The Wold Bison Jump (48JO966) is a communal bison (Bison bison) hunting site in Johnson County, Wyoming. It likely represents a single kill event precipitated by Great Plains foragers between A.D. 1433 and 1643. Operating the jump required that prehistoric hunters drive stampeding bison up a steep slope in order to position them within a V-shaped drive line configured to funnel them toward a cliff. Using iterative models of least cost paths, topographic cross-sections, and visibility analysis, we test which landscape-embedded variables are optimized at the jump site as compared to other potential localities across the study area. We find that this site’s placement is primarily explained by minimizing the distance at which the cliff face is visible and secondarily by minimizing the cost of slope and curvature routes ascending into the drive lines. Our procedure could hypothetically be used to predict optimal jump locations on similar landscapes.
B ison (Bison sp.) jumps are landscapeembedded locations where hunter-gatherers stampeded ungulate herds over cliffs or ridges, resulting in mass kills. Great Plains foragers often employed this type of communal hunting strategy throughout prehistory (Brink 2008; Byerly et al. 2005:596; Polk 1979), perhaps as early as the Paleoindian period (Dibble 1970; Dibble and Lorrain 1968). At the Wold Bison Jump (48JO966; hereafter referred to as WBJ) in northcentral Wyoming (Figures 1a, 2), a gathering basin of prime ungulate grazing habitat abuts a 40-50m-tall plateau to the south. V-shaped cairn alignments extend southward across the top of the plateau, where this landscape feature then drops off into a steep cliff. Previous geospatial studies of bison jumps (or possible jumps) focus on inductive analysis of surrounding landscapes using the jump as a known, unvarying focal point of analysis (e.g., Byerly et al. 2005:599-605; Carlson 2011; Guenther 2014). While this approach is informative, at WBJ we attempt to obtain a more general understanding of how bison jumps operate. Why are the jump and drive lines situated at this topographical position rather than elsewhere on the surrounding landscape? In other words, is
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