COMMUNAL DEER HUNTS
Communal hunting by Native Americans of the Northeast were an efficient means of exploiting a mobile and widely dispersed natural resource such as native ungulates, bear and other mammals for essential meat and hides.
Lowering energy costs to exploit a resource is a key survival strategy for hunter-gatherers where survival was eternally balanced precariously on a knife edge of adequate caloric intake versus scarcity and starvation. Survival had to include a balance between calories required to exploit and consume a resource and calories gained from that exploitation. As a consequence of this exigency, survival pressures often evolved toward more and more efficient ways to satisfy this energy demand. One of these more efficient ways to supply meat and hides were the very common communal hunts which were practiced in pre-contact North America and for decades afterward.
These “deer drive hunts” also demonstrated the existential significance of deer meat and deer hides for subsistence. Meat was an essential source of fats and proteins for a nutritional diet. And as well, hunts provided mammal hides and furs for critical winter survival in the northeast maritime/continental climate where inhabitants were exposed to hot humid summers as well as frigid snowy winters. Deer provided protection, as a form of essential insulation, from harsh winter climate. Deer hides for clothing, for footwear and for winter sleeping robes served as essential insulation to conserve body heat (calories) that helped balance the caloric equation of survival.
Elsewhere, this author theorized on the essential nature of deer skins for the winter survival of Algonquian speaking natives of North America*.
In their natural state native Americans lived on the knife edge between starvation and survival. The level of caloric energy required to survive in an unforgiving environment was delicately balanced with the amount of energy they could exploit from that environment, as well the energy required to acquire these sources of energy. Adequate clothing was an essential component of that equation. Strategies for survival evolved over time which were the most efficient in conserving energy, and producing the most energy per unit of effort expended. Besides winter clothing more efficient winter wigwams were smaller, compact, low coast and required only modest energy to construct. Archeological studies of prehistoric native sites on LI reveal evidences of small compact and easily erected structures which were well adapted to the local environment in comparison to the larger communal “long houses” described from Lenni Lenape natives in western Long Island and from Dutch records of Brooklyn and Manhattan (See: (1639 Manatus Map of Dutch New Amsterdam, NYC archives, and for historical accounts of Native Americans during constant period Russel Shorto “Iland at the center of the World.) )
Communal deer hunting methods also conserved human energy. Compared to individual hunts where a single hunter might have to hunt many hours laboriously stalking game in woodland terrane stalking deer which required a high energy input per unit of food calories generated, communal hunts, using joint human effort provided more calories per unit hunter per unit of energy expended.
Deer “ambushes” also demonstrated complex social organization, leadership and planning which were all necessary for success. Historic and other evidence indicate such hunts often involved large groups of individuals in cooperative effort. In some cases large scale “traps” or physical “funnels” were used to drive Whitetail deer, Pronghorn antelope, or American buffalo (bison) or other big game toward waiting hunters where significant numbers of animals could be readily dispatched using low technology, low energy methods to disable or kill the game animals such a by being bludgeoned with clubs or killed with spears or bows and arrows.
As well as historical accounts and ethnographic reports from early explorers and colonists, physical evidence for these hunts derive from archeological findings such as remains of stone fencing, evidences of “lop-tree” fences, or soil disturbances such as “post molds” of wood structures used for corrals or fencing,
One of the earliest and most well documented of these evidences is that of Samuel De Champlain (1574–1635 ), a French explorer, artist, cartographer, ethnographer, and political figure who was instrumental in the development and exploration of the French colony of New France and who served as governor of the French colonial city of Quebec in the winter of 1615.
In 1615 as a result of continued unprovoked Iroquois attacks on Huron villages, Champlain was urged by his Huron allies to join a French-Huron-Montagnais punitive attack on the Iroquois at a village known as the “Onondaga Fort” located in the Finger Lakes area of central New York. During the conflict Champlain was wounded by an Iroquois arrow to his knee. Unable to walk, Huron warriors carried Champlain to their village. His long recovery forced the Frenchman to spend the fall and winter with the tribe. As a result, Champlain spent much of the latter part of 1615 to 1616 with the Huron in the upper Great Lakes region of modern day Canada in an area called “Huronia” where, during very early stages of European colonialism he observed, sketched and recorded Native American hunting and subsistence practices, in the early stages of European.
One of his reports documents an October 1615 a collective hunting effort, or ‘deer drive” in which the Huron herded deer into a laboriously prepared enclosure where game was effectively killed in large numbers. Champlain describes* the enclosures as several “V” shaped fences brush obstacles most of which consisted of “eight or nine feet high” wooden posts driven into the ground over a distance he claims were “150 paces long on a side”. (Based on an approximately 4.5 foot average pace, each side may have been about 675 feet (@206 m) long. )
Champlain who was also a talented artist included a sketch of this feature. It depicts a wide open fence approximating a “v” shape which led into another smaller unit of similar shape. These connected to an “escape channel” or narrow wood-fence passage-way where hunters with spears dispatched the deer. In the sketch Champlain depicts beaters holding fan-shaped probably thin split-wood sheaves and a mallet with which they presumably beat upon the sheaves with the small mallet. Champlain wrote that the beaters also imitated wolf cries as they drove the deer into the wide end of the enclosure.
Champlain’s report states that this one hunt generated 120 deer carcasses. The sketch includes images of buck deer and other game animals hung from limber saplings and bled in preparation for skinning and butchering. It is noteworthy that a fox also is depicted hanging from a sapling.
In the early 1800s Lewis and Clark (in 1804) report on a variant of this practice as used by western tribes of North America. In October 1804 Lewis and Clark reported on a communal hunt in a Pawnee, Arikara village, near present day Mobridge, South Dakota. There Arikara hunters drove a herd of Pronghorn Antelope into the Missouri River. While the herd milled about in the river, members of the tribe occupied both banks of the River, preventing the antelope from climbing the river bank. At this point Arikara young boys were sent out to swim among the herd using bludgeons to dispatch the ungulates which, as the carcasses drifted down stream, were collected by other members of the tribe.
Even prior to the introduction of the horse in western North America in the 17th century, there is evidence of Clovis people using buffalo “drives or “buffalo jumps” to stampede herds to a cliff where they would fall to their death, or become disabled with broken legs or backs and were easily killed by members of the tribe poised at the base of the cliff. In the Crow and Blackfoot tribes, specially trained “buffalo dancers” dressed in the heads and hides of this species, might actually “enco a herd” to the cliff, by imitating the behavior pattern of a buffalo’s behavior, while other natives in the rear encouraged their flight to the cliff by making After the introduction of the horse, Native American tribes such as the Sioux, Cheyenne, Blackfeet, Comanche used similar communal drives to stampede the North American buffalo or bison over bluffs or cliffs where they were killed, or disabled and then dispatched.
In the Northeast deer hunting by all methods was not only a means of providing essential sources of meat, hides and deer robes but was also a means of demonstrating a sachem’s established territorial rights. In a 7-01-25 report entitled: “Gone a Hunting” by Nathan Braccio, Duke University Press, the author describes deer hunting in the 1600-1750s in Northeast North America, as a means by which rights to deer hunting was an important way in which Native American sachems, (such as Mohegan sachem Uncas) expressed territorial rights over the land. Deer hunting helped establish the rights of native Americans to the land and to alert other native tribes of the sachem’s rights during the period of European colonization to English, French and Dutch settlers.
On Long Island, Suffolk County, New York native Americans also had the existential need for meat, hides for clothing and footwear, as well as insulating furs to conserve energy during harsh, inclement Long Island, NY winters where late winter season temperatures can plunge well below freezing and stay there for weeks. Though snug in their winter, single-family dome-shaped wigwams of bent saplings covered with tree bark and grasses, which were efficient to heat, winter survival for the occupants required more. It was necessary to access adequate fats, proteins and carbohydrates to provide needed energy. As well as food to generate energy and maintain body heat, adequate protection from loss of body heat was essential. For this purpose hides and furs which could conserve body heat was essential. In addition, even within the warmed wigwam, adequate hides and furs for footwear and winter sleeping robes were also essential. Deer meat and its fats provided much of the internal energy essential to maintain the human body’s core temperature, while deer hides and other furs used as clothing served to conserve the heat by its ability to insulate the body to that potentially lost to the surrounding air.
As in any hunter gatherer society, these preparatory and efforts were required to insure winter survival. Though evidence of communal hunts on Long Island are rare or non existent (?) this author is aware of one exception in Suffolk County, NY.
Field reconnaissance studies were conducted in central Long Island in the 1970s, while this author was a graduate student at SUNY, Stony Brook. In the early 1980s several archeological surface reconnaissance trips conducted by this author in long-term forested areas used historically as woodlots in the past provided evidences of past hunting, tool making, and other evidences of Native American lifeways. On Long Island these pine/oak woodlands were a source of dimension lumber, charcoal, and local fire wood and a source of income to locals who provided essential fuel wood and charcoal for near-by NY City prior to the advent of the “coal age”. Data collected during these trips provided documentary evidences in one area where natural topographic features appear to have provided a means of establishing a natural deer ambush site.
The actual area must remain unspecified, but I can report that it occurred in a region of a cluster of glacially formed topographic features called “kettle holes”. These glacial features were formed as a result of glacial ice-block strandings, subsequent burial in sandy outwash deposits followed by eventual melting and collapse into a steep-sided depression, and final mass wasting which often altered the surface topography and depressiono outline pattern. These features often dominate areas of glacial outwash plains common all across Long Island.
Where the rapidly melting glacial front sluices meltwater away from a glacial terminus, melt water carries low density sediment such as silica sand and quartz pebbles downslope forming relatively featureless “outwash plains” typical of Long Island south shore and inter morainal areas between the Harbor Hill Moraine (north) and the central Montauk Moraine.
During periods of past rapid warming (the last one about 17,000 years ago) and glacial melting large masses of ice stranded as the glacial ice front retreated, or were simply sluiced down stream with melt water, there, to be eventually surrounded and then buried by subsequent outflow surges of fine grained sediment such as sand and gravel. These isolated masses of buried ice were relatively rapidly buried and then slowly melted, leaving in place an unusual, often circular, steep sided, and commonly many tens of feet deep. In some places the ice mass was large enough and deep enough to intersect the permanent water table and produce a sizable lake. Lake Ronkonkoma, etc, Middle Island’s Artist lake, Twin Ponds, etc. were all formed in this manner.
A cluster of kettle holes forming a generalized series of interconnected depressions occurs……………… in … The kettles holes occur in a one mile long, 1/2 mile wide region of general elevation of 120 feet above mean sea level within which eight irregular kettle holes can be identified.
The generally low lying area (at @ 120 feet above mean sea level) has eight kettle holes trending in a general east west direction about ……. mile(s) south of the hilly Harbor Hill Moraine complex in an area of glacial outwash.
The kettles steep sides descend from about 120 feet + MSL to below 70 feet in the east and increasing in depth to about <80 feet in the central area, the to a low point in the western end of the complex at < 60 feet below MSL. The topography of the western end just the last two of the deepest kettles holes manifests in the form a swale between two higher point where game animals driven from the eastern kettles might have been forced into a narrow passage (about 30 meters or 100 feet wide) created a natural ambush site where ancient Native American hunters might have targeted game animals with bows and arrows, spears or atlatal points.
A surface scatter of stone tools occurred along an interior dirt surfaced roadway which was used infrequently and cut across the swale where a depression may have acted as an exit point for the driven deer. After a heavy rain chipped stone artifacts were repeatedly collected in this one area (the swale) along this interior unsurfaced roadway. The stone tools often found as broken pieces were of a wide range of types and materials: milky quartz Wading River triangular points, chert, flint Contracting Stemmed Points, milky quartz Stemmed Points, a large, untyped chert, elongate “spear” or atlatal point, as well as others. These materials when collected were sent to and curated by State of New York, Stony Brook University staff.
The concentration of stone points, the topographic setting, their location at this one locus and their variety, (but with no other evidences of occupation), strongly suggested to the author that the locale was an ambush site. Used in late fall or winter deer might congregate in the kettle bottoms where the soil was more effectively saturated, the bottoms were more densely vegetated and wooded, and where deer may escape from detection and possibly be protected from deep snows and owinter winds. Kettleholes, particularly those located in connected clusters may have attracted wildlife such as deer.
Native Americans may have used such natural features in communal deer drives to more effectively exploit the deer herd for meat and skins. The deer may have been driven from these “wildlife covers” toward exit points where they were speared, shot at with atlatal or bow and arrow as they attempted to escape from the noise-making “drivers” moving up behind them with shouts or thrashing of undergrowth. Many attempts at moving deer targets may have missed their mark and the stone tips ended up in the soil and remained preserved there. The apparent variety of the point types collected on the surface suggest that this feature may have been used over hundreds or even thousands of years.
No attempts at excavation of near-by areas were made.
Perhaps some eager archaeologist may in the future undertake further investigations with the concept that glacial kettles may have been used as natural areas for communal deer drives.
*As reported in: Champlain’s Dream, David Fischer, Simon and Schuster, 2008.
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