The Communal Pronghorn Hunt: A Review of the Ethnographic and Archaeological Evidence

A review of the available archaeological, ethnographic, and historical data reveals that there is compelling evidence for communal pronghorn hunting across western North America in the protohistoric and early historic periods. The evidence is particularly compelling for the Great Basin, where corrals were in common use, as well as for the Great Plains, where drives into corrals or pits were common. Evidence for such activities in the remote past, including projectile point concentrations, hunting facilities, and bonebed sites, is considerably sparser and more ambiguous. Nonetheless, it appears that communal pronghorn hunting did not decrease through time, but rather was maintained or has increased within the last 1,500 years