Cooper Bison Kill Site

Twelve thousand years ago, along the Beaver River in what is now Harper County, some people were hunting Bison. Bison are big animals, and they travel in herds. They are a formidable challenge to hunt when your best weapon is a sharpened stone tied to a stick. These hunters, had a plan, though. They would stampede the Bison into gully. Hunters would be waiting on the lips to kill the trapped beasts with spears thrown from above. The entire group would then butcher the carcasses right where they were killed.

Jump forward to the 1993. Another man is hunting along the Beaver River. He notices a bed of large bones eroding out of the bank. It's likely that he's not the first person to notice them, but he tells someone. Soon archeologists from the University of Oklahoma are taking a look. The bones turned out to be from Bison antiquus, the ancestor of the modern bison. B. antiquus went extinct about 10,000 years ago. A preliminary survey of the material already eroded from the bank turned up a Folsom point; the site quickly became a full scale archeological dig.

The site told the story of three separate bison hunts, with three to five years between each hunt. These hunters returned to successful hunting sites. All of the hunts seemed to have been in late summer or early fall. The bones show clear marks of the bison being butchered where they fell. The evidence also shows that there were probably multiple discrete groups involved in these hunts. Stone tools made from two separate sources, the Edwards Plateau in central Texas and the Alibates quarries in the Texas panhandle, were found. Unlike some other Folsom sites, the bison were not completely butchered, but rather selected cuts of meat were cut from the carcasses. There is no evidence of permanent camp at the site.

If the information presented above were all that was gleaned from the site, it would still be an important site, but one mainly of interest to professionals. There, however, was one additional, spectacular find. Before the second hunt, a skull was disinterred from the first hunt. A red zigzag "lightening bolt" was painted on it with hematite and it was placed at the entrance of the gully. This is the oldest known painted object in North America. It gives an important clue to the ritual life of these hunters. Hunting was not merely a means of acquiring food but was bound with rituals, traditions and taboos.

The Cooper Bison Kill Site is in the Cooper Wildlife Management Are, but its exact location has not been revealed. Even if its location were known, it would be of little interest, as the site was returned to its original state after the archeological dig was completed. It is unlikely that any significant archeological remains. Most of the material recovered from the sight, including the painted skull is in the collection of the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History. The skull is usually on public display.