This volume has eight chapters by nine authors, including the two editors. I anticipated discussion of how animal prey carcasses were manipulated (e.g., butchered, differentially transported, shared); instead, most discussions concern how prey animals were obtained en masse. Nevertheless, “mass hunting” is rarely defined, and this may be why the authors do not always rigorously tie their archaeological observations to the concept. I take “mass hunting” to signify multiple humans working together to capture numerous prey during a single event spanning a brief interval of time. Leland Bement's introductory chapter emphasizes that communal hunting—involving multiple human participants in various roles—is as much a social enterprise as an economic one. Both cooperation and competition between individuals are involved, as are scalar stress, the construction of facilities (traps, drive lines, etc.), the processing of carcasses, rituals, and other things.
María Nieves Zedeño suggests that the process of forming ethnically distinct geographic areas was driven by political agency; defense from intruders into a resource-rich area in which much labor had been invested resulted in local territoriality and interband cooperation. Jane Balme summarizes ethnographic and historic information on facilities used for the communal trapping of fish and eels in Australia. Fish-trapping facilities were necessary to support ceremonial gatherings that may have lasted up to several months. Ulla Odgaard describes three kinds of Greenlandic caribou drive systems evident in the archaeological record. The evidence suggests a bit of surplus killing and meat wastage, but Odgaard argues that there was likely a sense of ideological respect and mutual interdependence between caribou and hunter.
David Maxwell and Jonathan Driver address the perplexing issue of why remains of calves and yearlings are rare in many Plains bison mass-kill sites. The hypotheses they propose are fascinating. Because modern data on bison herd demography are biased by Euro-American influences, they chose African blue wildebeest as an analogue species on the belief that traditional demographic models used by zooarchaeologists are too idealized and rigid. They recommend the use of stacked bar graphs showing three age groups—calf, yearling, and adult—rather than the typical three-pole and ~10 age group bar graphs to visually evaluate prey demography. Many analysts utilize ordinal-scale statistics to evaluate frequencies of age groups, an explicit allowance for variability in frequencies within age groups, yet Maxwell and Driver offer no suggestions on how to visually or statistically assess the significance of variability in the frequency of their three age groups.
Adam Graves determined the trace element composition of Folsom-age bison teeth from the southern Plains and concludes that some bison migrated moderate distances seasonally whereas others were yearlong residents of particular areas. The predictability of bison occurrence in time and space allowed Folsom people to exploit resident populations when migratory herds were absent and to avoid resident herds and exploit migratory herds when available. Thus herds of both populations were not depleted. Kill sites with numerous animals signify temporary aggregations of multiple human groups that could exchange mates and information and perform spiritual rituals as well as undertake communal hunts. Residential mobility was low most of the year but high in the fall, when migratory bison herds became available. Kristen Carlson and Leland Bement measured stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes in several bison bones from each of three Paleoindian sites in Oklahoma and three Paleoindian sites in the northwestern Plains. The former set of sites indicates decreased herd mobility, whereas the latter set suggests increased herd mobility over time.
John Speth agrees with Bement that the volume is “eclectic,” but so too, one might argue, are Speth's concluding 76 pages of text (plus 50 pages of references). The chapter is a tour de force critical examination of several deeply held assumptions about Paleoindian behaviors and causes thereof, all of which Speth questions logically and empirically. In my view, his discussion will generate the most controversy but also, hopefully, the most rethinking and new research.
Many labels on maps and line drawings throughout the volume are illegible, some even when a magnifying glass is used. The lack of acknowledgments in each of the first seven chapters seems odd, and the index is so brief as to be of minimal utility. Nevertheless, there is much in this volume worthy of attention, whether or not one studies sites seemingly formed more or less instantaneously at the hands of multiple people, containing remains of multiple animals, or both.
