Under the supervision of Dr. Donald K. Grayson, Ms. Lee Ann Kreutzer will conduct a structural analysis of bison bone and apply the results to faunal material recovered from the Mill Iron archaeological site located near Ekalaka in southeastern Montana. Using a recently developed technique, Quantitative Digital Radiography, Ms. Kreutzer will study a series of bison skeletons housed at the University of Wyoming and measure bone density of different skeletal elements collected at multiple sites. This will provide a basis to determine relative resistance of different bones to destruction in archaeological and geological settings. She will then analyze bison remains recovered from the Mill Iron site which dates to approximately 11,000 years ago and has yielded both abundant faunal remains and stone tools. Ms. Kreutzer hopes to determine the extent to which the skeletal composition of the assemblage is determined by either cultural practice or differential preservation. Because skeletal remains from hunted animals constitutes a major class of archaeological data archaeologists have focussed a great deal of attention on the analysis of such materials. In most sites the distribution of skeletal parts is non-random: ie. not what one would expect given the numbers of different kinds of bones in a mammalian skeleton. Archaeologists have generally claimed that such departures from an expected distribution reflect cultural practice and have tried to interpret assemblages in this light. More recently it has been pointed out that differential preservation may play a major patterning role and that some bones are more frequently encountered because they are better able to withstand destructive forces. Ms. Kreutzer's research will address this issue. This research is important for several reasons. It should result in information and analytic techniques of use to archaeologists who study large mammals from many time periods and parts of the world. It will also contribute to our understanding of North American prehistory and further the training of a promising young archaeologist.
