Month: February 2015

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.