Archaeology Wordsmith

Results for bison:

bison: CATEGORY: fauna
DEFINITION: The name of two species of wild oxen, the European bison or wisent and the American bison or buffalo. Only a small number of European bison now exist, bred from zoo specimens, and in a protected state in forest of Lithuania. Two further species, now extinct, inhabited Europe and Great Britain for much of the Quaternary period. The great steppe wisent was present during both interglacials and cold period. The smaller wood wisent, was only present in Europe during interglacials. Sometimes these animals are called aurochs. In North America, a number of species preceded today's bison. One species, popularly called 'buffalo', formerly roamed in vast herds over the interior of the continent, mainly in the Rocky Mountains.
bison jump: CATEGORY: feature
DEFINITION: A steep cliff or other natural feature used to kill stampeding buffalo.
Altamira: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: One of the most important painted Palaeolithic caves (as is Lascaux, France) and one of the earliest discovered (1879). The site is in the Cantabrian Mountains of northeast Spain and the 280-meter long cave is famous for its polychrome animals, which include deer, bison, and wild boar painted in red, black, and a range of earth colors. Most of the art in the cave was produced by Solutrean and Magdalenian peoples, with one layer radiocarbon-dated to c 13,000 BC. The most famous panel is of 15 bison, plus deer and horses. There is also a hall with black paintings, and symbols are found in several parts of the cave. The paintings' authenticity was challenged right up to 1902 when Emile Cartailhac finally accepted that they were genuine.
Amvrosievka: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: An Upper Palaeolithic site in southern Ukraine with and large number of bison bones and artifacts of microblades and laterally-grooved bone points. The site is dated to 15,250 bp.
auroch: CATEGORY: fauna
DEFINITION: The name of an extinct species of wild ox (Bos primigenius), the ancestor of present-day domestic cattle, which became extinct in the 17th century AD. It was described by Caesar as Urus and it inhabited Europe and the British Isles in ancient times and survived in most recent times in Lithuania, Poland, and Prussia. The name has often been applied erroneously to another species, the European bison, which still exists in the Lithuania forests. It was probably domesticated in some places, such as in eastern Hungary during the 4th millennium BC.
Beringian tradition: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: American Paleo-Arctic
CATEGORY: culture
DEFINITION: A culture in existence approximately 12,000 years ago between Siberia and temperate Alaska. The term was used by H. West to cover various Alaskan and Siberian archaeological formations which had developed from the Siberian Upper Paleolithic period, an area now largely submerged under the Bering Strait. Chronologically these formations lie between the middle of the Holocene period (c 35,000-9/10,000 BP), depending on the area. West's categorization includes the Bel'kachi, Diuktai, and Lake Ushki cultures in Siberia, the Denalian culture and American Paleo-Arctic formations in Alaska and the Yukon. Although Alaska is generally thought to be the gateway through which humans entered the New World, the earliest undisputed evidence for people there dates later than 12,000 years ago, well after the climax of the last major glacial advance but while glaciers still covered much of Arctic Canada. Artifacts of 11,500 to 9,000 years ago are known from a number of Alaskan sites, where hunters of caribou (and, in one case, of an extinct form of bison) manufactured blades.
Big Game Hunting tradition: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: Big Game Hunting culture
CATEGORY: culture
DEFINITION: Any of several ancient North American cultures based on hunting herd animals such as mammoth and bison; the first indigenous cultural complex of the continent. It may have developed from an earlier hunting culture whose people arrived in North America between 20,000-40,000 years ago in an interstadial (break) in the Wisconsin Ice Age. It is also probable that this culture derived from a migration across the Bering Land Bridge c 13,000-14,000 BC. The remains of these cultures have been found mainly in the North American Plains as well as in the eastern and southwestern regions of North America. Lanceolate projectile points, such as Clovis and Folsom, characterize the tradition. The big-game-hunting tradition began to decline or change after 8000 BC.
Blackwater Draw: CATEGORY: site; culture
DEFINITION: The deeply stratified type site for the Clovis point and Llano complex, located near Clovis, New Mexico, with evidence of occupation from the earliest Paleo-Indian through the Archaic period. Clovis points have been found associated with mammoth bones and Folsom points have been found with bison bones. Also found: Agate Basin points, Cody complex points, a Frederick point, and tools of the Archaic period. Blackwater Draw is also used to evaluate the chronological sequences at other sites. The Blackwater Draw Museum exhibits 12,000-year-old artifacts from the area's archaeological sites.
cave art: CATEGORY: artifact
DEFINITION: Any paintings, engravings, or designs on cave walls, man's oldest surviving art, especially those by Paleolithic and Pleistocene people that are found in southwest France, northeast Spain, and elsewhere in Europe. Other sites have been discovered in Portugal, Italy, Greece, and the Ural mountains; the only known Russian site is Kapovo Cave. The subject matter of cave art is predominantly animals, especially mammoth, horse, ox, deer, and bison; human figures are relatively uncommon. There are also numerous signs and symbols. The artist used a range of reds, blacks, yellows, and browns derived from ochres and other naturally occurring mineral pigments (iron oxide and manganese dioxide). The purpose and meaning of cave art are still obscure. In France, the caves are mainly in the limestone of the Perigord and Pyrennean regions and the most famous are Altamira, Lascaux, Niaux, and Pech Merle. Occupational evidence is rarely found with the art.
Chokurcha: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: Middle Palaeolithic cave sites in the Crimea, Ukraine. One had three occupation levels associated with woolly mammoth, steppe bison, and wild ass and the artifacts were sidescrapers and bifacial foliates. The other cave had wild ass, sidescrapers, and some mobiliary art.
Cody complex: CATEGORY: culture
DEFINITION: A North American flint industry with a late Plato tool assemblage representing the last of the plains-based hunting groups. First identified in Cody, Wyoming, it dates to c 7500-5000 BC. There are Eden and Scotsbluff varieties of finely worked lanceolate blades and projectile points and a unique asymmetrical knife with a shoulder on one side (the Cody knife), usually found with bison remains.
Dyuktai: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: Diuktai, Dyuktai Cave
CATEGORY: culture; site
DEFINITION: An Upper Palaeolithic culture of northeast Siberia with the type site being the Dyuktai Cave at the confluence of the Dyuktai and Aldan rivers. It is characterized by bifacial tools of various shapes, burins on flakes and blades, blades, and microblades. The industry was associated with mammoth, bison, and horse bones and is similar to the Denali complex of Alaska. The cave's earliest occupation dates to c 33,000 BC and the culture seems to have ceased c 10,000 BC. The people who first migrated into North America may have been from this cultural group and it may be ancestral to the earliest lithic technologies, in particular the bifacially flaked points, of North America.
Eden point: CATEGORY: artifact
DEFINITION: Eden points are known for their exceptionally well done parallel pressure flaking and diamond cross-section. The people that made them were hunting large animals like bison. Eden points were first discovered in Yuma County, Colorado blow-outs during the 1930's but none were found in situ until the spring of 1940 when Harold J. Cook spent several days digging in a site discovered by O. M. Finley. The Eden point was named by H. M. Wormington after the town of Eden, Wyoming. The Eden type site was named the Finley site in honor of O. M. Finley who discovered it.
Folsom: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: Folsom culture
CATEGORY: culture
DEFINITION: A village in northeastern New Mexico which lends its name to the remains of a prehistoric culture first found there and especially to its characteristic projectile point (Folsom point). It was a Stone Age culture, characterized by refinement of fluted projectile points, marking a significant advance over the projectile points of the earlier Clovis culture. The culture is believed to be 10-13,000 years old (11,000-10,200 BP). It was the scene of one of the first New World discoveries of artifacts associated with extinct fauna (the remains of 23 extinct giant bison). Folsom points are usually dated between c 9000-8000 BC. Folsom points are slightly different from Clovis: smaller, with their widest dimension near the middle rather than towards the base; more concave base than Clovis, and edges of Folsom points were retouched. Another site, Blackwater Draw has its Folsom layer dated to 8340 BC.
Font de Gaume: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: Font-de-Gaume
CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: A painted cave close to Les Eyzies in the Dordogne region, southwest France. Excavations have revealed archaeological levels deep in the interior spanning several earlier Upper Palaeolithic phases, but the polychrome paintings of bison and other animals date from the late Magdalenian at the end of the Palaeolithic (c 14,000-10,000 BC).
Head-Smashed-In: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: A bison kill site in southern Alberta, Canada, with evidence of use from 3700 BC.
Hell Gap point: CATEGORY: artifact
DEFINITION: Bifacially worked chipped stone projectile points of the Plano Tradition with a broad pointed top set on a straight-sided trapezoidal body. The base is narrow and straight. Used by later Palaeo-Indian cultures of the North America Plains in the period around 7500 BC. Experiments show that these points were probably spearheads and fully capable of penetrating the hide and rib cage of large beasts such as bison.
Il'skaya I: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: A Middle Palaeolithic site in the northern Caucasus, Russia. There are numerous occupation horizons with remains of steppe bison and sidescraper artifacts.
Jones-Miller: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: Site in northeast Colorado of the Hell Gap complex, used as a bison kill and butchering site. There were also stone tools and bone artifacts dating to c 8000 BC.
Lamb Spring: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: Palaeoindian site in Colorado with camel bones dated to c 13,000 BP. There are also mammoth, bison, and horse bones and later Palaeoindian components.
Lartet, Edouard (1801-1871): CATEGORY: person
DEFINITION: A French scholar, one of the pioneers of Palaeolithic archaeology, known as the founder of the science of palaeontology. He proposed a classification scheme for the Palaeolithic period based on animal bones: the Cave Bear period; the Woolly Mammoth and Rhinoceros period; the Reindeer period and the Aurochs or Bison period. He collaborated with Henry Christy in excavating many of the well-known rock shelter sites of southern France and was one of the first to recognize in situ mobiliary art; the publication of these objects from well-excavated contexts made it easier for scholars to accept the authenticity of cave art. With Christy, he carried out the first systematic study of south French caves, and excavated many of the most famous sites in the Dordogne (Laugerie-Haute, Le Moustier, La Madeleine). Their results appeared in several important articles, and also, during the decade 1865-1875, in the volumes of Reliquiae Aquitanicae"."
Les Combarelles: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: A long narrow cave just outside Les Eyzies in the Dordogne, southwest France, where thousands of superimposed engravings from the late Aurignacian through the middle Magdalenian periods were discovered. The engravings are dominated by horses, bison, bear, reindeer, mammoth, and andropomorphs. They are assigned to the mid-Magdalenian, c 14,000-12,000 BC. The number of engravings suggests that the cave long served as the center of a hunting cult. Scholars rank Les Combarelles as one of the finest products of the Ice Age.
McKean point: CATEGORY: artifact
DEFINITION: Bifacially worked chipped stone projectile points characteristic of the McKean Complex of the middle Archaic Stage in the Great Plains of North America during the period c.2900-1000 BC. Lanceolate in outline with curved sides and a hollow base these points were probably spearheads used in bison hunting.
megafauna: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: mega-fauna
CATEGORY: fauna
DEFINITION: The large, Ice Age big-game fauna in North America, now extinct. These Late Pleistocene food sources included mammoths, mastodon; giant bison, sloths, camels, and diprotodons. The term also covers extinct larger species of quite small animals, such as giant beavers. The late Pleistocene extinction of megafauna did not occur synchronously nor was it of equal magnitude throughout the world. Considerable doubt exists regarding the timing of the megafaunal extinction on various landmasses. Evidence suggests that the earliest mass megafaunal extinctions occurred in Australia and New Guinea about 30,000 or more years ago. Eighty-six percent of the Australian vertebrate genera whose members weighed more than 40 kilograms became extinct. Much smaller extinction events occurred in Africa, Asia, and Europe earlier in the Pleistocene, removing very large species such as rhinoceroses, elephants, and the largest artiodactyls. Other mass megafaunal extinction events occurred on the Eurasian tundra about 12,000 years ago (affecting mammoths, Irish elk, and woolly rhinoceroses); in North and South America they occurred about 11,000 years ago (affecting a wide variety of species, including elephants, giant sloths, lions, and bears). These extinctions have removed 29 percent of the vertebrate genera weighing more than 40 kilograms from Europe and 73 percent of such genera from North America. Until 1,000 to 2,000 years ago the megafauna of large, long-isolated landmasses such as New Zealand and Madagascar survived. Gigantic birds such as the elephant birds of Madagascar and the moas of New Zealand disappeared in the past few thousand years.
Middle Missouri Tradition: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: Plains Village Indian
CATEGORY: culture
DEFINITION: One of three broad cultural traditions (along with Central Plains and Coalescent) which constitute the Plains Village Indian or Plains Village Pattern of c 1000-1500 AD. There were many permanent farming village sites along the central Missouri River trench in North and South Dakota. The culture is characterized by a specially developed strain of cold-resistant, quick-maturing maize, by the bison scapula hoe, and by permanent dwellings in the form of the semisubterranean timber-and-earth lodge. Often palisaded and constructed on high promontories overlooking a river, villages of over 100 dwellings are quite common. Ceramics, though Woodland derived, bear evidence of some Mississippian influence, such as shell tempering. The tradition disappeared, due to drought and/or alien incursions, by 1500. Historic tribes such as the Mandan, Arikara, and Hidatsa are thought to be the cultural heirs to the tradition.
Niaux: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: One of the greatest Palaeolithic painted caves, in Ariège in the Pyrenees, southwest France. No trace of occupation has been found in the huge cave. The paintings are in black; bison and horse are the animals most frequently depicted. The 'Salon Noir' has six panels of black bison, horse, ibex, and deer figures, which were probably sketched in charcoal and then painted with different pigments. A new gallery discovered in 1970 has hundreds of Palaeolithic footprints. Much of Niaux's art is late Magdalenian (11th millennium BC).
Olsen-Chubbuck: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: A bison kill site in Colorado on the North American plains that revealed many details of Paleoindian hunting and butchering techniques. it is about 8500 years old, of the Firstview Complex of the Plano tradition.
Paleo-Indian or Palaeoindian: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: Paleoindians; Early Lithic
CATEGORY: culture; chronology
DEFINITION: One of the prehistoric people who migrated from Asia and settled throughout the Americas no later than 10,000 BC. They existed as big-game hunters from about 10,000 BC to about 6000 BC in the Great Plains and eastern North America. (The other tradition at the time was the Desert-culture peoples of the western basin-range region.) Some regard the term as referring to all hunting groups involved with now-extinct mammals, in which case the peoples who hunted the species of bison that became extinct about 4500 BC would also be classified as Paleo-Indians. The oldest remains of the Paleo-Indian tradition are found on sites where large Pleistocene mammals were killed and butchered. The most distinctive artifact type of this horizon is the Clovis Fluted projectile point, which was accompanied by sidescrapers. Paleo-Indians are most frequently associated with mammoth, although associations with extinct species of bison, horse, and camel have also been reported. The term also refers to the earliest period in New World chronology, representing the time up to the development of agriculture and villages. In yet another sense, it refers to the period in archaeology (also called Early Lithic) beginning with the earliest stone tools, about 750,000 years ago.
Plano: CATEGORY: culture
DEFINITION: Widespread late Palaeoindian tradition in North America from 10,000-7000 BP. In the west, it is characterized by bison hunting and diverse projectile point styles; complexes include Agate Basin, Hell Gap, Cody, and Frederick. The characteristic unfluted leaf-shaped projectile point appears to have developed from Llano and Folsom types. These many styles or types have been identified by such local names as Plainview, Angostura, Milnesand, Agate Basin, and Scottsbluff and their primarily hunting culture may be included in the term Plano. The Plano complex or culture type was a direct descendant from the fluted-blade early American hunters. As the climate moderated, peoples of the Late Plano complex moved north into Saskatchewan and Alberta with the grazing game animals and, by 3000 BC, had reached the Arctic tundra zone in the Northwest Territories of Canada. It is the most recent of the three major Palaeoindian cultures.
Promontory culture: CATEGORY: culture
DEFINITION: A culture sometimes identified with the Fremont culture in northern Utah which is now considered an early phase of the late prehistoric groups that followed the Fremont. It was a bison-hunting, cave-dwelling people.
Roc de Sers: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: A Palaeolithic rock shelter in the Charente, France, with Solutrean and Magdalenian levels, including burials in the latter. A line of limestone blocks carved with bas-relief bison, horse, ibex, and other figures are among the rare examples of Solutrean art.
Sandia Cave: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: Sandia point
CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: Type site for a tanged and unfluted projectile point in New Mexico's Sandia Mountains. This cave has yielded artifacts of the so-called Sandia Man" (25 000 BC). In Pueblo mythology the Sandias were sacred marking the southern boundary of the Tiwa-speaking Indian territory. Sandia points were stratified below Folsom points but the radiocarbon dates of pre-20 000 BC are often discounted the true date probably falling in the range 12000-8000 BC overlapping with Clovis. Associated fauna of bison mammoth and mastodon suggested contemporaneity with the Llano Complex. Sandia Type I has a lanceolate blade without fluting and without concave base of Clovis/Folsom and a shoulder to one side of the base of the blade suggesting knife use. Sandia Type II has rounded base."
Sandia point: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: Sandia projectile point
CATEGORY: artifact
DEFINITION: type site for a tanged and unfluted projectile point in New Mexico's Sandia Mountains. This cave has yielded artifacts of the so-called ""Sandia Man"" (25,000 BC). In Pueblo mythology the Sandias were sacred, marking the southern boundary of the Tiwa-speaking Indian territory. Sandia points were stratified below Folsom points but the radiocarbon dates of pre-20,000 BC are often discounted, the true date probably falling in the range 12000-8000 BC, overlapping with Clovis. Associated fauna of bison, mammoth, and mastodon suggested contemporaneity with the Llano complex. Sandia type I has a lanceolate blade without fluting and without concave base of Clovis/Folsom and a shoulder to one side of the base of the blade, suggesting knife use. Sandia Type II has rounded base.
size classification: CATEGORY: typology
DEFINITION: A categorization of faunal remains into categories based on body size: 1) rodent- and rabbit-sized, 2) wolf- and pronghorn antelope-sized, 3) mule deer and bighorn sheep, 4) bison- and elk-sized, and 5) giraffes and elephants
Tuc d'Audoubert: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: Deep cave system in the central Pyrenees, southwest France, with a few examples of Palaeolithic cave art. It is known for a bison modeled in clay, preserved deep in the cave.
Ventana Cave: CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: Rock shelter and stratified site in southwest Arizona occupied from over 11,000 years ago. The stratigraphy starts with remains left by hunters of extinct species of horse, bison, and ground sloth, who also had stone tools -- including Clovis/Folsom-like projectile points. It may have been contemporary with the San Dieguito complex of California. After a break, the cave was reoccupied by people of Desert Culture type (especially Cochise, Aramagosa). The firmest date for these upper levels, from geological evidence, is post 5000 BC. The more recent strata contain evidence of the transition from Desert to Hohokam and use of the cave into historic times.

Another Dictionary Search