Please join us on Wednesday, February 25 at 7:00pm in Room 132 of the Archaeology Building!
Tomasin Playford – A Biography
Tomasin originally comes from Brandon, Manitoba where she completed her undergraduate degree in Anthropology. While there, she spent several summers working in southwestern Manitoba on archaeological sites in the Lauder Sandills. She completed her Master’s Degree in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Saskatchewan where she compared subsistence strategies of two Late Precontact archaeological groups inhabiting the Canadian northeastern Plains. Her recently completed PhD dissertation quantified animal food resources and attempted to explain subsistence variability by placing sites within Aboriginal seasons. She is currently the Executive Director of the Saskatchewan Archaeological Society.
Abstract — Bison Today and Yesterday: Using Modern Bison Behaviour to Understand Past Birthing Schedules
It is well established that bison played a pivotal role in the lifeways of Northern Plains people. Archaeologists are very aware of this relationship and realize that in order to better understand past peoples, it is necessary to understand the animals that were important to them. There has been some debate about whether or not modern day bison can be used to model past and extinct bison species. Complicating the matter are contradictions in the historical literature. This presentation will address the feasibility of using modern bison to model past bison behaviour, especially in regards to the nature and timing of bison mating and birth schedules, which has implications for estimating seasonality of archaeological sites.