Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump (UNESCO World Heritage Site) Fort Macleod, Alberta, Canada

Описание: Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump is located in southern Alberta, Canada, where the foothills of the Rocky Mountains meet the Great Plains. It is the best preserved example of the communal hunting techniques and of the way of life of the Plains people based on the vast herds of bison that existed in North America for more than five millennia. A remarkable testimony of pre-European contact life in North America, this bison jump bears witness to a sophisticated custom practiced by Indigenous people of the North American plains. These people, drawing on their excellent understanding of bison behaviour and topography, used natural barriers such as coulees, depressions and hills to funnel these animals into drive lanes that ended at a precipice, over which the bison were stampeded. The animals’ carcasses were then butchered in a camp set up below the cliff to provide food and the materials for clothing, tools and dwellings. The development of complex social and technological systems to systematically and repeatedly harvest the herds in a communal hunt also nourished spiritual interests. Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump is the most outstanding of the surviving bison jumps in the Americas in use from approximately 5,800 years BP until AD 1850. On this grassy, windswept 3,626-ha landscape can be seen the drive lanes that led the bison toward the jump (including the remains of stone markers used to direct the bison toward the cliff), the 10-m-high cliff face that served as the actual jump, the foot of the cliff where numerous undisturbed stratified layers of bone and cultural deposits are found, and the area encompassing the many butchering camps established through the millennia.

Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump is one of the oldest, most extensive and best preserved sites that illustrate communal hunting techniques and of the way of life of Plains people who, for more than five millennia, subsisted on the vast herds of bison that existed in North America.

Source: https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/158/