Plains nations build the buffalo economy at Head-Smashed-In
Nearly 6,000 years of communal bison hunting on the edge of the Rockies
Quick facts
- Location
- Porcupine Hills, southern Alberta
- Period of use
- c. 6,000 years, ending mid-19th century
- UNESCO designation
- 1981
- Cliff height
- About 10 metres
What happened
On the southern end of the Porcupine Hills in what is now southern Alberta, Blackfoot and other Plains nations used a sandstone cliff called Head-Smashed-In as a buffalo jump for close to 6,000 years. Hunters trained as 'buffalo runners' wore hides and mimicked calls to lure bison herds along stone cairn drive lanes toward the cliff edge, then stampeded them over a drop of roughly ten metres. The animals killed in the fall were butchered at a camp below, where the deep bone deposits, some layers metres thick, still contain tools dated to between 9,000 and 7,500 years old. The buffalo hunt supplied meat, hides for shelter and clothing, sinew for tools, and bones worked into implements, forming the material basis of Plains life until commercial hide-hunting collapsed the herds in the 1870s and 1880s.
Why it matters
The site shows a sophisticated, sustained technology adapted precisely to the northern Plains environment, not an incidental or occasional practice. Its UNESCO recognition in 1981 made it one of the best-documented records anywhere of pre-contact communal hunting, and its collapse in the 19th century, driven by the commercial hide trade and deliberate policy, removed the economic base that numbered-treaty negotiators later exploited.
How we know
Stratified bone deposits at the site preserve nearly continuous occupation layers; radiocarbon dating of tools and butchered bone from the lowest layers places the earliest confirmed use between 9,000 and 7,500 years ago, with UNESCO and the Canadian Encyclopedia both documenting the site's stone drive-lane cairns and interpretive archaeology.
Sources
- The Canadian Encyclopedia. Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump · Reputable sourcethecanadianencyclopedia.ca · The domain "thecanadianencyclopedia.ca" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre. Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump · Primary source (author-declared)whc.unesco.org · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match).
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