Bonfire Shelter facts for kids
Bonfire Shelter is a really cool place in southwest Texas. It's an archaeological site, which means scientists study old things there to learn about the past. What makes Bonfire Shelter special is that people hunted huge numbers of buffalo there a long, long time ago. This is unusual because mass buffalo hunts usually happened far away on the Great Plains. Bonfire Shelter is the most southern place in North America where we've found evidence of these big hunts.
Discovering Bonfire Shelter's Past
Long ago, people hunted bison using a method called "bison jumps." This meant scaring a large group of bison so they would run over a cliff. Then, the hunters would prepare the animals for food and other uses.
At Bonfire Shelter, archaeologists found two main layers of bison bones. Each layer shows that several bison jumps happened over a short time, maybe 50 to 100 years. But here's the interesting part: these two big hunting periods happened almost 7,500 years apart!
The older bones are from the Paleo-Indian period, which was a very long time ago. The more recent bones are from around 500 BC. The site was first studied by a famous Texas archaeologist named David S. Dibble.
Why Were There Gaps in Hunting?
Archaeologist Vaughn Bryant wondered why there were such long gaps between the hunts. He studied pollen samples from the area. Pollen can tell us what kind of plants grew there in the past.
He found that the area had good grass for bison to eat only twice since 10,000 BC. Each time there was good grass, it matched up with one of the bone layers. This means that at other times, the area was too dry or harsh to support large herds of bison.
Bonfire Shelter helps us see how changes in climate can affect what we find in archaeological sites today. It shows how people and animals adapted to their environment over thousands of years.
Protecting Bonfire Shelter
The area where Bonfire Shelter is located, called Mile Canyon, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1970 AD. This means it's an important historical place that should be protected. The historic area covers about 1,500 acres (about 6 square kilometers) and is on private land.
