Background Information on Hunting Buffalo and the Sea Mammal Hunting Culture
The Buffalo Jump-
“The buffalo jump was the most dramatic form of communal hunting. Buffalo jumping entailed more than simply stampeding a herd over a cliff; it required planning, coordinating, and orchestrating a communal drive that took advantage of natural features in the landscape to move animals toward the selected precipice and generate the momentum to carry them over the edge. Archaeologist David Hurst Thomas described it as a ‘delicate art.’ After medicine men and women performed the rituals or songs necessary to ‘call’ the buffalo and offered prayers for a successful hunt, runner went out to locate the herd. Disguising themselves in buffalo or wolf skins, they began to lure or nudge the herd slowly and precisely in the direction of the jump. As the herd neared the kill site, the runners steered it between lines of obstacles or piles of stones that had been erected to funnel toward the edge of a cliff. The hunters had to time their movements perfectly to maneuver the herd into the lanes. People who had been watching the herd’s approach now waved buffalo robes and shouted, panicking the animals until their gathering momentum sent them plummeting over the cliff.”
The Whaling Tradition-
“Coastal peoples fished for five species of salmon, halibut, herring, cod, smelt, eulachon, and rockfish and gathered shellfish. Men hunted whales, seals, sea otters, and other sea mammals from dugouts. Women gathered strawberries, cranberries, blueberries, huckleberries, roots, and wild plants. Moving between the coast in the summer and more sheltered inland locations in the winter, people enjoyed a rich diet based on their management of huge fisheries and their exploitations of marine and river resources. On the Olympic Peninsula of present-day Washington State, sometime between three and five hundred years ago a mud slide engulfed several cedar-plank longhouses at Ozette, a Makah whaling village. Most of the people escaped, but their material culture was buried and preserved. During eleven years of excavation, archaeologists and Makah students recovered some sixty thousand artifacts from the site, providing a detailed portrait of life at Ozette and the sea mammal-hunting culture that had developed in the area in the thousand years before the mud slide. Northwest Coast peoples developed increasingly efficient ways of harvesting mammal resources. They made more elaborate tool kits for fishing and sea mammal hunting, such as steam-bent wooden hooks with bone barbs and bone-tipped harpoons with long wooden shafts. They felled tall straight red cedar trees with finely ground stone adzes and carved out large yet maneuverable canoes for whaling, sealing, fishing, and trading voyages.”
Materials:
•PDF Day Two Worksheet
•Buffalo Jump Powerpoint based on Heads Smashed In Buffalo Jump in Alberta, Canada: http://www.history.alberta.ca/headsmashedin/docs/buffalo_tracks.pdf
•Two PDFs Articles: Ozette and The Makah and the Whaling Tradition: (The two pdfs are from the three following websites: http://www.makah.com/whalingtradition.html , http://content.lib.washington.edu/cmpweb/exhibits/makah/whaling.html , http://archaeology.about.com/od/oterms/a/Ozette.htm .)
Essential Question:
•How did the knowledge of animal behavior help the Paleo-Indian hunt big animals?
•What tools were used to hunt big game before the coming of the horse?
Objectives:
•The student will be able to describe the anatomy of a buffalo jump.
•The student will be able to describe the Makah’s whaling traditions.
Procedures-
Preview Assignment: The student will do a three minute quick write on what they learned the previous day.
Direct Instruction: The teacher will introduce George Frison’s quote on hunters and animal behavior. Then the teacher will have the students imagine they are hunters of two large mammals the Indians would have hunted. Using a t chart on the white board and their worksheet, the teacher and students will list animal behaviors of whales and buffalos that would be useful in hunting down these big game animals.
Group Work Investigation: In groups of four, the students travel to two different stations in the classroom: Head Smashed In and Ozette (use the signs to identify the area.) The readings on the Ozette archaeological site, the whaling practices of the Makah and ‘Smashed Head In’ buffalo jumps packet will be at each station. At the buffalo jump and the whaling station each group will list characteristics of a jump, other hunting techniques, hunting strategy, archaeological evidence and religion, prayers and songs. The bulleted characteristics will be used for the processing assignment. The bottom of each worksheet for the both stations asks the same question. The student is to do that question which requires complete sentences by himself or herself.
Processing Assignment: The students will choose one of three processing assignments to synthesize and apply the information they learned about buffalo jumps or whaling.
Attachments:
Buffalo_Jumps.pptx
Buffalo_Jumps_and_Whaling_Worksheet.docx
The_Makah_and_the_Whaling_Tradition.pdf
The Buffalo Jump-
“The buffalo jump was the most dramatic form of communal hunting. Buffalo jumping entailed more than simply stampeding a herd over a cliff; it required planning, coordinating, and orchestrating a communal drive that took advantage of natural features in the landscape to move animals toward the selected precipice and generate the momentum to carry them over the edge. Archaeologist David Hurst Thomas described it as a ‘delicate art.’ After medicine men and women performed the rituals or songs necessary to ‘call’ the buffalo and offered prayers for a successful hunt, runner went out to locate the herd. Disguising themselves in buffalo or wolf skins, they began to lure or nudge the herd slowly and precisely in the direction of the jump. As the herd neared the kill site, the runners steered it between lines of obstacles or piles of stones that had been erected to funnel toward the edge of a cliff. The hunters had to time their movements perfectly to maneuver the herd into the lanes. People who had been watching the herd’s approach now waved buffalo robes and shouted, panicking the animals until their gathering momentum sent them plummeting over the cliff.”
The Whaling Tradition-
“Coastal peoples fished for five species of salmon, halibut, herring, cod, smelt, eulachon, and rockfish and gathered shellfish. Men hunted whales, seals, sea otters, and other sea mammals from dugouts. Women gathered strawberries, cranberries, blueberries, huckleberries, roots, and wild plants. Moving between the coast in the summer and more sheltered inland locations in the winter, people enjoyed a rich diet based on their management of huge fisheries and their exploitations of marine and river resources. On the Olympic Peninsula of present-day Washington State, sometime between three and five hundred years ago a mud slide engulfed several cedar-plank longhouses at Ozette, a Makah whaling village. Most of the people escaped, but their material culture was buried and preserved. During eleven years of excavation, archaeologists and Makah students recovered some sixty thousand artifacts from the site, providing a detailed portrait of life at Ozette and the sea mammal-hunting culture that had developed in the area in the thousand years before the mud slide. Northwest Coast peoples developed increasingly efficient ways of harvesting mammal resources. They made more elaborate tool kits for fishing and sea mammal hunting, such as steam-bent wooden hooks with bone barbs and bone-tipped harpoons with long wooden shafts. They felled tall straight red cedar trees with finely ground stone adzes and carved out large yet maneuverable canoes for whaling, sealing, fishing, and trading voyages.”
Materials:
•PDF Day Two Worksheet
•Buffalo Jump Powerpoint based on Heads Smashed In Buffalo Jump in Alberta, Canada: http://www.history.alberta.ca/headsmashedin/docs/buffalo_tracks.pdf
•Two PDFs Articles: Ozette and The Makah and the Whaling Tradition: (The two pdfs are from the three following websites: http://www.makah.com/whalingtradition.html , http://content.lib.washington.edu/cmpweb/exhibits/makah/whaling.html , http://archaeology.about.com/od/oterms/a/Ozette.htm .)
Essential Question:
•How did the knowledge of animal behavior help the Paleo-Indian hunt big animals?
•What tools were used to hunt big game before the coming of the horse?
Objectives:
•The student will be able to describe the anatomy of a buffalo jump.
•The student will be able to describe the Makah’s whaling traditions.
Procedures-
Preview Assignment: The student will do a three minute quick write on what they learned the previous day.
Direct Instruction: The teacher will introduce George Frison’s quote on hunters and animal behavior. Then the teacher will have the students imagine they are hunters of two large mammals the Indians would have hunted. Using a t chart on the white board and their worksheet, the teacher and students will list animal behaviors of whales and buffalos that would be useful in hunting down these big game animals.
Group Work Investigation: In groups of four, the students travel to two different stations in the classroom: Head Smashed In and Ozette (use the signs to identify the area.) The readings on the Ozette archaeological site, the whaling practices of the Makah and ‘Smashed Head In’ buffalo jumps packet will be at each station. At the buffalo jump and the whaling station each group will list characteristics of a jump, other hunting techniques, hunting strategy, archaeological evidence and religion, prayers and songs. The bulleted characteristics will be used for the processing assignment. The bottom of each worksheet for the both stations asks the same question. The student is to do that question which requires complete sentences by himself or herself.
Processing Assignment: The students will choose one of three processing assignments to synthesize and apply the information they learned about buffalo jumps or whaling.
Attachments:
Buffalo_Jumps.pptx
Buffalo_Jumps_and_Whaling_Worksheet.docx
The_Makah_and_the_Whaling_Tradition.pdf