Comparative Collection

Bison Butchering

In October 2021, the Meeteetse Museums was donated a bison by Sam May and the Antlers Ranch outside of Meeteetse, Wyoming. The Museums butchered the bison with stone tools. The event and project had two main goals: 1) to educate the public on the lives of stone tool using peoples who hunted and butchered carcasses for millions of years and 2) to record and preserve the butchered bison skeleton in Museum collections for future research.

Nature's Design Taxidermy donated the cost of cleaning the bison bones and they are now housed in the Meeteetse Museums' comparative collection. Using the cleaned bison bones, researchers can study a wide range of topics such as being able to reliably identify the microscopic marks left by stone tools cutting and scraping or reconstructing how carcasses found an archaeological site were butchered and used. The Museum also has images taken during the butchering, some of the stone tools that were used, and a log of who butchered with what tool and where. Combined with the bones, all these things are a treasure trove of potential information that lets one Wyoming cow bison inform the interpretation of numerous archaeological sites at a global scale and over vast periods of time.