Analysis Of The Harley Site, Rio Honda, And The Norton Site

In this assignment, I was tasked with looking through data for various sites and interpreting it to determine when species that inhabited each site. The three sites I interpreted included the Harley site, Rio Honda, and the Norton site. Through this data, I was able to determine when each species inhabited the sites and when humans inhabited each site. The species that can be seen at the Harley site include hickory, deer, mountain sheep, antelope, bison, and blackberry. There were several thousand charred nutshells discovered in multiple hearths, which led me to believe that people may have collected the hickory nutshells and toasted them for food. We know that hickory nuts ripened in late September and early October, but trees live for many …show more content…
There were many edible grains coming from wild rice and grass. There were more charred hickory nuts. We can guess that perhaps the humans in this area may have harvested these crops and maybe stored them during the colder months. With trout, we have no proof that they are migratory species but we do know they spawn in the rivers during July and August. We know that bones can be dated in those months, but perhaps the species were around year-long and fish were hunted all times of the year. There were also mature antlers from deer and antelope found in the area, however, bones may be from the females. That being said, we can’t assume that there are bones from female deer because the hunters may have avoided hunting the females in order to keep the population large in the area. Pike jawbones were found in the area from 7 to 8 month old Pike. Pike hatch in October, so we can assume these jawbones are from April to May. The last species seen in this area is duck, which is a migratory species that were in the local area in March and November. We can see that the humans in the area gathered and stored the seeds of many crops and also hunted large …show more content…
With male mammals, you can see with the antlers when exactly each animal was killed. However, there are many bones from deer and antelopes that are unknown as to whether they are male or female bones. Female mammals may have been killed year around, but we can not tell because we can only evaluate the antlers. Another problem is that floral remains may have been kept over winter and stored over that season instead of just harvested whenever the seeds were edible. This is a problem because we can’t accurately see a change in diet and assume these people moved locations or changed food resources. In one of the sites, you can see trout and pike bones. It is easy to assume that they died when they were there to spawn or when they are hatched. However, we are unsure as to whether they were hunted in the area year around. This is another reason why we can’t tell a diet year around or accurately gauge when humans inhabited the area. We can see that pike was hunted around April to May and were killed when they were 7-8 months old. With trout, it was not specified how old the bones were, so they could have been hunted year around. These reasons can make my results and estimates less