Under the supervision of Drs. Marcel Kornfeld and Todd Surovell, Jack Fenner will investigate prehistoric Native American pronghorn hunting practices. Pronghorn antelope are the fastest mammals living in North America, and are exquisitely adapted to life on the open range. Nevertheless, people have succesfully hunted them for thousands of years. Their hunting success is attested by the numerous butchered pronghorn bones found in archaeological sites throughout the western United States and Canada. Within Wyoming, these sites sometimes take the form of large bonebeds containing the remains of a number of pronghorns. Such a bonebed may result from an accumulation of bones taken individually over a long period of time from multiple pronghorn herds, or may be evidence of an organized pronghorn drive resulting in a mass kill of an entire pronghorn herd. Such drives are known from the historic record, but their antiquity is uncertain. Fenner's work will develop and validate a new chemical isotope analysis method that will distinguish whether ancient pronghorn bones from a site represent multiple herds or the mass kill of a single herd. This will allow archaeologists to better understand ancient hunting practices, including the antiquity of pronghorn drives and the social organization necessary to undertake them.
The analytical technique involves determining the isotopic variation within modern populations of wild, mostly free-roaming pronghorn, and then comparing it to the variation found within archaeological pronghorn bonebeds. An accumulation of mortality events over time is indicated when a bonebed contains significantly more isotopic variation than expected within a single population. Bonebeds containing variation equal to or less than that of a single population may be the result of a mass kill event, or perhaps multiple near-simultaneous kill events focused upon a single population. The technique will be applied to a series of important sites located in Wyoming which have previously been professionally excavated and the pronghorn remains curated. This includes the Trappers Point site, which contains the earliest large pronghorn bonebed known (dating to more than 5,000 years ago) and the Eden-Farson site, which at more than 200 individuals is the largest pronghorn bonebed known.
Once validated, the technique is expected to be of interest to archaeologists investigating large kill sites of a variety of animals, such as deer, bison, and mountain sheep. It will also provide paleontologists with a means of distinguishing between catastrophic kills such as those caused by flooding and accumulations due to predation or a natural trap. In addition, this research project will have impact beyond its direct application within the sciences. Development of an isotopic baseline for modern pronghorn populations from known locations will allow wildlife managers and game law enforcement officers to establish the area of origin for a pronghorn carcass when poaching is suspected. Also, additional information on Trappers Point site formation circumstances in particular will provide long-term perspective useful in debates about modern land development. Trappers Point lies directly on a modern pronghorn migration bottleneck, and is often interpreted as evidence of the great antiquity of such migrations. This project will provide new evidence which may help in understanding the significance of that site and its relevance to land-use discussions in that rapidly developing area. Finally, this project will provide graduate student training in specialized isotope analysis techniques, and foster inter-departmental cooperation among archaeologists, geologists, and natural resource experts.
