In 1970, B. Robert Butler of Idaho State University was contacted by a resident of Challis, Idaho, that bison bones and artifacts had been found at the edge of a borrow pit at the base of a cliff southeast of Challis. This piqued Professor Butler’s interest because of the possibility that it could be the site where bison were driven off the cliff by prehistoric people, a pattern common in the Northern Plains of Wyoming and Montana but not previously known in Eastern Idaho. Later that year, Professor Butler conducted an excavation at the location and in a nearby small cave (Quill Cave) to better understand the range of native bison hunting practices in the region. A report of the findings was published by B. Robert Butler in 1971 entitled A Bison Jump in the Upper Salmon River Valley of Eastern Idaho in Tebiwa volume 14, Number 1, pagers 4 – 32. The site was revisited in 2009 by Kenneth P. Cannon and Molly Boeka Cannon of Utah State University who published a preliminary report in 2010 entitled Reinvestigation of the Challis Bison Kill Site: Is It Really that Old? in The Newsletter of the Idaho Professional Archaeological Council Volume 3, Number 1, pages 9 – 12.
Questions