Why is their only one bison jump kill site in the Lower Pecos?

Let's begin at the beginning - not only is Bonfire Shelter the only bison jump in the Lower Pecos, it is the scene of two kill episodes separated in time by about 7500 years. It is also both the oldest example of this strategy in the New World and the southern most example on the Plains where bison hunting was elaborated into a complex and fairly ritualized endeavor. We therefore have three conundrums rather than one unless we take into account that formidable enemy of archeology - differential preservation. Bonfire Shelter provides a rare combination of a fortuitous place to drive bison over a cliff with a receptacle below capable of preserving their remains. I am sure that there were other locations equally suitable for the jump-kill strategy along the multitudinous sheer canyons but the remains either degraded or were washed away over the 10,000 years between then and now.

For those of you unfamiliar with Bonfire Shelter, let me recapitulate - this huge shelter is now midway between the rim and the bottom of a narrow canyon. Above the site, the rolling terrain obscures the canyon from the eyes of a charging bison herd until they came over the rise - oops, too late. A natural notch in the canyon rim, directly over the shelter, served as a funnel through which the bodies poured onto a house-sized boulder in front of the cave. Bison, and especially those three times the size of a modern buffalo, are not aerodynamically sound so when they crashed into the boulder, some rolled into the cave, under the overhang, where they could be butchered in the shade and relative calm of the shelter. The bodies that fell outward are long gone, those that were butchered or left in the shelter were buried by their own rotting carcasses, cave detritus falling from the ceiling and walls or silt blown in from outside its entrance. This strategy was employed during two periods of prehistory - the most recent are evidenced by meter-thick bone layers that spontaneously combusted due to the accumulation of fats and decaying meat, incinerating the skeletal remains into a mass of burned bone and ash - hence the name Bonfire. This level has been radiocarbon dated to the period between 2600-2900 years ago. The artifacts found in this bone bed are more characteristic of northern and central Texas, leading to the hypothesis that climatic change toward a wetter and/or cooler regime permitted the expansion of the plains grasslands into the Lower Pecos, bringing with them the herds and their attendant hunters. This interval lasted a brief 400 years before the desert reasserted itself and the herds retreated northward. Did these people somehow know that 7500 years before the earliest inhabitants of the Lower Pecos used the same site for the same purpose?

Outside of a few sporadic lenses of occupational debris left by various people over the years, the event that put Bonfire Shelter on the archeological map of North America is now evidenced by a deeply buried bone bed, again consisting solely of bison but this species is Bison antiquus, one of the giant Ice Age mammals that became extinct about 10,000 years ago. Careful analysis of the bones allowed Dessamae Lorrain to suggest three separate incidents where bison were driven over the cliff above, tumbling to the rocks below where they were dispatched and butchered. A Folsom dart point and radiocarbon dates centering around 10,000 years ago demonstrate the antiquity of these events, making Bonfire Shelter one of the oldest sites in Texas. But there is more.

Beneath the dense bison bone of Bone Bed 2, as it is called, are a series of bone lenses identified as horse, camel, and elephant as well as bison - all animals that became extinct at the end of the last Ice Age. One radiocarbon date from a middle bone lens pushes back the utilization of Bonfire as a kill site to 12,360 years ago. It is unlikely that these animals were driven over the cliff to their deaths - it is very difficult to make a mother mastodon and her child leap into space - rather, it appears that at that time the canyon was much shallower and the roof of Bonfire Shelter was an overhang above the canyon floor. Handfuls of river gravel pulled from a deep test beneath the bone beds indicate that water once flowed along this small tributary some 7 meters above its current bed. Driven up a box canyon or trapped when they sought refuge in the shade of the overhang, the animals
were brought down by determined hunters using lances, fire brands, and perhaps atlatls. Now that is hunting.

What are the implications of Bonfire Shelter for our understanding of Lower Pecos society and the emergence of art? We can assume a number of things about the people who effectively slaughtered so many huge animals at one blow (or effectively utilized such a large portion of the regional biomass if you prefer to think of it that way). First, it dispels the notion of the noble savage who only took what he needed - I am sure that the native people had great respect for nature and perfectly understood the process of herd depletion and replenishment but it is pretty hard to stop a stampeding herd once you have determined that you have enough meat. That impossibility is mirrored in the amount of unbutchered carcasses and the selection of only prime parts from others. However, a considerable amount of social discipline is implied by their ability to coordinate and control the hunt. The initial herding, orienting the stampede in the right direction, and keeping the maddened animals on course for the rim required leadership, cooperation, obedience, and communication between all the participants. No vagabonds here. Unfortunately, although Bonfire tells us a lot about economic strategies and organization, we still don't know much about the Paleoindian's everyday life because their living sites have yet to be found and excavated. Rock shelter life is a disadvantage to people who follow migratory herds for a living - they need mobile portable structures that can be put up and pulled down rapidly. Remember that the domesticated horse was still 10,000 years in the future - horses were to eat, not to ride - so everything you owned was carried with you, including however many children were too small to walk. Traveling light leaves little for the archeologist who is 10,000 years too late to see the campsite.

The same presumed sophisticated social organization can be attributed to the Archaic hunters, ca 1000 B.C. whose overkill far exceeded that of the Paleoindians. We know from Plains Indian hunts prior to the acquisition of the horse that every hunter played a crucial role in the entrapment, whether the object was to drive the animals over a cliff or into an arroyo, snowbank, or bog. The one I admire is the fellow who dressed up like a bison and wandered around until the curious animals began to follow him, headed in the right direction. When the other hunters started the stampede, this guy dropped into a convenient hole while the herd thundered over him. Knowing the Plains ethos, being picked as "it" was probably a mark of esteem and a cherished honor.

Every time you think of archeology as a sterile science, stop and imagine the sounds and smells of this shelter on D-day - crammed with dead and dying beasts being dispatched by hunters at short range. The women must have flocked to the scene to flay the carcasses and strip the choicest parts for immediate consumption. Their work had just begun - hides to tan, meat to dry, bones to crush for marrow and fat, horns to shape into implements and costumes - a multitude of uses for a multitude of parts. The task at hand

far exceeded the available labor so eventually no more could be salvaged and the people went in search of another herd. I am sure this happened many times at many places along the cliffs of the Rio Grande but scavengers, floods, and exposure has probably erased the vast majority of them. So rather than ask "why is there only one" - I think "what if there were none?" what if Bonfire Shelter hadn't fortuitously provided exactly the right conditions to insure preservation of the remains for 10 millennia? - We would know nothing about the predecessors of the Archaic people, much less that the Lower Pecos was once a savannah populated by herds of massive animals and the puniest of predators, the mighty hunters of the Paleoindian Period. We could not from that vantage point see the adaptive mechanisms that led to the optimal Archaic adaptation to an increasingly stressful climate and their culmination in the Pecos River rock art. Similarly, the archaic kill contributes to our understanding of why the Pecos River style ceased to be and the Red Linear began. The illustrations of bison hunts and bison herds in the Red Linear style link those artists to the Archaic hunters of Bonfire Shelter and the environmental changes that prompted both man and beast to migrate to the Rio Grande. Other than the rock art, Bonfire Shelter is the one Lower Pecos site that has achieved national and perhaps international fame. Jack and Wilmuth Skiles deserve our gratitude for their faithful stewardship of this site and its companion, Eagle Cave.

Several reports on Bonfire Shelter are available at local libraries - the original "Bonfire Shelter" by David S. Dibble and Dessamae Lorrain was published in 1968 and is a classic exemplar of archeological interpretation. Dibble also wrote a paper in Plains Anthropologist in 1974 called "On the Significance of Additional Radiocarbon Dates at Bonfire Shelter" which, despite the uninspired title, is the definitive statement about Paleoindian social organization as seen at Bonfire. I was at Bonfire Shelter for 2 years in the early 1980s - my colleague Lee Bement wrote his master's thesis at UT on the deepest bone lenses. Unfortunately, most of these reports are only available in Xerox form. Later articles include a summary I wrote in Ancient Texans and my discussion of Paleoindian lifeways in the Amistad District's report on their survey of their shoreline.