison bison jump which is down near Bozeman there's first peoples which is near Great Falls that's a national historic landmark so please if you're interested in this kind of stuff it's one thing to talk about it and see pictures but it's quite another to go and actually see what it looked like and what these people were doing in person the final time period that I'm going to talk about now that we're out of the archaic or the middle prehistoric is the late prehistoric about 1700 BP to around 300 BP the climates probably a lot like it is today there's gonna be some fluctuation but it still still ideal for bison and their habitat so we know that they're still large herds of bison at this point and really this is what we considered the peak of bison hunting in Montana we know that there were sometimes bison kill events that killed hundreds of bison it's hard to imagine a group of people on foot with their stone points killing hundreds of bison it's it's quite an amazing thing to imagine we also see more bison being killed year round at this time before it tend to be a little more seasonal and now we see it hat like I said year round more into the in the summer and in the winter than just in the fall in the spring correlating back to that when I talked about the mountainous areas in the Alexander Creek site we see an increase in the mountainous areas in deer hunting at this time as well so things were pretty good for people all living all over the state because things are good there's a population increase there's more diversity between cultural groups so when I get to talk before it started and said okay there's Clovis living here as far as we know that was really besides maybe some different little variations that was the cultural complex then it kind of starts to spread out and now by the time we get into the late prehistoric we know there are several different cultural groups living in Montana and living in and around the plains area into the Dakotas in Wyoming so because we have this diversity in cultural groups there's a increase in territoriality between people and there's an increase in warfare between people this is really the first time at least that we've identified as archaeologists sites where people were killed by other people in you know in a large aggressive manner we don't really haven't seen that before in the archaeological record here when the biggest changes to happen during this time and people are probably wondering when I would get to it is right around 1,500 to 1000 ppb bow and arrow comes into Montana this is huge this is a huge technological change okay this is this is on par with us getting the car you know going from a horse carriage to a car this is huge this is really changes people's lifestyles and how they're gonna go about doing things and and if it's the primary weapon once it comes in it gets adapt adopted fairly quickly by people and you see the atlatl just kind of go by the wayside and there's several reasons for this one of them is you have a lot smaller points so you need less raw material to make your points they're easier to make they're more expendable and it's gonna reduce what people have to carry with them when they're gonna be remaking their toolkit if you lose an error arrow or two it's probably not that big of a deal it's a way been to losing a dart or two with your atlatl also this allows the bone arrow allows hunters to fire from cover now with addle addle you have to stand to throw it you are exposing yourself to your prey whatever animal that you are going to be firing your weapon at so there's an increased risk in that that you're gonna startle them that you're not going to get your your prey your animal the bow and arrow you can shoot from cover that increases success rates for these hunters the picture on the bottom is another display from the homeland exhibit here at MHS and you can see the top part of it has the darts adil and then the bottom has some arrows and a bow so i encourage you to go look at it because you can really see the differences in these weapon types it is during the late priest orc that would we see an increase in pottery here montana we know it's already been here but we see a lot more of it and we actually see three distinct styles that really predominate what we see in montana that doesn't mean there aren't other types but these are the ones that we typically find in montana we have the Avonlea pottery which is one of the earliest Potteries in montana and is more common in the north and northeast parts of Montana with Intermountain pottery which is very similar to Shoshone pottery in Wyoming and Utah and so we typically find it in southern Montana closer to those areas and the last pottery that we really see coming into Montana is crow pottery which we believe was introduced from the Dakotas probably about the same time we see the crow the cultural group of the crow moving into the Montana area knowing the plans as a whole there's another interesting development that begins to happen during this time we begin to see people establishing permanent villages this isn't common in Montana I don't know how many people have driven through North or South Dakota but they have several village sites that you can go visit and this is when these village sites really kind of pop up in the archaeological record even though we don't have as many of these in Montana they still impacted people's life ways here they became major sources and centers of trade which meant that people we know people from the plains we're trading their bison and their goods with people in these villages for some of their goods they're practicing Corte culture so there's a steady supply of a plant that they're gonna be trading for but is with archaeology there's always an exception and one of these exceptions is the Hagin site the Hagin site is a late prehistoric Plains village in Montana it's on the Yellowstone River near Glendive and this site we believe was occupied occupied about 600 years ago there was possibly a second occupation 100 to 200 years later but we're not really sure that this site was was excavated in in the 40s and the 50s and not a lot of work has really been done since then so there's a lot that we know about archaeology and our methods and our processes that they didn't have when they first excavated this site so I think there's a lot of questions that could be answered if we ever got back to this site it's like I said it's a it's a village site it consisted of a circular earth lodge that had about a 16 foot diameter it had storage pits and a burial mound and what's interesting I was I was reading a lot about this site before to prepare for my presentation and the one thing everyone noted was how the burial mound was almost perfectly circular and so there's a lot of speculation on how they got this mound to be perfectly circular but just a little tidbit I found very interesting some of the storage pits that they found at the Hagan site were quite large some of them were five meters in diameter or sorry five feet in diameter and six feet deep so that's that's a big space for storage we know people here were mostly eating bison which you know it's typical for what we're seeing in Montana and the plains at this time 95% of the faunal remains from the site where bison we believed that there was some where the remains from about 340 animals left at the site give or take they also RQL just recovered thousands of pottery sherds and hundreds of arrow points they also recovered awls knives scrapers ground stone beads pipes hammer stones you name it the found everything at this site based on the presence of the pottery which is very similar to crow pottery and the construction of the village is very similar to the dots are abandoned villages that you see in the Dakotas archeologists believe that it's a crow or her dots a village now the sites really interesting because like I said we don't know a lot but it's very tantalizing it's a very unique site so there's a lot of theories about why is this site out here what is it doing out here you know when there's not a lot it's there's ot a lot of sites like this out here we know we have them in you know more in the Dakotas and there's some theory that this site may have been the result of the crow Hadassah schism and I don't know how many people are familiar with that but based on crow oral traditions and the history that we know of some of these Plains groups that at some point the corona Hidatsa were related came from the same people and then they split archaeologists have been trying to put it into to find an exact date we don't know but we do know what happened and it was sometime around this time period so there was speculation is this village the result of one of these these groups of crow people having just split from the Hidatsa as they're moving west building a village similar to what they know further west onto the plains or was this the result of an earlier split between different groups of people who are then moving out onto the plains and trying to adapt the lifestyle that they know from the villages into the area we don't know there's another theory that this village was potentially an outpost for the Hidatsa and that because they were trading so much with the plains people for bison why not send a group out build a village get the Bison yourself and kind of cut out that middleman I don't know I think that sounds like a very you hero centric point of view for this but we don't know what is interesting about this village is that we think it's a transitional village so the there's a lot about this village that reflects the Mandans in the Hidatsa villages in the Dakotas but there's a lot about it that's very different from these villages and reflects more on the nomadic lifestyle that we see further into Montana and the reason we say this and believe this is that there's the presence of only one structure that we know of at this site and like I said it was 16 feet in diameter it's a good sized structure but it's not massive by any means with the amount of artifacts that we found at the site we believe that there was quite a number of people living here and with the sizes of the storage pit so where is everybody living they're not a living in this one Lodge okay so is this kind of a combination village where we have the one center Lodge but then people are living in teepees or some other kind of mobile structure and then we just don't have evidence of it that's a possibility there's also questions about whether or not the people living in this village practice horticulture that's one of the main things we see with these villages in the Dakotas is people were growing things they were active in horticulture we don't see any evidence for that here at the Hagan site except for bison bone hose show up but that's it we don't have any seeds we don't have any faunal remains that indicate this we just have these bone hose now interesting the knoll Myer site which is another Plains village site in Montana it's actually just 40 miles up the river from the Hagan site also had bone hose and the archaeologists there interpreted that they were used to help with Lodge construction and digging out the the base for the lodge the floor and really had nothing to do with horticulture at all so I don't know but some of the speculations at some point the Hagan site was abandoned we believe it was a process of an abandonment it wasn't a raid and people were killed off suddenly we think people packed up their stuff and left the site and part of the reason we believe that is because these storage pits were filled in with refuse which is probably not something you worry about if you're in immediate danger and that brings me to the end of the pre contact period once we get the European goods and the horses coming in to North America there's contact and you need to come back next week to hear dr. wilmuth talk about what happens once Europeans come onto the North American contact or continent and to see what happens next with these people so I want to thank you for listening today I want to do a quick shout out to the MHA MHS staff who gave me some of these pictures of their exhibits to you so I could encourage you to visit them so please please do and also we have the poster over there that Martha brought down and I also encourage you to pick up the poster the poster is from the Montana Archaeological Society it's their 2018 poster and it pinpoints some of these archaeological sites here in Montana that you can go visit yourself so thank you very much [Applause]