Imagining Head-Smashed-In Aboriginal Buffalo Hunting on the Northern Plains

At the place known as Head-Smashed-In in southwestern Alberta, Aboriginal people practiced a form of group hunting for nearly 6,000 years before European contact. The large communal bison traps of the Plains were the single greatest food-getting method ever developed in human history. Hunters, working with their knowledge of the land and of buffalo behaviour, drove their quarry over a cliff and into wooden corrals. The rest of the group butchered the kill in the camp below. Author Jack Brink, who devoted 25 years of his career to “The Jump,” has chronicled the cunning, danger, and triumph in the mass buffalo hunts and the culture they supported. He also recounts the excavation of the site and the development of the Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump Interpretive Centre, which has hosted 2 million visitors since it opened in 1987. Brink’s masterful blend of scholarship and public appeal is rare in any discipline, but especially in North American pre-contact archaeology.

About the Author

Jack W. Brink is archaeology curator at the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton, Canada. His interests also include the study of rock art images of the northern Plains, and he enjoys working with Aboriginal communities on heritage issues.

Reviews

Imagining Head-Smashed-In: Aboriginal Buffalo Hunting on the Northern Plains is an outstanding book with a unique tale to tell. Brink uses the past and eyewitness accounts described by early settlers to set the mood for his story, which includes an abundant source of ancient legends from the Elders and a host of buffalo jump stories by those who wrote down what they witnessed on the plains of southern Alberta and beyond.

Alberta Native News

A writer committed to a subject that most of the world considers marginal, yet approaches it with I-will-be-heard confidence, can win the heart of even the most recalcitrant reader. Jack W. Brink, a curator at the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton, has that ability. He’s spent 25 years studying the way Prairie natives kept themselves alive for millennia by hunting buffalo, a subject that in his hands becomes absorbing, dramatic and almost urgent — even though many will also find it inherently appalling.

The National Post

Brink takes readers on an exploration of the site, telling its story in an irresistible personal voice into which he pours his heart and soul.

Edmonton Journal

Table of Contents

1. Foreword by Eldon Yellowhorn
2. Preface
3. Acknowledgements
4. 1. The Buffalo Jump
5. 2. The Buffalo
6. 3. A Year in the Life
7. 4. The Killing Fields
8. 5. Rounding Up
9. 6. The Great Kill
10. 7. Cooking up the Spoils
11. 8. Going Home
12. 9. The End of the Buffalo Hunt
13. 10. The Future of the Past
14. Epilogue: Just a Simple Stone
15. Sources to Notes / Bibliography / Index

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 2.5 CA). It may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes, provided that the original author is credited.