Plains Indian Studies - Smithsonian Institution Libraries

NUMBER 30 169
Among the historic Comanche prairie dogs and ground
squirrels were often the first wild game sought by small boys
learning the use of bow and arrow and developing hunting
skills .... The surprising abundance of prairie dog bones at
Medicine Creek reservoir sites suggests that the animal may
indeed have been a regular and accepted supplemental food
item along with pocket gophers and jackrabbits.
T.W. Clark (1975:72-73) provides the following
ethnographic description of a prairie dog hunt:
They hunted prairie dogs. When it rained good, a real
heavy rain, they'd go out and hunt the prairie dogs. They
would go to their town and they would find a little pond
close to that. They dug a ditch toward the prairie dogs holes,
and they helped each other. They dug the ditch, and water
would flow into the holes. When bubbles started coming up,
the dogs would come out. The little and the big ones. Some
of them, that were about two months old. That was the size
they liked. The dogs would come and see them, and then
jump back into the water. When the dogs came out, they
could catch them and wring their necks by swinging them
around their heads. They threw them over in the weeds. The
big ones could bite, but the little ones don't bite much. They
were afraid of the big ones. They went along from hole to
hole. When they had killed about five or six, they would
take them and build a big fire. They would throw the dogs
in it, and singe off the fur. They scraped the dogs real
smooth. They cut the neck and split the dog lengthwise in
two. They cleaned it real good, like a rabbit. They could
boil it. These dogs don't eat nothing rotten, they just eat
clean things, some kind of sour that grown there in their
town.
In winter time, the dogs used to live on nuts, they would
bring them to their holes one at a time. Nuts and walnuts,
sometimes, they would float up in the water. Maybe, I ate
them when I was a little girl, but I don't know.
The difficulty with prairie dogs, pocket gophers,
and other fossorial animals is that it is hard
to determine whether the bones of these species
found in archeological sites are intrusive or not.
Wilson (1973:232) has suggested that the adaptation
by Thomas (1971) of Shotwell's (1958)
distinction between distal and proximal taxa may
be a way to make the determination. Shotwell
argued that animals which died close to the point
of deposition (proximal species) are more likely
to be represented in a sample by most of the
elements in their skeletons; those that died at a
distance from the point of deposition (distal species)
are likely to be represented by only a few
elements. Thomas argued that species that are
utilized by human groups are likely to appear to
be "distal," represented by a few selected skeletal
parts. The description given by T.W. Clark
(1975:72-73) of prairie dog hunting would indicate
that the head was discarded before the carcass
was cooked. The skin would travel a different
technological pathway than the edible part of the
carcass on the basis of Wedel's (1961:143) description
of a prairie dog skin bag. The boiling of the
butchered prairie dogs would likely reduce the
rest of the skeleton to a state where the bones
either could be eaten or would have much reduced
resistance to depositional conditions.
The passage quoted above (T.W. Clark,
1975:72-73) is strikingly similar to a description
given the author in South America of the exploitation
of a behavioral analog of Plains fossorial
rodents, the cholulo {Ctenomys sp.). The method
of capture and preparing is identical, driving the
rodents from their holes with water, beheading,
and skinning and roasting the carcasses. Additionally,
it was stated that the bones, softened by
cooking were entirely consumed. An archeological
sample of Cholulo bones excavated in the area
where this description was obtained contains almost
entirely skull and mandible fragments, suggesting
that these animals had been processed in
a manner similar to the ethnographic description.
The skeletal recovery pattern contrasted with that
of an even smaller rodent, which was not described
as a food source. As Wedel (1970:17) has
suggested, this may also explain why pocket gophers
and prairie dogs at Mowry Bluff were
represented archeologically almost exclusively by
cranial, maxillary, and mandibular fragments
(Falk, 1969:47, table 9).
These examples emphasize a point made by
Vehik (1977:180-181). Because of the multiplicity
of factors capable of producing a given bone
distribution, "a more profitable approach would
be to consider the archeological implications of
the activity responsible for producing the bone
fragments," than proceeding on a purely inductive
basis to generate inferences. The rich ethnographic
literature of the Plains will continue to