September 2009 - Congratulations to Dr. Zedeño for receiving a two-year grant from NSF to study "The Complex Organization of Communal Bison Hunting: Revisiting the Late Prehistory of the Northern Plains". She was awarded $193,699 through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).

With this support, Dr. Zedeño, a team of colleagues and Blackfeet collaborators will conduct two seasons of archaeological fieldwork on the US northwestern Plains. Together they will examine the relationships between social investment in communal bison hunting and organizational complexity among Late Prehistoric hunter communities who inhabited the foothills and prairies of the Montana-Alberta border between AD 1050-1660.

This study will provide the opportunity to evaluate and update deeply set models of sociopolitical organization that have characterized archaeological and anthropological approaches to big game hunters in general, and to northern Plains bison hunters in particular. It will integrate diverse archaeological components and data sets, paleoecology, and ethnographic information into a multi-scale landscape approach to bison hunting. Finally, it will furnish a substantial amount of new information to augment current knowledge of northern Plains prehistory. As a collaborative endeavor with the Blackfeet Tribe, the research has great transformative potential: it will incorporate an underrepresented constituency into archaeological research, and will promote archaeological practice that is not only scientifically sound but cognizant and responsive to the traditional knowledge and practices of this constituency. This project will create multi-year research opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students, and a participatory model of archaeological investigation for them to follow.

To read more about this, visit the following webpage:
http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0918081