Bison kill gave life

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From thousands of years ago to a few hundred, one animal has shaped the environment for North America's Indigenous people. The importance of the animal and the affect it had are seen and described in one of the first displays seen inside the Syncrude Galleries of Aboriginal Culture at the Provincial Museum of Alberta.

It's Summer on the Plains, 9000 years ago. There is no smog, no ozone depletion, no aerosols, and no PCBs. The environment is clean and survival is simple.

A young, black-haired hunter, who has thrown the first stone-tipped shaft into the ribcage of a huge prehistoric bison, has been forced to stop and reload. The other, a grey-haired, well-seasoned Elder, has jumped in and placed himself between the gigantic beast and the younger man, preparing to drive in the final killing thrust. In a dramatic moment frozen in time, one life is spared while another is about to be taken away.

Known as The Bison Kill Site Diorama, one of the displays at the scene is an important window on the past, one that takes us back to the pre-historic times of our ancestors.

The lifelike reconstruction of an actual bison kill site, takes place in a reedy marsh some 9000 years ago. The exhibit was based on an actual archaeological site discovered in 1950 which dated back to the Early Prehistoric Period (11,500 to 7,500 years ago). It is the only intact and buried site of it's kind found on the Plains.

The original archaeological site was excavated in the late 1980s. Under the sand and sediment, scientists discovered bison bones, stone points, seeds, pollen, shells, and insect remains, in an unusually good state of preservation, that allowed a very accurate reconstruction of the climate and vegetation at the time the area was inhabited by the ancestors.

The 9000 year old Bison is thought to be a larger form of present-day bison with huge horns. The bison kill site was a central part of ancient man's environment. It was where the end of a successful hunt meant the beginning of real work; skinning and cutting with sharp stone tools, drying and transporting of meat, gathering much needed quantities of sinew and tendons, scraping, curing and smoking hides, collecting useful bits of hooves, bones and hair and saving the soft innards like liver, heart, tongue and marrow for the old ones back at camp who had no teeth.

Using two Aboriginal men as models for the hunters, a sculptor was able to recreate an extraordinary scene, with weapons and clothing recreated in the same style and materials that would have been used 9000 years ago.

The two hunters, possibly a father and son, are wearing loincloths and moccasins made of smoked brain-tanned leather, custom made for a hot summer's day, and carry lightweight, portable bear-skin bags that would have dried food, fire making flints, spare points, dried sinew, mammoth ivory forshafts and a knapping kit.

The Clovis Complex, the time period in which these two hunters had lived is one of the oldest, identified by weapons with large stone points and distinctive grooves or fluted bases.

Mammoth ivory and bone shafts, which held the stone points, were then lashed to wooden spears, a formidable combination that could take down an ancient bison, camel or mammoth during a hunt.

For the ancestors, mastery of tool making and flint-knapping could mean the difference between life and death for hunters trying to survive in a difficult environment.

From the ancient hunters of the Clovis period, 9000 to 15,000 BC to the golden age of horsemanship in the 18th century, the mighty herds of bison have given the Aboriginal people of the Great Plains everything they needed to live and thrive, their food, clothing, shelter, tools and weapons, as well as providing the basis of their myths, art and spirituality.